Passengers of the missing Malaysian airlines flight MH370 most likely asphyxiated in a long fruitless journey in the Southern Indian Ocean, after the aircraft flew in autopilot mode until the fuel ran out before eventually crashing into its doom somewhere in the midst of waters, a new report by Australian authorities claims.
In a 55-page report, the Australian Transport Safety Board has outlined how investigators reached this conclusion based on comparisons made with similar condition inside the plane in other accidents, although there is no new evidence to suggest this is what definitely happened.
The final resting place of the doomed Boeing 777 was determined after analyzing thousands of possible routes, absence of any communications from the cockpit or the plane and the steady flight path the aircraft appeared to take as per the handshakes it inadvertently transmitted to the Inmarsat satellite.
"Given these observations, the final stages of the unresponsive crew/hypoxia event type appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370's flight when it was heading in a generally southerly direction," the ATSB report said.
Ever since the Malaysian jetliner, bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard, mysteriously vanished into thin air after disappearing from the civilian radar system in the wee hours of 8 March, the aircraft's automated pings received by Inmarsat's satellite have been considered as the only credible clues to determine its final whereabouts.
Days after the plane's disappearance, the Malaysian authority had revealed that the aircraft had finally "logged off" from the satellite system by 9:15am (Malaysian time) after disappearing from the radar shortly after midnight. The most likely explanation to that was that the aircraft had finally run out of the fuel before it catastrophically crashed into the Ocean.
This analysis is consistent with what has been referred to as the 'Ghost Plane' theory, which suggests that the plane was flying in auto-pilot and it finally went down when the fuel ran out.
Thursday's report from Australia also stressed that after extensive analysis, evidences suggested that the plane most likely crashed farther south into the Indian Ocean than previously thought – leading the authorities to announce a shift further south within the prior search area of what has been recognized as 7th arch.
Investigators have said that evidences also suggest that the plane was deliberately diverted thousands of kilometers from its scheduled route before finally crashing into the waters in Indian Ocean.
The theory of deliberate sabotage or a possible suicide mission was bolstered ever since two authors of a book on the MH370 mystery, claimed that there was ample evidence that the aircraft's pilot was to blame.
The widow of the flight's pilot was quoted as saying for the first time that the words transmitted from the cockpit were indeed spoken by Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah. This revelation has pointed the finger of blame squarely to the pilot.
Reports suggested that he was in fact, found to have been practicing flying situations in Southern Indian Ocean and landing in a remote Island, via a simulator in his computer much before he took this flight.
