Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished midflight a year ago and has never been found — but there are clues as to what really happened, according to former FAA safety inspector David Soucie, who has written a new book on the tragedy.
"There was an in-flight mechanical failure … a fire on board or at least excessive smoke on board that caused the rapid recompression of the cabin. That's what the predominant theory … in my analysis," Soucie said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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Flight 370, a Boeing 777, disappeared on Mar. 8th, 2014, as it travelled over the southern Indian Ocean from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Some 239 passengers and crew were lost.
Despite a massive search conducted by 26 countries, no trace of the aircraft or any human remains have been found.
Numerous theories were touted, including one which had terrorists hijacking the jet and landing it in a remote location.
But Soucie — a CNN aviation expert and author of
"Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Why It Disappeared—and Why It's Only a Matter of Time Before This Happens Again," published by Skyhorse — has no doubts the jetliner sits somewhere on the bottom of the ocean.
"I don't think there's any other question as to where it might be," said Soucie, who conducted an exhaustive probe of the evidence. But it could be years before anything is found, he believes.
"There's only 9,000 square miles they've searched so far. There's another 18,000 miles in this high probability area. That first 9,000 square miles was the highest of the high probability areas," he said.
"So it seems like every day that goes by I lose a little bit of confidence as to whether they're going to find it at all and we might just be looking at some kind of Discovery documentary down the road somewhere."
Soucie added that flying remains very safe.
"But that doesn't allow us, especially in the safety industry, to get complacent about this and say, oh well, it's only 239 lives and then another, oh well, it's another 239 lives," he said.
"It's very dramatic and it's incredibly damaging to the reputation of the flyers by not having the aircraft figure out what the heck went wrong with this. We really have to find out [what happened]."