Files Were Deleted from Malaysia Airlines Pilot’s Flight Simulator
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(KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia) — Forensics teams are scrambling to recover files recently deleted from the home flight simulator of the pilot who was commanding Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 when it disappeared, officials said Wednesday.
Investigators had confiscated the homemade flight simulator as part of their efforts to determine whether the crew of the plane could have been complicit in whatever happened to the flight and the 239 people on board. Authorities are baffled about the plane’s disappearance, but have determined that it was a “deliberate act.”
The files from Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s simulator were deleted on Feb. 3, Malaysian Police Chief Khalid Abu said at a news conference Wednesday. The family of the pilot is cooperating with the investigation, officials said.
After the simulator was confiscated, ABC News aviation expert John Nance said that officials would be looking through the simulator data to see if the captain practiced maneuvers similar to those done by MH370 after it disappeared from radar.
They will also look for “any indication that the simulator could practice anything untoward like practicing landing on small islands in the ocean,” Nance said.
Despite the focus on the flight simulator, Malaysian officials said they are not ruling out any possibilities.
“I would like to take this opportunity to state that the passengers, the pilot and the crew remain innocent until proven otherwise,” Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Wednesday.
Wednesday’s daily news conference was marked by angry relatives of passengers who shouted insults at Malaysian authorities and held up a banner in protest.
A chaotic scene ensued in the Sama Sama Hotel in Kuala Lumpur as police tried to escort the relatives out of the area. The families were first escorted into a holding room, but when police emerged from the room and tried to move them out of the area, pushing and shouting erupted as camera crews tried to get near the families.
The families, devastated by the plane’s disappearance, have apparently become frustrated by the lack of information.
As the frustrations mount, the plane’s path and final position remain a mystery. Officials on Wednesday rejected suggestions that islanders in the Maldives, an island chain in the southern Indian Ocean, saw the jetliner flying low in the sky.
Search crews from 26 countries are searching for the plane.
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