MH370 The author of a thriller where the plot revolves around the hijacking of a Boeing 777-200ER from Pakistan shares his thoughts on the MH370 mystery.

In the novel Bolt Action , author Charlie Charters posed the question: What if a plane is hijacked but no one can regain control because the cockpit door is locked?

Since the Sept 11 terror attacks, all passenger jets have been fitted with bolt armatures to the cockpit door. Unless it is opened by the pilot or co-pilot, nobody can get in through the door which is designed to withstand the impact of a hand grenade detonated right outside.

In Bolt Action , the terrorist is part of the cabin crew, whose aim is to force the US Air Force to shoot it down to further the cause of jihad and making all on board martyrs.

In an interview published in The Telegraph , Charters ( left ) acknowledged the similarities between his book and the disappearance of MH370.

However, he refused to believe that the pilots, who have also become the subject of investigations, are responsible.

"When I first read about this plane I assumed there was some ghastly explosion or mid-air break up and that the plane had gone straight into the sea.

"But with each succeeding day and each succeeding news cycle there's this ghastly realisation that events are tracking more and more closely towards the basic proposition I put forward in Bolt Action . It's been really weird and uncomfortable. I came to write the book because fundamentally I love planes and more than anything I wish I had become a pilot. So it's just kind of startling to realise that something I wrote about three or four years ago could be potentially playing out in real life."

Explaining why he does not believe that the pilots could be responsible, Charters said: "If I had to make a guess now, I'd say somebody took control of the plane who had a limited understanding of flight procedures and was not the captain or the co-pilot of MH370."

"Part of me, like a little child, is still tremendously impressed by anyone who is qualified to fly a plane and flies it to the best of their ability on behalf of all of those people on the plane. That part of me finds it difficult to believe a pilot would do this," he added.

Crashed in southern corridor

Furthermore, Charters argued that if it was one of the pilots responsible, the person would have disabled all the communication devices, not just the transponder and the ACARS (the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System).

"If a pilot or co-pilot was minded to do this, they would have completely disabled all of the communication devices and ensured that the Inmarsat satellite would not have identified the two corridors along which the search is now proceeding.

"Whoever took over the plane – and with each passing day it looks as though somebody did – they disabled the obvious ones like the transponder, but not the connection to the Inmarsat network," he added.

Although noting that he is not an expert, Charters does not believe that the plane had landed somewhere.

"A transponder is what enables air traffic controllers to track a plane that's coming in to land at a particular airport,.

"If flight 370 had tried to land at a conventional airport, there would have been no one who knew there was a plane on approach, no one to vector the plane on the way down, no one to relay vital information to the pilot, such as wind speeds, air pressure, and so on.

"Basically, the plane would have just been invisible to the air traffic controllers.

"You would have no coordination so the prospect of it making a safe landing in those circumstances is remote.

"It would need the most benign weather conditions in an otherwise completely empty airspace and a traffic-free airport," he said.

"I researched a similar scenario and it was clear that for the plane to have landed safely somewhere, and yet for us to still not know about it, would mean that whoever was in charge of that airport – and we're talking a pretty big airport with a runway at least 3,000 metres long – would have to be in on the conspiracy, as would the civil aviation authority with jurisdiction over that airport. That seems the least likely scenario," he added.

The more likely scenario, according to him, is that the aircraft with 239 people on board had crashed in the southern of the two corridors identified by investigators.

"If it had crashed somewhere along the northern corridor, it would have been spotted by the military radar in one of the countries it flew over. That's a seriously militarised airspace between China, India, Pakistan and the southern fringes of the old Soviet Union.

"My gut feeling is that the plane is somewhere in the southern corridor, along the arc that extends beyond the west coast of Australia, way beyond the reach of where people are currently looking," he said.