'An active pilot until the end': New MH370 clue points to deliberate crash

A piece of debris from the doomed flight MH370 passenger jet points to one of the pilots deliberately lowering the plane's landing gear, backing theories the aircraft was crashed deliberately.

The Boeing 777 aircraft vanished on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people aboard, including six Australians.

It remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries.

READ MORE: Family's search for answers after death of Perth student in Bali

Damage to landing gear door from the Malaysian Airlines jet, found in the possession of a fisherman in Madagascar last month, is the first physical evidence to suggest one of the pilots deliberately destroyed the aircraft.

Amazingly, the fisherman was oblivious to how important the piece of wreckage was.

His wife had used it as a washing board since he discovered it on a beach in 2017, three years after MH370 disappeared.

The find came to light in a new report this week by British engineer Richard Godfrey and American MH370 wreckage hunter Blaine Gibson.

They suggest the landing gear debris - known as a trunnion door - was likely penetrated from the inside by the aircraft's engines breaking up on impact.

This points to the landing gear probably being down when the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean eight years ago.

During emergency landings on water, pilots are trained to retract a plane's landing gear and lower the flaps to ensure a low-speed and controlled ditching.

READ MORE: Mystery and tragedy: How MH370 and MH17 changed the way we think about air travel

But the flaps on MH370 were not believed to have been retracted to slow the aircraft's speed and extending the landing equipment would have caused the collapse of the fuselage once the plane struck the sea at high speed.

Putting down the landing gear would also raise the chances of an aircraft sinking rapidly, reducing the time any survivors had to evacuate.

In their new report, Godfrey and Gibson suggest the plane was crashed deliberately.

"The fact that the damage was from the interior side to the exterior side ... leads to the conclusion that the landing gear was highly extended on impact, which in turn supports the conclusion that there was an active pilot until the end of the flight," the report reads.

"The level of damage with fractures on all sides and the extreme force of the penetration right through the debris item leads to the conclusion that the end of the flight was in a high-speed dive designed to ensure the aircraft broke up into as many pieces as possible."

READ MORE: Stephen 'tWitch' Boss, the Ellen show's DJ, dies at 40

One of the prevailing theories about how flight MH370 crashed has been that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a veteran Malaysian Airlines pilot, deliberately flew the plane into the ocean.

The damaged landing gear door brings the number of pieces of MH370 debris discovered in Madagascar and handed to authorities to 19.