It’s time for Senate probe into what’s known on Flight MH370 - The Australian

The truth has a way of coming out, even if it takes a couple of years.

The head of the Dutch company running the three ships searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 now believes they have been searching in the wrong area because it is likely that a pilot was at the controls and “glided” the aircraft to a different location.

FBI data from the MH370 captain’s home computer shows he plotted a course into the southern Indian Ocean and that it was a ­deliberate planned murder/­suicide.

I was told this two years ago and was also told that the FBI had told the Australian Transport Safety Bureau all this.

Why did the ATSB then persist with the BS theory of an unres­ponsive flight crew, which did not make sense to us pilots?

For nearly two years I have been writing articles in The Daily Telegraph and The Australian pointing out the absurdity and falsities coming from the ATSB, which even had then deputy prime minister Warren Truss leaping to its defence by criticising me over what I and my airline colleagues considered a rubbish ATSB report from last December.

GRAPHIC — The mystery of MH370

So idiotic and fanciful was this report that I tried it out in a B777 simulator, knowing what the ­result would be: if the crew were unresponsive, then on second-­engine flame-out due to fuel exhaustion the autopilots would disconnect and this huge aircraft would rapidly enter a terminal vertical dive hitting the sea at 1200km/h smashing into thousands of pieces some of which would have floated indefinitely. This never happened.

The ATSB favourite falsity was that all the evidence points to an unresponsive flight crew. Bollocks.

The fact that the plane turned southwest three minutes after the captain said goodnight to Kuala Lumpur air traffic control means it was under control, otherwise it would have flown itself to the programmed destination, ­Beijing. It was under control 90 minutes later when it turned south, north of Sumatra.

The other favourite falsity pushed by the ATSB in the media was that the evidence does not support a controlled ditching. Again bollocks. It is the lack of ­evidence that supports an attempted ditching in heavy seas.

How is it that a taxpayer funded government department can be so devious? To ignore the massive amount of negative opinion coming from me, with many thousands of hours in command of B777s, and later other very exper­ienced pilots who joined the chorus means the ATSB was ­either totally incompetent and too stubborn to admit it had made a mistake at the start of the whole MH370 saga, or it was a deliberate cover-up.

Perhaps it was fear of the MH370 captain being regarded like Egyptair co-pilot Gamil al-Batouti, who deliberately crashed his B767 out of New York in 1999.

Recovery and analysis by the US NTSB of the flight data ­recorder showed he held the control column forward all the way down in the terminal dive to crash into the sea. Analysis of the cockpit voice recorder showed ­religious prayers being shouted. It is commonly ­believed he martyred himself in an act of mass murder/suicide.

The Seven Network reported that the FBI said that MH370 was a murder/suicide by the captain Zaharie Shah. Did the “ friendly” Malaysian government influence our government because of liability concerns? Payout over the murder of 238 passengers could run into billions.

This whole farce of the search for MH370 has occupied nearly 2½ year, and cost Australian taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

What I would like to know is who made the decision, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to stay with a rubbish, unresponsive flight crew theory that has resulted in the search being conducted in the wrong area.

The ATSB should be the subject of a Senate inquiry — as should the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Tony Abbott, Truss, former ATSB chief Martin Dolan and Transport Minister Darren Chester should be quizzed about what they knew more than two years ago from information supplied by the FBI and why it was not acted upon. The taxpayers of Australia need answers.