A family member of a passenger on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 holds a placard during a news conference following a meeting with Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia July 21, 2016.
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The confirmation corroborates earlier reports that the device had programmed in it a route similar to the one which investigators believe the doomed flight took on its final voyage.
The search for MH370 which disappeared on March 14, 2014, with 239 aboard is unprecedented in modern times and aside from a few fragments there has been no sign of the plane.
“This type of scenario was not new and had been reported in the media previously”, JACC said in its operational report. “It does not reveal what happened on the night of the aircraft’s disappearance, nor where the aircraft is located”, its statement says.
The JACC maintains that the so-called “seventh arc” search area in the southern Indian Ocean, calculated using satellite communications, aircraft systems, data modeling and accident investigation in collaboration with a number of governmental bodies and private companies, remains the best guess of where the plane ultimately went down.
The revelation reignited speculation that the unsolved mystery could have been a murder or suicide.
Malaysian investigators said in 2015 there was nothing suspicious in the financial, medical or personal histories of pilots or crew.
“The FBI did their tests. if there was anything, the police would be the first people to know”.
JACC said the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), the agency in charge of search operation, has worked closely with worldwide experts in satellite communications, aircraft systems, data modelling and accident investigation to form the Search Strategy Working Group to determine the search area.
“He’s been a scapegoat from the beginning”.
There has been confusion over what was found on Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s flight simulator since New York Magazine reported last week that an Federal Bureau of Investigation analysis showed Zaharie had conducted a simulated flight to the southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished along a similar route. The multimillion-dollar effort involved several ships with special equipment scanning sections of the sea floor.
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To improve their simulation, they used the locations of the five confirmed debris found to date: two in Mozambique and one each in Réunion, South Africa and Rodrigues Island (Mauritius).
