Quote: New York (a magazine?) has obtained a confidential document from the Malaysian police investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that shows that the plane's captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished under uncannily similar circumstances. The revelation, which Malaysia withheld from a lengthy public report on the investigation, is the strongest evidence yet that Zaharie made off with the plane in a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide.

The document presents the findings of the Malaysian police's investigation into Zaharie. It reveals that after the plane disappeared in March of 2014, Malaysia turned over to the FBI hard drives that Zaharie used to record sessions on an elaborate home-built flight simulator. The FBI was able to recover six deleted data points that had been stored by Microsoft Flight Simulator X program in the weeks before MH370 disappeared, according to the document. Each point records the airplane's altitude, speed, direction of flight, and other key parameters at a given moment. The document reads, in part:

"Based on the Forensics Analysis conducted on the 5 HDDs obtained from the Flight Simulator from MH370 Pilot's house, we found a flight path, that lead to the Southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the Flight Simulator, that could be of interest, as contained in Table 2."

Taken together, these points show a flight that departs Kuala Lumpur, heads northwest over the Malacca Strait, then turns left and heads south over the Indian Ocean, continuing until fuel exhaustion over an empty stretch of sea. Search officials believe MH370 followed a similar route, based on signals the plane transmitted to a satellite after ceasing communications and turning off course. The actual and the simulated flights were not identical, though, with the stimulated endpoint some 900 miles from the remote patch of southern ocean area where officials believe the plane went down. Based on the data in the document, here's a map of the simulated fight compared to the route searchers believe the lost airliner followed: (map omitted in article)


Rumors have long circulated that the FBI had discovered such evidence, but Malaysian officials made no mention of the find in the otherwise detailed report into the investigation, "Factual Information," that was released on the first anniversary of the disappearance. The credibility of the rumors was further undermined by the fact that many media accounts mentioned "a small runway on an unnamed island in the far southern Indian Ocean," of which there are none.


From the beginning, Zaharie has been a primary suspect, but until now no hard evidence implicating him has emerged. The "Factual Information" report states, "The Captain's ability to handle stress at work and home was good. There was no known history of apathy, anxiety, or irritability. There were no significant changes in his life style, interpersonal conflict or family stresses." After his disappearance, friends and family members came forward to described Zaharie as an affable, helpful family man who enjoyed making instructional YouTube videos for home DIY projects hardly the typical profile of a mass murderer.


The newly unveiled documents, however, suggest Malaysian officials have suppressed at least one key piece of incriminating information. This is not entirely surprising: There is a history in aircraft investigations of national safety boards refusing to believe that their pilots could have intentionally crashed an aircraft full of passengers. After EgyptAir 990 went down near Martha's Vineyard in 1999, for example, Egyptian officials angrily rejected the U.S. National Transport Safety Board finding that the pilot had deliberately steered the plane into the sea. Indonesian officials likewise rejected the NTSB finding that the 1997 crash of SilkAir 185 was an act of pilot suicide.

Previous press accounts suggest that Australian and U.S. officials involved in the MH370 investigation have long been more suspicious of Zaharie than their Malaysian counterparts. In January, Byron Bailey wrote in The Australian: "Several months after the MH370 disappearance I was told by a government source that the FBI had recovered from Zaharie's home computer deleted information showing flight plan waypoints ... my source ... left me with the impression that the FBI were of the opinion that Zaharie was responsible for the crash."


However, it's not entirely clear that the recovered flight-simulator data is conclusive. The differences between the simulated and actual flights are significant, most notably in the final direction in which they were heading. It's possible that their overall similarities are coincidental that Zaharie didn't intend his simulator flight as a practice run but had merely decided to fly someplace unusual. Today, ministers from Malaysia, China, and Australia announced that once the current seabed search for MH370's wreckage is completed, they will suspend further efforts to find the plane. The search was originally expected to wrap up this month, but stormy weather has pushed back the anticipated completion date to this fall. So far, 42,000 square miles have been covered at a cost of more than $130 million, with another 4,000 square miles to go.


"I must emphasise that this does not mean we are giving up on the search for MH370," Malaysian Transport minister Liow Tiong Lai said. Officials ]have previously stated that if they received "credible new information that leads to the identification of a specific location of the aircraft," the search could be expanded. But some, including relatives of the missing passengers, believe that that evidentiary threshold has already been past. Recent months have seen the discovery of more than a dozen pieces of suspected aircraft debris, which analyzed collectively could narrow down where the plane went down. (The surprising absence of such wreckage for more than a year left me exploring alternative explanations that ultimately proved unnecessary.) The fact that Zaharie apparently practiced flying until he ran out of fuel over the remote southern Indian Ocean suggests the current search is on the right track and that another year of hunting might be a worthwhile investment.

Quote: Malaysia's transport minister finally confirmed one of the key details of a bombshell report released last month that revealed the pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 simulated a flight path into the Indian Ocean. The revelation came this week after he and other officials had previously declined to confirm the New York Magazine report, and came with the caveat from Malaysia Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai that the route was only one of "thousands" found on the home simulator.


The comment echoes that of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, JACC, which said the presence of the simulator data did not prove that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah had intentionally crashed the plane. "The MH370 captain's flight simulator showed someone had plotted a course to the southern Indian Ocean," JACC said in late July. "The simulator information shows only the possibility of planning. It does not reveal what happened on the night of the aircraft's disappearance, nor where the aircraft is located," the group said in an earlier statement.

The Boeing 777 plane and the 239 people on board disappeared more than two years ago while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. While several pieces of wreckage from the MH370 jet have washed up on beaches in Africa, they have yet to shed any significant light on what brought the plane down.

• 7 Oct 2016 at 12:45
  
• WRITER: AFP
  

SYDNEY - A piece of wing debris found in Mauritius is from MH370, Australia said Friday, the latest fragment discovered along western Indian Ocean shorelines that has been linked to the missing passenger jet.
A trailing edge section of Boeing 777 left, outboard flap, originating from the Malaysian Airlines aircraft registered 9M-MRO (MH370), the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said.

The composite debris, recovered from the Indian Ocean island nation in May, "was a trailing edge section of Boeing 777 left, outboard flap, originating from the Malaysian Airlines aircraft registered 9M-MRO (MH370)", the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said in a report.
The government agency is leading the search for the Boeing 777 Malaysia Airlines plane -- which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 passengers and crew -- in the southern Indian Ocean far off Western Australia's coast.
"A part number was identified on a section of the debris," the ATSB said, adding that another "unique work order number" assigned by the flap manufacturer corresponded to MH370.
The report came two weeks after the ATSB said officials had yet to link debris recovered from Madagascar by US amateur investigator Blaine Gibson to MH370 or a Boeing 777.
Officials also said that the debris found in Madagascar was not exposed to fire, quashing earlier speculation.
No trace of MH370 has been recovered from the current 120,000-square-kilometre (46,000-square-mile) search zone, fuelling speculation it may have crashed outside the area.
But several pieces of debris linked to the flight have been discovered along western Indian Ocean shorelines -- in Mozambique, South Africa and Mauritius.
The first piece found was a two-metre (six-foot) wing part known as a flaperon that washed up on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion in July 2015.
More than 110,000 square kilometres of the search area has been scoured so far, Australia said last month, adding that the hunt was set to be completed in December.

Quote:All three pieces of wreckage linked to the flight have been found at or very very near the 'S' on this map.....but the 'officials' are spending all of their time and money looking deep at the bottom of the ocean VERY far away to the East and South. Methinks they are looking where the flight never was. Ocean currents can not explain it away, I'm afraid. Someone was spoofing the satellite data.