The pilot who flew missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which is believed to have gone off route and crashed in the Indian Ocean, conducted a simulation of a similar path just weeks prior, New York magazine reported.
Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the airman at the helm of the plane, used an elaborate home-built flight simulator to steer himself over the Strait of Malacca and into the remote southern Indian Ocean, a course with striking resemblance to the route MH370 is believed to have taken.
The finding, which casts a shadow of suspicion over the 53-year-old pilot, was published on Friday by New York magazine, which said it obtained a confidential document from Malaysian police investigating the incident.
Photo: EPA
According to the document, the FBI recovered deleted data points from the flight simulator on Zaharie’s hard drive.
“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,” the document said, according to the magazine.
Although the paths are similar, the simulated flight’s endpoint is about 1,450km from the area where the plane is believed to have gone down.
The Boeing 777 vanished for unknown reasons on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard, mostly Chinese nationals. It remains one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history.
The Malaysian government continues to maintain that it does not know what caused the incident.
At the time Zaharie, an opposition supporter, came under scrutiny amid unsubstantiated reports that he was upset over a jail sentence handed to Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim hours before the plane took off or was suicidal due to personal problems.
His family and friends strongly reject such claims as baseless.
News of the simulated flight came the same day that Malaysia, Australia and China, the three nations leading the search, said that hope of finding the flight’s final resting place is “fading” and that the massive hunt will be suspended if nothing turns up in the suspected crash zone.
Japan has deployed long-range missiles in a southwestern region near China, the Japanese defense minister said yesterday, at a time when ties with Beijing are at their lowest in recent years. The missiles were installed in Kumamoto in the southern region of Kyushu, as Japan is attempting to shore up its military capacity as China steps up naval activity in the East China Sea. “Standoff defense capabilities enable us to counter the threat of enemy forces attempting to invade our country ... while ensuring the safety of our personnel,” Japanese Minister of Defense Shinjiro Koizumi said. “This is an extremely important initiative for
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) today accepted an invitation from Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to lead a delegation to China next month, saying she hopes to promote the peaceful development of cross-strait relations and bring stability to the Taiwan Strait. “I am grateful and happy to accept this invitation,” Cheng said in a statement from the KMT chairperson’s office. Cheng said she hopes both sides can work together to promote the peaceful development of cross-strait relations, enhance exchange and cooperation, bring stability to the Taiwan Strait and improve people’s livelihoods. At today's news conference, Cheng said any efforts to
MORE POPULAR: Taiwan Pass sales increased by 59 percent during the first quarter compared with the same period last year, the Tourism Administration said The Tourism Administration yesterday said that it has streamlined the Taiwan Pass, with two versions available for purchase beginning today. The tourism agency has made the pass available to international tourists since 2024, allowing them to access the high-speed rail, Taiwan Railway Corp services, four MRT systems and four Taiwan Tourist Shuttles. Previously, five types of Taiwan Pass were available, but some tourists have said that the offerings were too complicated. The agency said only two types of Taiwan Pass would be available, starting from a three-day pass with the high-speed rail and a three-day pass with Taiwan Railway Corp. The former costs NT$2,800
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
RSS