A world-leading air crash investigator has said he believes flight MH370 was deliberately flown into the sea. Larry Vance also told Australian news program 60 Minutes that erosion along the trailing edge of recovered wing parts indicated a controlled landing.
The Boeing 777 disappeared while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board in March 2014. The official investigation team has said it is investigating whether the plane was piloted in its final moments, BBC reported. An Australian-led search for the missing jet has focused on an area of the ocean floor 2,000 km off Australia's west coast. The zone was selected based on the theory the flight was running on autopilot after veering off course.
But an official coordinating the search effort told 60 Minutes the wreckage could be outside that search zone, if someone had been in control of the plane when it crashed.
Vance was formerly investigator-in-charge of the Canadian Aviation Safety Board and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, and has led more than 200 air crash investigations. He was the chief author of a report into the 1998 SwissAir Flight 111 crash off Nova Scotia, Canada, which killed 229 people. The force of that crash broke the plane into more than two million pieces.He told 60 Minutes that an absence of such wreckage was one factor suggesting MH370 landed in controlled circumstances.
"Somebody was flying the airplane into the water. There is no other alternate theory that you can follow."
Despite the extensive search of the southern Indian Ocean, no trace of the aircraft was found until the discovery of a wing section called a flaperon on Reunion Island off Madagascar one year ago.
According to Vance, photographs of the recovered flaperon show a jagged edge, suggesting high-pressure water erosion that could only be caused if someone had been guiding the plane into the ocean.
