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Doomed Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was deliberately flown into the sea, a world-leading air crash investigator claims.
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 aircraft was piloted in its final moments.
An Australian-led search for the missing 777 has focused on an area of the ocean floor 1,242 miles 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 aircraft 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. The force of that crash broke the aircraft into more than two million pieces.
He told 60 Minutes that an absence of such wreckage was one factor suggesting MH370 landed in controlled circumstances, the BBC reported.
“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.”