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Emirates Airline chief doubts MH370 in Indian Ocean, believes plane was ‘under control'

KUALA LUMPUR — The head of the world’s largest commercial carrier has cast doubt on the official line that the missing flight MH370 is in the Indian Ocean even as an international search for the Malaysia Airlines plane moves further south this week.

File picture of a crew member on Australian Navy ship the HMAS Success looking for Flight MH370 taken on March 31, 2014. Photo: Reuters

File picture of a crew member on Australian Navy ship the HMAS Success looking for Flight MH370 taken on March 31, 2014. Photo: Reuters

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KUALA LUMPUR — The head of the world’s largest commercial carrier has cast doubt on the official line that the missing flight MH370 is in the Indian Ocean even as an international search for the Malaysia Airlines plane moves further south this week.

Sir Tim Clark, head of Emirates Airline since 1985, also told German weekly Der Spiegel he disagrees with the hypothesis shared by Australian investigators that the Beijing-bound jet with 239 people on board that disappeared under mysterious circumstances on March 8 had flown on autopilot for five hours crashed into the ocean after running out of fuel.

“MH370 was, in my opinion, under control, probably until the very end,” Mr Clark was quoted saying in interview published Oct 9.

“Our experience tells us that in water incidents, where the aircraft has gone down, there is always something,” he said.

“We have not seen a single thing that suggests categorically that this aircraft is where they say it is, apart from this so-called electronic satellite ‘handshake’, which I question as well,” he added, referring to a series of electronic signals communicated between the Boeing 777-200 and satellite locators, which officials said ended over the Indian Ocean.

A multi-national underwater search has been focused on the southern Indian Ocean, off the west coast of Australia in the days following MH370’s disappearance and seven months on, is now underway along the seventh arc of a 60,000 square kilometres.

But Mr Clark said he was “totally dissatisfied” with the lack of any physical evidence to suggest the plane’s resting place is in the Indian Ocean, and urged the authorities to go over the details of the plane’s flight data from the beginning once more.

“There is plenty of information out there, which we need to be far more forthright, transparent and candid about. Every single second of that flight needs to be examined up until it, theoretically, ended up in the Indian Ocean for which they still haven’t found a trace, not even a seat cushion,” he said.

He claimed that there has not been a single airplane water crash in the history of civil aviation that was not “at least 5 or 10 per cent trackable”, with the exception of the 1939 incident involving Amelia Earhart.

The senior executive of Emirates Airlines which has 127 Boeing 777 jets, more than any other airline in the world was sceptical that the tracking data from the plane could have been disabled by MH370’s pilots themselves.

“Disabling it is no simple thing and our pilots are not trained to do so. But on flight MH370, this thing was somehow disabled, to the degree that the ground tracking capability was eliminated,” he said.

While Mr Clark voiced confidence in Boeing’s tracking systems, he also proposed that aircraft makers find a way to make it impossible to disable the plane’s transponders and its Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) which sends out regular reports of the plane’s health data “irrespective of who is controlling the aircraft”.

“If you have that, with the satellite constellations that we have today even in remote ocean regions, we still have monitoring capability. So you don’t have to introduce additional tracking systems,” he said.

He said he was baffled as to why the current systems allowed a plane’s pilot to put the transponder into standby mode or to switch it off entirely.

Malaysian aviation officials have said MH370’s ACARS was last transmitted at 1.07am on March 8, but added that it was unknown when exactly the communications system was switched off.

“MH370 remains one of the great aviation mysteries. Personally, I have the concern that we will treat it as such and move on. At the most, it might then make an appearance on National Geographic as one of aviation’s great mysteries.”

“We mustn’t allow this to happen. We must know what caused that airplane to disappear,” Mr Clark said. MALAY MAIL ONLINE

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