An aviation engineer has outlined a "cunning plan" he believes explains the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, suggesting the aircraft was deliberately flown to a remote location using only a magnetic compass.
The Boeing 777, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members, vanished on March 8, 2014, while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The aircraft and all 239 people on board have never been found, making it aviation's greatest unsolved mystery and the deadliest single event involving a missing plane.
Engineer's theory on navigation
Ismail Hamad, Chief Engineer at Egyptair, told The Daily Star that the aircraft would have been located during the initial search off the coast of Perth, Australia, had it flown toward the southern Indian Ocean using the autopilot system reliant on Inertial Reference Systems (IRS) of navigation.
Hamad based this conclusion on a simple integration of satellite data and fuel consumption equations for the aircraft, without accounting for other factors such as weather conditions and crosswinds, which he said are precisely corrected by the autopilot system and its laser gyroscope aids.
Instead, Hamad claimed the hijacker's method was "far more cunning in planning but simple and easy to execute," relying on the aircraft's standby magnetic compass, which he described as "primitive in work." He said this would make the pilot himself uncertain of his exact landing location due to weather conditions, operational factors, and the compass's inherent deviation from the Earth's magnetic north.
Possible landing sites
Hamad suggested that if the hijacker sought "the perfect crime that would remain a mystery for a hundred years," he would have to land on one of the abandoned airstrips or lakes in the Philippine archipelago, which consists of 7,641 islands. He noted such airstrips are spread out and end in the sea, lakes, or swamps, rather than flying in a straight line to fall into waters off Perth, an area that could be predicted by calculating fuel consumption.
He added that "whatever the pilot's experience he would not be able to fly easily and accurately in a straight line on such a long straight route, above an open area of water, at night for such long hours." Hamad also said that inputting simple spatial coordinates into the autopilot computer presents considerable difficulties, and a pilot alone could not continue flying a large aircraft like the B777-200 for nine hours since take-off until vanishing, including the three hours on average it takes to check the aircraft's condition and documentation before take-off.
Hamad concluded that without autopilot systems or navigation aids, relying solely on the plane's magnetic compass, the search area should be restricted to the section between the Malacca strait and Perth coastline when accounting for "all those stresses."
Ongoing search efforts by marine robotics company Ocean Infinity are operating on a "no find, no fee" basis, with families anxiously awaiting answers. The initial search was launched off the coast of Perth in 2018, with further searches conducted in 2025 and earlier this year, following the suspension of the search in January and its relaunch in March.
