THE authorities of several nations, including Malaysia, may have wasted years combing the wrong place for missing Malaysia Airlines MH370, if the calculations of a Danish engineering professor is right, the Daily Mail reports.

Search efforts were largely focused in the southern part of the Indian Ocean, west of Australia, but according to a mathematical analysis of the flight data by Professor Martin Kristensen, an engineer at Aarhaus University in Denmark, the plane went down near Christmas Island, an Australian territory south of Java, Indonesia. 

He also said MH370 was deliberately downed and that the perpetrators parachuted out of the plane before it crashed into the sea.

The course of MH370 showed “intelligent planning” to conceal the aircraft"s path, Kristensen said.

Kristiansen proposed “a new, focused search zone of 3,500sq km centred at (13.279˚ South, 106.964˚ East) with slightly elliptical shape along the 7th arc and a total length of 140 km and width of 30 km. 

“The probability of finding the plane there is above 90%,” he wrote in his paper.

The paper includes a claim of an eyewitness account from a woman on a fishing boat who spotted a plane in the air.  

He said satellite detection and longrange radar are hampered by tropical thunderstorms on the way to Christmas Island, indicating that the “perpetrator(s)” knew what they were doing.

“The only plausible explanations are that they wanted to land in Banda Aceh or abort the flight by parachute.

“Since the aeroplane did not land, the only option is parachuting.

“In order to do this they had to fly low and slow… to open a hatch and get out. They programmed a return to normal flying-height into the autopilot before jumping.

“Therefore the plane returned to 11km height after Bandar Aceh without a pressurised cabin (due to the leak through the open hatch) causing death for everybody on board who might still have been alive.”

“Handshake” calls  to an Inmarsat satellite above the Indian Ocean reveal the Boeing aircraft was still in the air at this point.

The time difference between when the “handshake” calls were sent from the plane and when they were received shows how far the aircraft was from the Inmarsat satellite above the Indian Ocean at that time, Kristensen writes in his paper.

Each of the hourly “handshakes” allowed the plotting of a circle with the satellite in the middle. The plane was somewhere on those circles each time it sent out a call.  

Using these circles and eliminating areas where it was impossible for the aircraft to be, Kristensen could roughly map out the flight"s probable flight path.

MH370 vanished with 239 people on board while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014,.

A Australian-led search mission was suspended in January last year after investigators scoured 120,000sq km of the Indian Ocean – a search area determined by a satellite analysis of the plane’s trajectory.

Ocean Infinity, a private firm, was next hired to head a fresh hunt for the missing plane. Search vessel Seabed Constructor deployed high-tech underwater drones to comb a new area of about 25,000 sq km in the Indian Ocean, but failed to find the plane. – December 8, 2018.