The pilot who was at the controls of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may have taken it on a “last joyride.”
Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was “terribly upset” that his marriage with wife Faizah Khan was falling apart, a longtime friend told the New Zealand Herald newspaper Wednesday.
“He’s one of the finest pilots around and I’m no medical expert,” said the friend, who is also a pilot and insisted on not being identified. “But with all that was happening in his life, Zaharie was probably in no state of mind to be flying.”
Shah, 53, a veteran pilot with 18,365 hours of flying experience, was still sharing a home in the Malaysian province of Penang with his wife and their three kids and was “a fanatic for the three Fs — food, family and flying.”
But Shah was also seeing another woman — and that relationship was reportedly also in trouble, the friend said.
Investigators looking into the mysterious disappearance of the Beijing-bound Boeing 777 on March 8 are looking into the possibility that a suicidal Shah deliberately veered the plane off course at sent it hurtling into the Indian Ocean.
“The personal life of Zaharie Shah, however, is far more complex and is in the process of being unraveled,” a source close to the investigation told Malaysia Chronicle.
One of the possible scenarios reportedly being looked at is that Shah switched off the tracking equipment, set the auto-pilot on for a desolate stretch of ocean, then flew the plane up to 43,000 feet so that everybody on board would pass out.
“It is very possible that neither the passengers nor the other crew onboard knew what was happening until it was too late,” Shah’s pilot pal said.
There were 239 people aboard the doomed plane — two thirds of them Chinese — and Malaysian officials have already alerted their families that they don’t expect to find any survivors.
Meanwhile, the search for the plane resumed for a 19th day amid reports that a French satellite scanning the ocean for remnants of the missing jetliner found a possible plane debris field containing 122 objects.
Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein called the finding in a desolate Alaska-sized stretch of water southwest of Australia “the most credible lead that we have.”
The objects range in length from one to 25 yards and “appeared to be bright, possibly indicating solid materials,” said Hussein.
The satellite images were taken Sunday and a total of 12 planes and five ships from the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and China were taking part in the search.
Earlier, the Malaysian government announced that British aviation officials were able to narrow down the search area by analyzing signals the plane sent hourly to one of their satellites even after their communication systems shut down.
Based on that, they announced that all hope of finding anybody alive was lost.
Outraged that the Malaysians were throwing in the towel before the plane was even found, the Chinese government demanded to see the data while angry relatives staged a bitter demonstration outside the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing.
With News Wire Services
