MH370 'could have flown for hours while passengers lay dead in cabin'
7 March 2024, 09:35 | Updated: 7 March 2024, 09:43
The missing flight MH370 could have been intentionally redirected and flown for hours while passengers lay dead inside, a former commercial pilot has said.
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It comes nearly 10 years after the aircraft vanished while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, carrying more than 200 passengers.
The Boeing 777 aircraft disappeared from radars on March 8, 2014, with 227 passengers on board and 12 crew.
Retired Air France pilot Patrick Blelly has been looking into the incident for years and believes it was "depressurised".
"It is quite easy for a pilot to depressurise an aircraft. All you have to do is switch the pressurisation valves to manual," Mr Blelly said.
If the plane's automatic system was overridden by the pilot, passengers would have only been able to survive for around 20 minutes with their emergency oxygen masks.
Read more: MH370 breakthrough as 'new tech pinpoints' could hold key to locating missing plane
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However, in the cockpit there are extra supplies, including masks that would keep the pilot alive for more than 20 hours - giving them time to change flight path.
It would have also given the pilot time to shut off power to on-board satellite phones, preventing crew from contacting others on the ground.
Mr Blelly said it required skill and tools to make a plane "disappear" as it did, adding that there was no way it could have been an accident.
It comes amid fresh hope that families of passengers on board the Malaysia Airlines flight will finally get answers.
Richard Godfrey, a former Boeing, Airbus and Nasa employee, claims to have found an entirely new system capable of tracking the presumed downed aircraft.
He claims the location of the fuselage could be located using radio signals, with Mr Godfrey reporting to know the exact location of the missing plane.
Mr Godfrey, who is also a founding member of the MH370 Independent Group, has been trying to persuade the governments involved to restart search efforts for the missing aircraft.
Malaysia, alongside Australia and China, ended their search for the missing plane in January 2017.
