A retired Qantas pilot has spoken out about what may have happened during the mysterious flight MH370 that disappeared almost 10 years ago.
Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared over the South China Sea during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China, on March 8, 2014.
The baffling case made headlines around the world as the plane, carrying 239 people, including six Australians, appeared to have disappeared without a trace.
Just a week after the plane was shot down, then Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said there was a “high degree of certainty” that communications with the cockpit of MH370 had been deliberately cut.
A popular theory is that the crash was a murder-suicide at the hands of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, but authorities have never confirmed this.
Retired Qantas pilot and RAAF training captain Mike Glynn (pictured) said someone inside the cockpit of MH370 could have depressurized the plane’s cabin.
Retired Qantas pilot and RAAF training captain Mike Glynn appeared in the new Sky News Australia documentary: MH370: ten years laterwhich will premiere at 7:30pm AEDT on Tuesday.
He said there were several ways someone inside the cabin could have incapacitated the passengers.
There is a possibility that they may have been on the verge of death without knowing something was wrong.
Glynn told Sky that someone inside the cabin could have easily closed the door and forced the plane into a state of confusion by depressurizing the cabin.
‘[They’d] “Make sure the door is locked so no one can get in. There’s nothing anyone can do,” he said.
“When these outlet valves open, the plane depressurizes very quickly,” he said.
“If the plane is not going to descend, you will start to feel very hypoxic in three or four minutes.”
Hypoxia occurs when the body does not receive enough oxygen, which can cause confusion and a rapid heart rate before the patient loses consciousness.
Glynn added that it would have been easy for someone inside the cabin to keep other people out, since locking doors were introduced after the 9/11 plane hijackings.
“The door will close automatically and you can lock it with this switch,” he said.
And you can too, there is a manual lock that prohibits any type of entry to the flight deck. “You can have a full attack on the door, that’s not going to change anything.”
The passengers Glynn theorized would not have known they were in trouble aboard the missing flight until they reached a “hypoxic” state.
Nearly a decade later, the wreckage of MH370 has still not been found, even though its disappearance sparked the largest multinational air and sea search ever undertaken.
However, Australian fisherman Kit Olver, 77, claimed last year that his fishing boat stopped what appeared to be the wing of a commercial airliner in late 2014.
He claims he was fishing about 55 kilometers off the southeast coast of South Australia, in the Southern Ocean. when his net snagged on something big.
“It was a fucking huge wing of a big airliner,” Mr Olver said.
‘I have questioned myself. I have looked for a way out of this.
‘I wish I had never seen that thing… but there it is. It was the wing of an airplane.
Since he had a pilot’s license, Olver was sure the wing was larger than any typical private plane.
His discovery was supported by Peter Waring, whose experience studying the seabed led him to participate in the search for MH370.
Waring said it was “plausible” the plane’s wreckage was found in South Australia, considering more than 20 pieces of possible wreckage have been discovered in Africa.
However, the latest theories and discoveries would be of little comfort to the victims’ families, who may never have answers about what happened to their loved ones.
British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey last month accused the Malaysian government of abandoning its search for MH370.
He claims the government did not want to invest more funds in the mission, despite several calls from victims’ families to restart search efforts last year.
“In my opinion, the Malaysian government does not want the cause of the MH370 accident to be known,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
“It is not helpful to speculate on what the Malaysian government’s motives might be regarding MH370.”