Ten years after the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, flight expert and British pilot Simon Hardy has said he believes the plane pilot crashed the plane on purpose and that it crashed just outside the official search area.
In an interview with The Sun, Hardy pointed to the pre-flight documentation which showed a last-minute addition of fuel and oxygen for the cockpit only as clues to his theory.
He suggested that the plane's pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah allowed the cabin to be depressurized so that passengers and crew went unconscious before he plunged the plane into an area called the Geelvinck Fracture Zone.
"It's an incredible coincidence that just before this aircraft disappears forever, one of the last things that was done as the engineer says nil noted [no oxygen added], then someone else gets on onboard and says it's a bit low," Hardy told the outlet. "Well it's not really low at all."
"It's a strange coincidence that the last engineering task that was done before it headed off to oblivion was topping up crew oxygen which is only for the cockpit, not for the cabin crew," he added.
Hardy noted that the addition of 3,000kg of fuel would give the plane 30 more minutes of flight time and allow it to crash in the daylight. "If you want to do a good ditching, you do it in daylight or at least half daylight," he said.
"In the case of MH370, if the pilot has another half an hour of fuel it will be daylight," Hardy added. "Another half an hour of flying would be another 244 nautical miles and the most important thing is that it will be dawn."
A Malaysia Airlines flight went missing on March 8, 2014, and the wreckage was never able to be found. There have been several theories as to what happened to the plane with some believing, like Hardy, that it was a murder-suicide, and others believing that the pilot was attempting to execute 9/11 style flight into Beijing's Tiananmen Square but was shot down.
Former National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigator Alan Diehl told Fox News, that he believes if Zaharie Ahmad Shah wanted to disappear he would have flown in the opposite direction than was picked up by military radar.
"Which leads me to my theory that he wanted to make a political statement, nothing more, but something happened to the aircraft," Diehl said.
