MH370 pilot conducted similar route on home computer'

Washington: A forensic examination showed the pilot of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 conducted a flight simulation on his home computer that closely matched the suspected route of the missing aircraft, according to a confidential report obtained by New York magazine.

‘The confidential document from the Malaysian police investigation into the disappearance of the aircraft showed that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, conducted a simulated flight deep into the remote southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished under uncannily similar circumstances,’ said the New York magazine citing the report issued on Friday.

The revelation, which Malaysia withheld from a lengthy public report on the investigation, is the strongest evidence yet that Zaharie made off with the plane in a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide.
The document presented the findings of the Malaysian police’s investigation into Zaharie. It revealed that after the plane disappeared in March 2014, Malaysia turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) hard drives that Zaharie used to record sessions on an elaborate home-built flight simulator.

The FBI was able to recover six deleted data points that had been stored by the Microsoft Flight Simulator X programme in the weeks before MH370 disappeared with 239 people on board on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, the New York magazine quoted the document as saying.

Each point recorded the airplane’s altitude, speed, direction of flight, and other key parameters at a given moment.  According to the document, these points showed a flight that departs Kuala Lumpur, heads northwest over the Malacca Strait, then turns left and heads south over the Indian Ocean, continuing until fuel exhaustion over an empty stretch of sea, the magazine said.

Search officials believed that MH370 followed a similar route, based on signals the plane transmitted to a satellite after ceasing communications and turning off course. The actual and the simulated flights were not identical, though, with the simulated endpoint some 900 miles from the remote patch of southern ocean area where officials believe the plane went down, the document noted.