The writer, Jeff Wise, says that the simulated flight path was recovered by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation after Malaysia gave the FBI the hard drives from Zaharie’s computer.
It is not the only flight path that received wide publicity. Soon after the aircraft disappeared in March 2014, Malaysian press reports quoting police sources said that there had been a flight path into the western Indian Ocean found on the computer, not long after online speculation about the US military base in Diego Garcia being a destination.
However, Zaharie was known to be an avid aviation enthusiast and a keen user of the Flight Simulator computer program and had talked about adding extra screens to his PC for a more realistic experience.
Press reports talked that up by describing his PC as a “home-built flight simulator”, a phrase used by Wise.
Wise quoted the FBI document as saying “we found a flight path, that lead to the Southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the Flight Simulator, that could be of interest”.
Writing in New York magazine, Wise said: “It’s not entirely clear that the recovered flight-simulator data is conclusive. The differences between the simulated and actual flights are significant, most notably in the final direction in which they were heading.
“It’s possible that their overall similarities are coincidental — that Zaharie didn’t intend his simulator flight as a practice run but had merely decided to fly someplace unusual.”
Wise is one of many purported aviation experts who have written about the MH370 saga. In February last year he wrote a piece for New York Magazine on “How Crazy Am I to Think I Know Where MH370 Is?” claiming that the plane had landed on a remote airstrip in Kazakhstan, which was quickly debunked. In a later piece he boasted about how his theory had gone viral.
Wise based his present account on six data points recovered by the FBI from the Flight Simulator X program showing the simulated airplane’s altitude, speed, direction of flight, and other key parameters at a given moment.
He claimed that Malaysia had suppressed a key piece of incriminating information from the public report on the investigation released last year, and claims that it was “the strongest evidence yet that Zaharie made off with the plane in a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide”.
All 239 passengers and crew on board the aircraft are presumed dead.
The article comes a day after officials of Malaysia, China, and Australia announced further efforts to find the missing Boeing 777 aircraft would be suspended once the current seabed search for the wreckage was completed. The search has covered 42,000 square miles, with 4,000 square miles still to be searched.
Transport minister Liow Tiong Lai said yesterday: “I must emphasise that this does not mean we are giving up on the search for MH370.”
Officials in the international investigation team have concluded, based on scientific data, that the aircraft was diverted from the Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight path and flown around the northern tip of Sumatra and southwards. It is believed to have crashed in the remote southern Indian Ocean somewhere off the western coast of Australia.