He bases this statement on his belief that a rogue pilot was flying the airplane at the end of its flight. “Somebody was flying the plane into the water.”
There’s no alternative theory to follow, he added. “Of all the potentials that might have happened, there’s no other theory that fits.”
When the flaperon was found on Reunion Island in the western Indian Ocean, he argued, everyone should have concluded that this was a human-engineered event.
“Damage to a flaperon indicates it was extended when the plane hit the water, something that he believes could only have been done deliberately” Vance noted. “The evidence pointed to only one result for the doomed flight.”
The French are yet to hand over the flaperon, found a year ago, to the Malaysian Government and the search team. The analysis too remains with the French.
Vance, who led the probe team on the downing of Swissair Flight 111 in 1998, said the damage to the flaperon shows the plane hit the water and deliberately. “An aircraft that goes out of control at 30,000 feet will hit the water with tremendous impact.”
“We saw it in Swissair. We see it in other accidents.”
Flights which crash into the water out of control, he continued, would explode on impact, generating millions of pieces of debris. There should be more debris in the case of MH370, but after two years of ocean currents, only a handful of wing segments have been found.
The current search for MH370 in the 7th arc in the southern Indian Ocean, off southwest Australia, is driven by the conviction that a ghost plane went to a watery grave after running out of fuel.
The pilots and all on board, its assumed, were somehow all incapacitated and dead by the time the plane came to its final resting purpose.
MH370, a Boeing 777-200, disappeared on 8 March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board the ill-fated flight. It was on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Most of the passengers were Chinese. Six passengers were Australian nationals and permanent residents.
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