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“When you start looking at them, there’s a story in every one of them. And the story is consistent,” said Heaslip, an expert on wreckage analysis who was the TSB’s director of engineering when he retired in 1983.

Heaslip and Vance, along with their partner, Elaine Summers, another retired TSB investigator, began looking into the MH370 crash as a training exercise for their Ottawa consulting company, HVS Aviation.

The more they saw, the more they became convinced that the crash was a deliberate act by one of the pilots, whom they say likely killed his passengers by depressurizing the plane, then deliberately flew into a remote area of the Indian Ocean and ditched. Their theory flies in the face of the official story, which says the plane flew in a straight line until it ran out of fuel, then plunged vertically into the sea.

In the basement of Heaslip’s Blackburn Hamlet home, the two men pore over photographs of the wreckage, maps of the flight path and schematic drawings of the aircraft. They’ve worked together so long, they sometimes finish each other’s sentences.

Vance was the deputy lead investigator on Swissair 111 and wrote the TSB’s final report on the 1998 crash off the coast of Nova Scotia that killed 229. He was also the one to give briefings to the families, something that made it clear the investigation was more than a cold analysis of engineering calculations and cockpit procedure.

“People accuse me of being insensitive to families,” Vance says. “I don’t mind taking the question, but if someone challenges me, I say, ‘I don’t need any lessons from you. How many grieving families have you talked to after an airplane accident? I’ve done it by the hundreds. Don’t tell me that I don’t have any sympathy. I’ve had people faint in my arms.’ ”