AFAP President David Booth, a senior serving pilot, said that the Australian Government should not give up the search for the ill-fated plane just to “avoid embarrassing Malaysia” and to cut down on costs.
He estimated that it would take another AUD200 million to search for the missing aircraft to add to the AUD180 million already spent so far, including AUD60 million from Australia. “The idea that they are not going to search for the plane to finality is a serious precedent,” he said.
“This is critical to me as an aviator … the airplane’s missing, we need to find the airplane.”
This is the first time that the AFAP, the largest federation of pilots in Australia, has spoken up on MH370. The Federation represents 4500 airline and commercial pilots.
The statement by the Federation is expected to pile the pressure on Canberra. The Australian Government has since agreed with Malaysia and China to abandon the search for the missing plane once the present 120,000 sq kms in the 7th Arc in the southern Indian Ocean, off southwest Australia, was scoured.
Most of the passengers on board MH370, which went missing on 8 March 2014 during a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, were Chinese. There were six Australian nationals and permanent residents on board the plane, a Boeing 777-200.
The Federation decided to take a stand after it emerged that MH370’s flaperon, which washed up on the French Indian Ocean Island of Reunion, was in a lowered position for landing.
Aviation experts, citing evidence that the flaps were lowered, said this showed the plane went into controlled gliding to the end. The lowering of the flaps, said the experts, was proof that someone was in the cockpit, flying the plane.
Booth said that such a zigzagging path, ending in a remote ocean, could only be a suicide route. “What’s a pilot doing that for, just for fun?” he asked.
The Labour Party’s Anthony Albanese has since called on Transport Minister Darren Chester to reveal what Canberra knows about the last moments of MH370. The new evidence, he said, shows that MH370 Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his own aircraft to take it to a watery grave in the Indian Ocean, far from its flight path to Beijing.
It was pilot Byron Bailey who first wrote in The Weekend Australian in January about the FBI recovering the deleted files.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) confirmed, after the New York Magazine ran the same story recently, that the FBI recovered deleted files from Zaharie’s home simulator which plotted an Indian Ocean route. It appears to be uncannily similar to that which the plane eventually took.
The ATSB has downplayed the significance of what the FBI found. It has pointed out that the plane would not necessarily be along the path plotted on the home computer.