Senior pilot claims MH370 crashed 'deliberately' by pilot in act of suicide

A senior pilot has claimed that the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 was deliberately crashed by the pilot in an act of suicide.

Pilot Byron Bailey said that he believed that MH370 captain, Zaharie Shah, hid the plane from radar on purpose and flew it thousands of miles off course before plunging it down into the ocean, The Daily Star reported.

After speaking to experts, Bailey found that the Flight Management System (FMS), which automatically maps the flight plan, had been overridden manually and reprogrammed towards the southern Indian Ocean. He noted that someone hijacked the flight and turned all communication equipment off over the South China Sea, then flew westward towards Penang. If the FMS had not been tampered with manually then the flight would have flown itself to Beijing, Bailey said.

The pilot also said that only an experienced pilot could have reprogrammed the FMS, adding that out of the two pilots controlling MH370, only Shah had the ability to do so.

Bailey said that if the MH370 hijacker intentionally controlled the Boeing 777 aircraft for several hours, as stated by the world's largest Boeing 777 airline operator, into the remote Southern Indian Ocean then he probably knew that he would die as there are no airfields within thousands of kilometres.

"This therefore suggests a preplanned suicide," he said.

Bailey is not the first professional pilot to claim that MH370's disappearance was deliberate.

The plane went missing, along with 227 passengers and 12 crew members, on March 8 last year while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

No trace of the plane has been found so far and the search continues.