Flight MH370 'deliberately flown' toward Antarctica, say experts

A new documentary on the National Geographic channel is set to suggest that the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 was deliberately flown off course towards Antarctica.

Experts on the programme, called Malaysian 370: What Happened?, say satellite data from the plane indicates someone in the cockpit directed the aircraft towards Antarctica and flew south for several hours after losing contact with air traffic control.

The NY Daily News says the documentary reveals the plane took three sharp turns in the 90 minutes after flight controllers lost contact with the pilots.

Aviation expert Malcolm Brenner said: "It is conceivable that a pilot could deliberately de-pressurise the airplane that is part of an effort to hijack the airplane or take it for some purpose."

He added: "This accident has caught the attention of the world in a way that I have not seen in a 40-year career in aviation."

The programme is due to be aired on 8 March, a year to the day the flight disappeared while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.

No trace of the plane has ever been found, and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau Commissioner Martin Dolan is leading the attempts to recover it.

According to the Daily Record, he said: "It's been both baffling and from our point of view unprecedented - not only the mystery of it, but also on the scale of what we're doing to find the aircraft.

"We continue to work with experts to look at the modelling for where any potential floating wreckage might have drifted to."