Aviation experts reveal chilling new MH370 theory

World renowned aviation experts say the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was a planned and deliberate criminal act.

It's been four years since the flight vanished en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur on March 8,  2014.

What happened to the Boeing 777 and 239 people on board remains one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries.

A panel of internationally renowned aviation experts shed new light and revealed chilling discoveries about the flight's final moments on an episode of 60 Minutes.

They all agreed that the probability of it being an accident was 'one in a trillion' and that pilot captain Zaharie Amad Shah 'deliberately' brought down the plane.

"I think the general public can take comfort in the fact that there is a growing consensus on the plane's final moments," veteran air crash investigator Larry Vance told the program.

He believes the pilot 'was killing himself' and took the aircraft to the most remote place possible so it would 'disappear'.

"Unfortunately, he was [also] killing everybody else on board, and he did it deliberately," Mr Vance said. 

Former Australia Transport Safety Bureau head Martin Dolan added: "This was planned, this was deliberate, and it was done over an extended period of time."

According to Simon Hardy, a Boeing 777 pilot and instructor, Captain Zaharie avoided detection of the plane by either Malaysian or Thai military radar by flying along the border, crossing in and out of each country's airspace.

"As the aircraft went across Thailand and Malaysia, it runs down the border, which is wiggling underneath, meaning it's going in and out of those two countries, which is where their jurisdictions are," Mr Hardy said.

"So both of the controllers aren't bothered about this mysterious aircraft. If you were commissioning me to do this operation and try and make a 777 disappear, I would do exactly the same thing."

"As far as I'm concerned, it's very accurate flying because it did the job and we know, as a fact, that the military did not come and intercept the aircraft."

After reconstructing MH370's actual flight plan, Mr Hardy made a chilling discovery that the captain made an unexplained and strange turn to fly over his hometown of Penang.

"So I spent a long time thinking for this about what this could be, what technical reason is there?" he said.

"And after two months of thinking about it, I finally got the answer - somebody was looking out the window. It might be a long, emotional goodbye or a short, emotional goodbye to his hometown."

Mr Dolan spearheaded the two year search for the doomed flight in a search zone covering 120,000 square kilometres of sea.

The largest search in aviation history was suspended in January last year.

The search area was based on the assumption that MH370 fell out of the sky in a steep, uncontrolled 'death dive'.

The assumption was disputed by Mr Hardy and Mr Vance, who believe the plane was ditched in a controlled landing.

Mr Vance believes the majority of the aircraft is still intact.

"If we don't end up finding the aircraft in the search area, then the conclusion is that yes, we focused on the wrong set of priorities," Mr Dolan admitted.

But while the panel said finding the missing plane 'isn't necessary', they are confident the wreckage will be discovered.

"When you look at it and you go back into the history of commercial jet aviation, with fare-paying passengers on board, we've always found the plane," international air-safety expert John Cox said

"To have one that we can't find is probably aviation's greatest single mystery."

The Malaysian Government struck a deal with exploration firm Ocean Infinity to resume the search in an area north of the original zone, that scientists now believe is the likeliest crash site.

The search restarted in January and is expected to end by mid-June.  

Mr Cox remains hopeful they will find the wreckage.

"If you take history and you look back, it says we'll find it, we always have," he said.

"So if history is our guide, I remain optimistic."

Mr Dolan added: "There are the families of the 239 people out there that at the moment still do not have an answer to what happened to their loved ones. I'm still passionately committed to finding this aircraft."

This article was first published on dailymail.co.uk and is republished here with permission.