Data was wiped from pilot's flight simulator weeks before Malaysia Airlines jet vanished
Investigators reveal they are trying to restore data wiped from system
A flight simulator seized from the home of the captain of the missing Malaysian passenger jet is now at the centre of the investigation into how the airliner with 239 people on board disappeared.
Investigators, including agents from the FBI, are trying to restore deleted files from the simulator installed at the Kuala Lumpur home of Malaysia Airlines captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah in the hope that they might contain clues about the aircraft’s disappearance, which has sparked an unprecedented search spanning 6.2 million square kilometres and 26 countries.
Files containing records of flight simulations were deleted on February 3 from the flight simulator, little more than a month before flight MH370 vanished from radar screens on March 8, according to Malaysia’s police chief, Khalid Abu Bakar.
“What we have found out is that the simulator… the data logs of the games has been cleared,” he said yesterday.
It was not immediately clear whether investigators thought that deleting the files was unusual. The files might hold signs of unusual flight paths that could help explain where the missing plane went. Then again, the files could have been deleted simply to clear memory for other material.