KUALA LUMPUR: A former Australian Navy officer involved in the search operation for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 has criticised the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's (ATSB) leadership role.
Peter Waring contested the ATSB's "ghost flight" theory, which posited that the plane flew on autopilot before crashing. He said the theory's dismissal of the possibility of human intervention was premature.
"For them (ASTB), it wasn't even a conversation about whether someone could stay at the controls at the end, it was just black and white, absolutely not, it's not possible," he said in an interview with Sky News Australia.
Waring took the deputy operations manager role in September 2014, about six months after the aircraft's disappearance. He raised "serious doubts" about the operation, particularly regarding the mission's effectiveness.
He said the search initially focused on the South China Sea but shifted to the southern Indian Ocean under Australian authorities' direction.
"It was around April or May of 2015 that I started to have serious doubts," said Waring.
"That was because we had searched a large part of the ocean floor, the areas that we thought were most likely, and we found no sign of the aircraft.
"And it struck me that as the search continued, we were moving into less likely areas and that we had no backup plan. There was no plan B," he added.