THE pilots of MH370 were not in control when it crashed into the Indian Ocean, the head of the Australian investigation into crash has said.

Since the disappearance of the flight there has been speculation that the doomed aircraft may have landed in the Indian Ocean.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur and was heading to Beijing with 239 people on board when it disappeared in March 2014.

Earlier this year former Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance told Australia’s 60 Minutes that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah flew off course on a suicide mission.

Mr Vance claims evidence suggests Shah tried to ditch the plane as gently as possible to avoid creating wreckage that would make it easier to find.

But Peter Foley, who heads the Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigation into MH370 said the section of the aircraft’s wing known as the flap found in Tanzania disproves that theory.

The outboard flap of the Boeing 777 aircraft extends on an internal support track and investigators have discovered the track has left impact marks inside the flap.

That could only have happened if was in a retracted position, strong evidence that the plane was in its cruising state when it fell into the sea.

“The section of main flap was found in Tanzania Pemba island in 2016 and when imagery was passed to us we realised it was pretty significant,” Foley told National Geographic’s Drain the Oceans documentary.

“It’s been the subject of a lot of debate but the hard physical evidence and our analysis shows that is that it wasn’t a controlled ditch there or that there was active control from the cockpit extending the flaps at the time the flap separated from the aircraft.”

The programme said MH370 plunged into a “death spiral” in its final moments before smashing into the Indian Ocean after running out of fuel.

A never-before-seen reconstruction of the jet's final moments claims the plane continued to exchange signals with a satellite, known as Inmarsat, above the Indian Ocean, despite being lost to radar.

The signals occurred once an hour and experts were able to use this to calculate its direction of travel.

They established that after its initial track to the northwest, MH370 turned south and flew for six more hours.

Further analysis of the Inmar satellite showed that in its final moments the plane descended rapidly, almost certainly because it ran out of fuel.

Engineers then conducted a simulation of what happens when a Boeing 777 runs out of fuel, making it possible to recreate the final moments of the mysterious flight.

According to Drain The Oceans, the right engine flamed out first, the autopilot compensated for the imbalance with a hard left turn, then the second engine flamed out minutes later.

With no power, the autopilot shut down, leaving MH370 in a “long spiral descent”.

The idea that Shah was attempting a controlled landing has been dismissed by aviation expert Christine Negroni as "preposterous" and "absurd".

rain The Oceans: Malaysia Airlines 370 airs on National Geographic this Thursday, 27 September at 8pm.