Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 could have crashed due to the captain taking a toilet break, according to the latest theory.
Aviation journalist, Christine Negroni, claims the lesser-experienced First Officer on board the Boeing 777 was alone in the cockpit when an explosive decompression occurred.
This would have “made a deep and startling noise, like a clap or the sound of a champagne bottle uncorking, only much, much louder and sharper”, she said.
“This would have been followed by a rush of air and things swirling everywhere … everything loose — would have been tossed about in the wind,” writes Negroni.
Starved of oxygen-rich air at 35,000 feet, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah would have had to make his way back from the toilet, losing lucidity in as little as 15 seconds.
Negroni also theorises there was a problem with the emergency oxygen masks in the cockpit meaning First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid was not capable of taking the necessary action to rescue the plane.
Hamid only had 37 hours flying experience aboard a Boeing 777 and in his confusion may have turned the transponder to standby instead of sending an emergency signal, she claimed.
This would explain the mystery of why it was switched off although there is no physical evidence to back up the claim as yet.
Another mystery, why the plane turned south-west back towards Malaysian airspace, could be explained by Shah’s diminished mental state by the time he eventually made it back to the cockpit, according to Negroni.
She wrote: “I think he was no longer doing much reasoning, because his ability to do that was long gone.
“When you consider how muddled Fariq’s mind must have been, you can see many ways in which MH-370’s bizarre flight path can be explained.”
Negroni’s theory appears in a book, The Crash Detectives, in which she examines a number of notable air disasters including flight MH370.
The Malaysia Airlines plane disappeared on 8 March 2014 over the South China sea with 227 passengers and 12 crew.
A massive multinational search has so far failed to find a crash site or the plane’s black box flight recorder.
The only evidence of the aircraft has been a few parts including a piece of a wing that washed ashore on small islands in the Indian Ocean such as Mauritius.
Negroni dismisses the conspiracy theories surrounding the disappearance including one that suggested the pilots were suicidal, like in the tragedy of the 2015 Germanwings crash in France.
On her blog she wrote: “Sick isn’t subtle.”