MH370 was flown into water, says Canadian air crash expert

A world-leading air crash investigator has said he believes flight MH370 was deliberately flown into the sea. Larry Vance told Australian news programme 60 Minutes that erosion along the trailing edge of recovered wing parts indicated a controlled landing. The Boeing 777 disappeared while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board in March 2014. The official investigation team has said it is investigating whether the plane was piloted in its final moments. An Australian-led search for the missing jet has focused on an area of the ocean floor 2,000km off Australia's west coast. The zone was selected based on the theory the flight was running on autopilot after veering off course. But an official co-ordinating the search effort told 60 Minutes the wreckage could be outside that search zone, if someone had been in control of the plane when it crashed. Vance was formerly investigator-in-charge for the Canadian Aviation Safety Board and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, and has led more than 200 air crash investigations. He was the chief author of a report into the 1998 SwissAir Flight 111 crash off Nova Scotia, Canada which killed 229 people. "Somebody was flying the airplane at the end of its flight," he said. "Somebody was flying the airplane into the water. There is no other alternate theory that you can follow." Peter Foley, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's (ATSB) programme director of the search, told 60 Minutes that the type of damage the flaperon sustained provided evidence for the controlled landing theory.<br/>Mr Foley was asked: "If there was a rogue pilot, isn't it possible that the plane was taken outside the parameters of the search area?" He replied: "Yeah — if you guided the plane or indeed control-ditched the plane, it has an extended range, potentially... There is a possibility… somebody [was] in control at the end and we are actively looking for evidence to support that."<br/>