Canberra, May 23 (IANS): Australian investigators have rejected claims that the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was deliberately brought down by the pilot.

Speculation that the jet was the subject of a "controlled ditching" into the sea was dismissed on Tuesday by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the BBC reported.

The bureau maintains that the pilot was unconscious during the final moments.

The passenger plane disappeared in 2014 while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board.

The official search for the wreckage of MH370, also involving Malaysia and China, was called off in January in 2017, after 1,046 days.

Investigators from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) have said that the plane was out of control when it plunged into the southern Indian Ocean.

The theory that the pilot was in full control of the plane at the time of the crash was revived of late in a new book by former Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance, the BBC reported.

However the ATSB's search director, Peter Foley, on Tuesday defended the bureau's findings, insisting that investigators had explored all the advice and analysis provided.

"We have quite a bit of data to tell us that the aircraft, if it was being controlled at the end, it wasn't very successfully being controlled," he added.

Flight MH370 disappeared after it stopped sending communications hours into its flight on March 8, 2014.

The subsequent hunt formed one of the largest surface and underwater searches in aviation history. Underwater searches turned up nothing, but small pieces of debris from the plane were washed up on islands in the Indian Ocean and on the African coast.