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The pilot of missing Flight MH370 killed himself and his passengers by switching off the on board oxygen supply, an aviation expert has claimed.

Ewan Wilson is convinced that Zaharie Ahmad Shah locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit, de-pressurised the cabin and shut down all communication links before turning the plane around.

Mr Wilson, the head of Kiwi Airlines, says he has examined all other possibilities but cannot arrive at any other conclusion than that Shah, 53, was responsible for the deaths of the 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board the doomed Malaysian Airlines flight, which went missing on March 8.

In a further extraordinary twist, Mr Wilson claims there have been five other suicide flights in recent times, according to the Daily Express.

After travelling from New Zealand to Birmingham for a meeting, he said: "There is a fundamental desire to ignore the mental health issue in the aviation industry.

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"Our research indicates there have been five previous incidents of murder/suicide in commercial flights over the last three decades or so, accounting for 422 lives.

"The sad addition of MH370 would bring that number to 661."

Mr Wilson believes Ahmad Shah was mentally ill when he took the controls of MH370 on March 8.

He claims the captain tricked his co-pilot, father-of-three, Fariq Hamid, into taking a break about 40 minutes after take-off, before locking him out of the cockpit.

Mr Wilson says Ahmad Shah then made his last broadcast to air traffic control - 'Goodnight, Malaysian 370' - before switching off the aircraft's air-to-ground communication links and taking the plane up to 39,000 feet.

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He is then believed to have de-pressurised the aircraft, giving passengers and crew less than 60 seconds of consciousness, with death following between four and six minutes later.

According to Wilson, however, Ahmad Shah would have had three hours' worth of oxygen allowing him to set a course for the southern Indian Ocean and, after the fuel ran dry, perform a controlled ditching on the surface of the water.

The remarkable claims are made in the book 'Goodnight Malaysian 370', the culmination of a four-month study into the incident, which Wilson penned along with New Zealand broadsheet journalist Geoff Taylor.

Wilson, a commercial pilot and qualified transport safety investigator, said: "One of our objectives in writing this book was, in some small way, to convey the human stories of the tragedy.

"Our other, more important task was to pursue the truth about what really happened; that is one small contribution we felt we could make to this whole, terrible affair.

"We could never have foreseen the information we uncovered, or their implications.

"Neither could we have imagined the horrific scenario that our research suggests took place on board that fateful plane."

He added: "Ahmad Shah was a man known for his methodical, thorough nature, for his love of the technical, and probably for his ego, too.

"This (crash) would have been his final sad act to his family and to the world: "find this one".'

To date, no trace of the plane has been found.