Randy Ryan believes the Malaysia Airlines flight which disappeared on March 8 2014 was hijacked during the flight, purportedly by pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah. The retired Air Force pilot claims the plane was either flown towards Madagascar where it crashed into the ocean or was taken to a “pre-planned location”. Mr Ryan told the Daily Star Online: “If it turned north (before Madagascar) and landed I’d expect it would have landed in some desolate place where its approach would not have been noticed, especially at night. “GPS is such that it could find almost any place pre-planned.”
Mr Ryan, who was a United Airlines captain for 33 years, suspects the Boeing 777 could still be intact.
He centres his own theory on the flight’s detour.
On the day of its disappearance, the plane set off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing but lost contact 38 minutes into the flight.
According to the radar, the plane turned left and flew off course across the Peninsula Malaysia.
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Investigators determine the plane then veered left again, flying south towards Australia before crashing after running out of fuel.
The reason the plane went off-course has divided experts yet Mr Ryan claims the route suggests a premeditated plot and suspects it flew towards the African island.
He said: “This airplane took off and it did the initial route up to a point.
“But something took place in that cockpit, somebody had to programme that initial left turn.
“It’s a complex airplane so whoever did it, I assume of the two male pilots, he had to know what he was doing.
“In order to get away with that, the other pilot would either have to have been complicit or incapacitated.
“You get right down to it, with the exception of that piece of flap that they found in the water, I would say that it landed on land some place.”
However, Mr Ryan has also admitted that the discovery of three pieces of debris which investigators claim is from the aircraft pokes “a pretty big hole” in his theory.
A flaperon and two other fragments from the wing were found washed up in the Indian Ocean.