Tuesday, 24 Feb 2015 08:07 AM

By Elliot Jager

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have been deliberately flown off course before it vanished on March 8, 2014, after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, according to a National Geographic documentary into the disaster, the New York Daily News reported.

There were 239 people on board.

The Boeing 777 took three sharp turns in a way that "strongly suggests" it was purposely flown off course, aviation expert Malcolm Brenner told National Geographic.

Satellite data indicates that the plane flew for at least seven hours after it lost contact with controllers and that it was probably deliberately steered toward Antarctica.

Experts appear to have discounted the possibility that a malfunction in cabin air pressure slowly put the passengers and pilots to sleep as the plane flew on autopilot until it ran out of fuel. Nor do they think an onboard fire explains what happened.

National Geographic's "Air Crash Investigation: Malaysian 370: What Happened?" is scheduled for broadcast on March 8.

The Chinese, Malaysian, and Australian governments are expected to decide by the end of May how to proceed with the search that has so far failed to turn up any trace of the aircraft.

The priority search area in the southern part of the Indian Ocean is vast and combing it could take years.

The disappearance has been characterized as one of the most inexplicable aeronautical mysteries since aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Frederick Noonan, vanished in 1937 while over the Pacific on an around-the-world flight, according to the News.