Ross Aimer, CEO of Aero Consulting Experts, believes that the MH370 pilots could have flown the plane off course in an attempt to come down at a Malaysian airport.
"The initial turn, whatever they did to get off the airway, I think they may have initially tried to go to Penang Airport", he told Daily Star.
"And while they were going towards it I think they either lost consciousness or they died, and then the aircraft went that way.
"And for some other reason it made another left turn, going south towards the south Indian Ocean."
Aimer, praised as "perhaps the most experienced pilot in the world", earlier suggested that a "hard shake" could have caused the plane's cargo of lithium-ion batteries to go down, triggering a disastrous blaze which was "almost impossible" to put out.
He surmised that Flight 370 could have flown for hours until it ran out of fuel and eventually plunged somewhere into the ocean.
The Boeing 777 MH370, carrying 239 passengers and crew on board flew off radar on 8 March, 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. An official investigation by the Malaysian government failed to definitively determine the airplane's fate without having discovered the crash site. Investigators concluded, however, that the critical turn the Boeing made before vanishing from radars was made manually.
Australia, Malaysia, and China called off their three-year joint search for the plane in January 2017 after failing to find any answers in the 120,000 sq. km underwater search zone that officials predicted would contain debris from the plane, which is presumed to have crashed.