MH370 disaster: Australian pilot says he knows where Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 crashed

A veteran Australian pilot is adamant he knows where Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 crashed into the ocean 10 years ago – and his site is not far from where authorities searched for the missing plane.

Captain Byron Bailey, who has more than 50 years’ experience in the aviation industry, has extensively studied the doomed flight, which disappeared on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board, including six Australians. 

Theories raised by experts in the Sky News documentary MH370: 10 Years On suggest the disappearance of the Boeing 777 was not a tragic accident, but rather a deliberate mass murder-suicide orchestrated by Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah. 

During the documentary, which aired on Tuesday night, Mr Bailey was asked straight out by presenter Peter Stefanovic: ‘So, where’s the plane?’

There was no hesitation in his answer- in the Indian Ocean.

‘I put it at 39 degrees, eight minutes south, and it’s only about 30 or 40km further south from where they (searched), and they wouldn’t go that far,’ Mr Bailey said.

A map of where Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have flown and ended up is pictured

‘That’s where the Australian government was planning to search, and instead, when the search actually started, they went the other way.’

Mr Bailey also slammed a major Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) theory about what happened to MH370.

While an initial search was carried out in the South China Sea, the efforts turned to the southern Indian Ocean when Australian authorities were asked to takeover the mission.

The ATSB conducted an underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean from May 2014 until the operation was suspended in January 2017.

At that point, the ATSB reached its ghost flight theory, which suggests there was a catastrophic emergency with hypoxia incapacitating everyone on board including the pilot, and the aircraft was then left flying for hours before it crashed.

Hypoxia happens when the body does not get enough oxygen, which can lead to confusion and a rapid heart rate before the patient loses consciousness. 

‘Every pilot I know shakes their head at this invented theory of a hypoxic event over the South China Sea, and the plane meandered by itself for seven hours,’ Mr Bailey said.

‘Rubbish. You have to reprogram the computer.’

He thinks the murder suicide theory, which holds that pilot Captain Shah conducted a controlled glide of the plane once it ran out of fuel, is more likely. 

Tony Abbott, who was Australia’s prime minister when the plane disappeared, said within about a week it became clear that the passengers and crew had fallen victim to a murder-suicide plot.

He told the program it was clear to him that ‘someone had been in charge of that aircraft’ and the disappearance of the passenger plane was not an accident.

‘Aircraft do not do that kind of thing that that aircraft did, unless someone is at the controls,’ he said.

Mr Abbott said it very soon become clear the disappearance was the doing of the Malaysian Airlines pilot.

‘My very clear understanding from the very top level of the Malaysian government is that from very early on, they thought it was murder-suicide by the pilot,’ he said.

‘I’m not going to say who said what to whom but let me reiterate – I want to be absolutely crystal clear – it was understood at the highest levels, that this was almost certainly murder-suicide by the pilot, mass murder-suicide by the pilot.’

In a mixture of both major theories, a retired Qantas pilot and RAAF training captain told the documentary there were several ways someone inside the cockpit could have incapacitated passengers.

Captain Byron Bailey (pictured), who has more than 50 years’ experience in the aviation industry, has extensively studied the doomed flight, which disappeared on March 8, 2014 with 239 people on board, including six Australians

Mike Glynn said there were several ways someone inside the cockpit could have incapacitated passengers.

He said someone inside the cockpit could have easily locked its door and forced the plane into a confused state by depressurising the cabin.

‘(They’d) make sure the door’s locked, so no one can get in. Nothing that anyone could do,’ he said.

‘When you open these outflow valves, the aircraft depressurises very quickly,’ he said.

‘If the aircraft’s not going to descend, you’ll start to feel very hypoxic within three or four minutes.’

Mr Glynn added it would have been easy for someone inside the cockpit to keep other people out as locking doors were introduced after the 9/11 plane hijackings.

‘The door will automatically close, and you can lock it by this switch,’ he said.

‘There’s a manual deadbolt that prohibits any sort of entry into the flight deck. You can have a full on attack on the door, it’s not going to change a thing.’

Peter Waring’s (pictured) expertise in surveying sea floors led to his involvement in the search for MH370

An ex-Australian naval officer told the program he believed the authorities were searching for MH370 in the wrong area a year after the plane disappeared. 

Peter Waring was appointed deputy operations manager of the search in September 2014, but said he began to have ‘serious doubts’ about how the investigation was being carried out in May 2015.

‘At various points we made it seem as though we have a very good sense of where it was, but that just wasn’t the case,’ he said. 

‘We had absolutely, more or less, next to nothing.

‘Over time, the operation was wrapped in an armature of bureaucracy, if you will, and that made it more difficult to change course.’

Mr Waring, a former navy lieutenant, said despite evidence suggesting the aircraft may be in another area, the search operation was unable to change its course.

‘In some ways we had shackled ourselves to this one particular area and weren’t flexible to look elsewhere when there was evidence to suggest perhaps it was elsewhere,’ he said.

Sisters Jeanette Maguire and Eileen Docherty (pictured) had family onboard the MH370

Catherine Gang, whose husband Li Zhi was onboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, holds a banner saying the families of the passengers want the truth

Then Australian prime minister Tony Abbott (right) bids farewell to then Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak after his visit to Perth during the search of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 at Perth International airport on April 3, 2014

He said by mid-2015, enough of the sea floor had been covered to discount the ‘leading assumption’ that the aircraft had crashed into the Indian Ocean near an area known as the 7th Arc.

‘If that assumption had been correct we would have found the aircraft at that point,’ he said

The wreckage of MH370 has still not been found almost a decade later despite its disappearance triggering the largest ever air-sea multinational search.

The flight from Kuala Lumpur was bound for Beijing and was carrying passengers from 14 different countries.

Within 40 minutes of what was supposed to be a routine flight, MH370 crossed from Malaysia to Vietnamese airspace.

It was at that moment that the passenger plane dropped from civilian radars and the now infamous last words of the captain were heard.

‘Good night, Malaysia 370.’

Jeanette Maguire’s sister and brother-in-law, Cathy and Bob Lawton, were two of the Australians on MH370 on its fateful final flight a decade ago.

She said the 10-year anniversary of its disappearance of the aircraft was a ‘big one’ as the mystery remains unsolved. 

‘In some ways, it feels just like yesterday. Every year is hard, but for me, 10 years, it’s the realisation how long this is taken to not have any answers,’ she said.

Chinese relatives of passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 take part in a prayer service at the Metro Park Hotel in Beijing, China, in 20

Eileen Docherty, another of Cathy Lawton’s sisters, said the loss ‘never gets easier’.

But she believes the search was carried out in the best manner possible. 

‘I’m satisfied that with what little evidence they had to go on, that they did absolutely the best that they could. Very grateful,’ she said.

Ms Maguire said the family had been ‘very well supported’ throughout the ‘horrible ordeal’.

She said she cannot blame the pilot, despite many theories indicating he was at fault.

‘I still can’t blame someone unless I’ve got that evidence. It’s just not in my DNA,’ she said.

‘Just knowing what we’ve gone through, his family will be going through the same thing, and on top of that, they’re having to live with blame.’