A former naval officer who spent 12 months searching for missing flight MH370 believes it deliberately crashed into a never-explored area deep in the Indian Ocean.
Peter Waring, 41, was drafted into the international search operation to find the 239 people on flight MH370 six months after his disappearance on March 8, 2014.
The plane is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean. But multiple government-sponsored and private searches over a period of nearly a decade failed to uncover any significant information.
The official story is that less than an hour into the flight, Zaharie Ahad Shah, the ship's pilot-in-command, made a sudden U-turn before it crashed into the Indian Ocean near an area known as the 7th Arc.
But Waring, an expert in seafloor mapping, believes that MH370 intentionally crashed into an area called the Geelvinck Fracture Zone, nearly a thousand miles from the 7th Arc.
The fate of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which had 227 passengers and 12 crew on board when it disappeared in 2014, remains a mystery
A reconstruction broadcast on National Geographic showed the jet crashing into the sea
He told the Sun that investigators mistakenly believed the plane was out of Shah's control after his last contact with authorities on March 8, 2014.
'I find [the search team] “It is possible that the assumption that the plane was not under control at the end was wrong,” he said.
“We took it very seriously in the search that the aircraft may have continued to be under control in one form or another after crossing the 7th arc.”
“Once that happened, it meant the plane was probably further south.
“…if the aircraft had still been under control in the seventh arc, the size of the Indian Ocean they could have reached would have been so unimaginably large that they could not have afforded to search everything.”
“It took a lot of effort looking in the wrong areas.”
He says he believes in the theory of Simon Hardy, a Boeing 777 expert, who believes Shah was “suicidal” and deliberately flew the plane toward the Geelvinck rupture zone.
Pictured: MH370 Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who flew the aircraft alongside First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid
Estimated flight path of MH370, with the island of Sumatra at the top right
MH370 inexplicably returned over Malaysia, passing Thai, South Indian and Indonesian radar
Hardy, who was involved in the search effort with the team in Waring's final months, suggested flying into the ocean floor trench, about half a mile deep and seven miles wide, because he knew it would be difficult to find.
Hardy believes Shah was in control of the plane when it crashed about 1,500 miles off the west coast of Australia.
Shah, who goes missing along with everyone else on the plane and is presumed dead, is accused of plotting murder due to personal problems.
Some believe he banned his co-pilot from the cockpit, cut off all communications, depressurized the main cabin and then disabled the plane, allowing it to continue flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.
Rumor has it that his personal problems in Kuala Lumpur included a separation from his wife Fizah Khan and his anger that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been sentenced to five years in prison for sodomy shortly before he boarded the flight to Beijing .
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But the pilot's wife angrily denied any personal problems and other family members and his friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.
Peter said in his podcast “The Search for MH370 – Deepest Dive” that the search team's success was measured by how much of the ocean they searched, not whether the search area was correct.
He said: “It was clear to me that no matter what new evidence emerged or what new analysis was carried out, the box [search area] would stay the same.'
Frustrated, he left the project for a new position in September 2015.
He also criticized the search team's disregard for safety protocols.
“This is probably the roughest sea area in the world in terms of sea conditions. Ships move so slowly that you could walk faster,” said the former naval officer.
“Not only was the ship moving very slowly, which is not the case in bad weather, but they were also dragging this thing with them.”[search equipment] behind them the water was two miles deep.
“It's really dangerous, we were very lucky that no one was injured or killed and it annoyed me that we were so careless with them.” [crew’s] Security.'
Waring added that the search was rushed and carried out incorrectly, given the enormous pressure on the Malaysian government to find the plane as quickly as possible.
“There was a lot of political pressure to set milestones. Part of my job was to report each day on how much of the search area was covered the previous day,” he said.
“The measure of success was only how much of that box we completed, not whether the box was in the right place to begin with.”