I spent a year co-ordinating the MH370 search

• A former naval officer says the world’s search efforts have been misplaced
• He spent 12 months helping the international effort to locate the missing plane
• He believes the plane was deliberately crashed into a never-explored area 

A former naval officer who spent 12 months hunting for missing flight MH370  believes it was deliberately crashed into a never-explored area deep in the Indian Ocean. 

Peter Waring, 41, was drafted into the international search effort to find the 239 people on flight MH370 six months after it disappeared on March 8 2014. 

The plane is believed to have gone down in the South Indian Ocean. But several government-backed and private searches over nearly ten years have failed to turn up any substantial information. 

The official story given claims that Zaharie Ahad Shah, the pilot in charge of the vessel, executed a sudden U-turn less than an hour into the flight, before it plummeted into the Indian Ocean near an area known as the 7th Arc. 

But Waring, an expert in mapping sea floors, believes MH370 was deliberately crashed into an area known as the Geelvinck Fracture Zone, nearly a thousand miles away from the 7th Arc. 

He told the Sun that investigators have wrongly worked under the assumption that the plane was out of Shah’s control after its final contact with authorities on March 8 2014.

‘I think [the search team] may have gone wrong with the assumption that the aircraft wasn’t under control at the end,’ he said.

‘We were taking this quite seriously during the search, that the aircraft may have continued to be under control in one form or another after it crossed the 7th Arc.

‘Once that had happened that means that the aircraft was probably further south.

‘…if the aircraft was still under control at the seventh arc then the size of the Indian Ocean they could of of reached is so unimaginably large that you wouldn’t have been able to afford to search it all.

‘There was a whole lot wasted effort looking in the wrong areas.’

He says he believes the theory of Simon Hardy, a Boeing 777 expert who posits that Shah was ‘suicidal’ and deliberately flew the plane towards the Geelvinck Fracture Zone. 

Hardy, brought into the search effort in Waring’s final months with the team, suggested he flew into the trench, around half a mile deep and seven miles wide on the sea floor, knowing it would be difficult to find.

Hardy believes that Shah was in control of the plane when it went down around 1,500 miles off the west coast of Australia.

Shah, who is missing and presumed dead along with all the others on the plane, has been accused of planning murder due to personal problems. 

Some theorise that he locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit, closed down all communications, depressurised the main cabin and then disabled the aircraft so that it continued flying on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.

His personal problems, rumours in Kuala Lumpur said, included a split with his wife Fizah Khan, and his fury that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year jail sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded the plane for the flight to Beijing.

But the pilot’s wife angrily denied any personal problems and other family members and his friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.

Peter said on his podcast, The Search for MH370 – Deepest Dive, that the search team’s success was measured in how much of the ocean they scanned, rather than whether the search area was correct. 

He said: ‘It was clear to me, that no matter what new evidence arose or what new analysis was undertaken, that the box [search area] would remain the same.’

Frustrated, he left the project for a new posting in September 2015. 

He also criticised the search team’s disregard for safety protocols. 

‘This is arguably the most rough area of ocean in terms of sea state in the world, ships are moving so slowly you could walk faster,’ the former naval officer said. 

‘Not only was the ship moving very slowly, which you don’t do in bad weather, but they were dragging this thing[search equipment] behind them that was two miles deep in the water.

‘It’s really dangerous, we were very lucky no one got hurt and or killed and it annoyed me that we were so flippant with their [crew’s] safety.’

Waring added that the search was rushed and incorrectly done, given the immense pressure on the Malaysian government to find the plane as soon as possible. 

‘There was a lot of political pressure to have milestones, part of my job was to report each day on how much of the search area had been covered the previous day,’ he said.

‘The metric of success was only how much of that box we had completed, not if the box was in the right place to begin with.’