The co-pilot of MH370 may have spent hours at the controls alone after every other person on board had already died, according to one aviation expert.
The fate of the ill-fated flight, which vanished while en route from Malaysia to China in 2014 with 239 passengers and crew aboard, remains shrouded in mystery to this day.
Author Christine Negroni proposed the theory the aircraft’s catastrophic end may have been triggered by a sudden loss of cabin pressure, which she believes could have proved fatal for everyone on board.
She suggests that Boeing 777 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah may have been off duty and resting at the time, leaving co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid in charge of the controls.
The rapid drop in oxygen levels would have killed all passengers and crew within 15 minutes, though Hamid was shielded from the worst of its effects inside the cockpit.
View 3 ImagesThe MH370 aircraft disappeared on March 8, 2014(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
Despite surviving longer than those in the cabin, Negroni argues that the co-pilot’s oxygen-deprived brain led him to make a series of erratic decisions as he desperately attempted to bring the plane to safety.
In the end, he would have been unable to prevent the aircraft from plummeting into the ocean, which experts believe lies somewhere beneath the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean.
The author of ‘The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Disasters’ stated: “The plane starts heading south. Whatever that time period is, that’s the period of time I believe he went unconscious.
“The oxygen available for the passengers was about 15 minutes, so the passengers were all dead, there’s no chance they were resuscitated, they were dead long before that plane hit the water.”
View 3 ImagesThere are no answers(Image: Getty)
Negorni reckons the cabin depressurised 38 minutes into the flight when communications stopped following an electrical fault.
She added: “Nothing that this pilot did, after the plane experienced its issues, made sense.
“To me when a pilot does something that doesn’t make sense, it is a very strong clue that the pilot is not sensible.
“And what makes a pilot insensible is hypoxia, not just once but repeatedly.”
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The week before, former air crash investigator Larry Vance suggested the theory that the crash was a ‘murder-suicide’.
Vance stated he was “certain” that either Captain Shah or Hamid hijacked the aircraft in what he described as a “criminal event”.