Rob Griffith/Reuters
Officials from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said Monday there is no evidence that the pilot of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 practiced a suicide route on his home simulator before it disappeared in March 2014. A report last week claimed Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah had used Microsoft Flight Simulator software to plot a route over the Indian Ocean that would cause the plane to run out of fuel and crash into the water. “There is no evidence to support this claim,” according to a statement from the ATSB, the lead agency searching for the missing airliner. “For the purposes of its search, the ATSB has not needed to determine—and has made no claims—about what might have caused the disappearance of the aircraft. For search purposes, the relevant facts and analysis most closely match a scenario in which there was no pilot intervening in the latter stages of the flight. We have never stated that hypoxia (or any other factor) was the cause of this circumstance.”