About searching the ocean floor - would that be more effective than looking through satellite pics, then reaching that area 2 days later and finding nothing? At least with the ocean floor, you can systematically search it?
A sat pic can show a wide area and anything out of place that doesn’t match the color of water pops out of the image. From a geosync sat, you could theoretically take near-simultaneous pix of thousands of square miles. And the sea is relatively flat compared to the sea floor.
An undersea visual search can only cover a tiny area, measured in feet, not miles (okay, meters, not kilometers) and goes slowly, at the speed of a boat max. Sonar can cover a larger area, but the images don’t come close to visual ones. A blackbox pinger searcher is similarly limited by water depth and boat speed.
That’s one of the most reasoned and logical scenarios I’ve seen. Only examination of the actual plane will confirm or deny it.
Sam is referring to a suicidal pilot planning a deliberate disappearance.
Well sort of. I’ve been involved since the thread started. Every now and then someone suggests the pilot suicide explanation, and then to fill the inexplicable 5 hour gap, goes on to insist the pilot wanted to hide the tragedy.
But no-one has provided a hypothesis as to why:
-
A person intent on suicide would endure 5 extra hours and
-
Why they would fly in different directions (north-west) to utterly confuse searchers after their death.
Quite simply this is not the way a desperate mind works. Planning a dramatic death is possible, but to delay and plan a deceptive flight as well is a reach too far. People don’t do that. In fact death/suicide is usually sad and ordinary.
Just my 2cents.
Yes that is a reasonable scenario and was discussed earlier in the thread. Indeed its the most likely explanation (or some variation thereof). The only difficulty is the aeroplane turned north-west over the Andaman Sea but is now being looked for in the far south.
Either someone was at the controls or the turn is faulty data from the Thai radar. Nobody seems to have seen this aeroplane turn south - all we have are doppler-shifted short signals received by a satellite, which are still mathematical guesses at best.
I just thought, hey, we can detect decades-old cars at the bottom of lakes. If the plane went in intact, as some people suggest, it should show up clearly on sonar. Surely we have vehicles that can scan the seabed for weeks (submarines). I didn’t think of the 100× greater coverage of satellites than sonar, though.
What we need is a high-res satellite-based imaging system that can penetrate the water surface and image the bottom as if the ocean didn’t exist. AFAIK, that isn’t possible with today’s technology. If is is, they need to get cracking on this project.
Desperate minds are not perfectly rational. There have been other cases (the Fedex one) where the suicide-ist wanted to cover up his actions for insurance reasons and went out of his way to disable the CVR, among other things.
Exactly why a cover-up would be needed might require delving into aberrant psychology. But if it was, flying in different directions to utterly confuse searchers would do it. It could also explain the long flight after communication was cut off, whether anyone was alive on the plane or not. The more distance covered, especially in the wrong direction, the harder it would be to find, both while it was still flying and after it crashed. It might not have been human action that initiated all of this (equipment failure hasn’t yet been ruled out), but it certainly is consistent with a planned, intelligently executed suicide.
Not a terribly credible scenario given the latest evidence.
He starts with the report by the oil worker Mike McKay of seeing something burning in the air and uses that as evidence of a fire. However, Mike McKay cannot have seen the airplane - the oil rig he was on was far enough away that the curvature of the earth would have physically prevented him from seeing the plane.
Secondly, we now know that the plane was intact and powered and moving for at least 7 hours after losing communications. We also now know that it made course changes several hours after losing communications - it flew west until it reached the Indian Ocean, then turned south. An airplane which is on fire badly enough to lose electrical power has maybe 15 minutes left to fly, it doesn’t keep flying for 7 hours. The course change some time after losing radio communication would also seem to rule out complete pilot incapacitation.
I would hypothesize that the person who planned a suicide like this simply wouldn’t want to be remembered by whoever they left behind in their life as a suicide murderer who killed everyone else on the plane. By intentionally covering their evidence (flying long enough the recorders overwrite themselves) and crashing the plane in a very remote and deep area they have so far successfully done so.
As another thought - beside the person thinking about how others might remember them, they may also have thoughts of life insurance implications.
I was going to say the same thing–again–but I figured what’s the use. It’s been pointed out a bazillion and umpteen times already in this thread, and could be pointed out as many times again and people will still cling to the fantasy that there had to be a fire.
Not to mention the guy in that link must set the record for the number of “ifs” in a scenario. If a ceiling panel fell at the right moment, if everyone rushed to the back of the plane, if they all farted at just the right time…
If it was pilot suicide … it was also full large scale murder with no fear of a Muslim or a Christian God.
Spur of the moment?
Who was his last phone call to?
What was his state of mind of the chief pilot before take off with his close friend of the opposition party under arrest for sodomy just hours before the flight?
The answer to those questions would lead to a better conclusion.
-
They may have all been dead from anoxia by then, which would also prevent anyone from breaking down the cockpit door somehow. Just shut the pressurization system off after pointing the plane out toward a vast area of nothing.
-
To delay or prevent the conclusion that it was a murder/suicide. Why? TBD.
Do we actually know this? I know that is what investigators thinks what happened.
But how many times has the story changed? Heck, they even changed the last words to ATC within the last week and that is the most basic of the investigation.
I guess I am little jaded, but I don’t trust any speculation coming from the investigators.
This is based purely on the Inmarsat data, which is very well-verified. They only released this data after verifying the method used to determine position and speed with other airplanes using the same method. They also analyzed satellite pings transmitted by the accident aircraft from when it was sitting on the ground at the airport before taking off, so they have a known baseline for the transmitter on that plane.
There has been a lot of other questionable information, especially from the Malaysians, but the satellite tracking data does appear to be solid, and would also appear to rule out a fire or anything other than a very improbable series of malfunctions.
Really? It couldn’t be a super-religious dude who thinks that Allah/God will provide and Paradise is better for everyone whether they know it or not? Do everyone a favor and get them to paradise right away; they’ll thank you later.
Rather than fear, it might be extreme love. Twisted by our estimation, but suicide bombers rationalize this way all the time.
The siting of an airplane on fire is not to be discounted outright. According to the report The plane was seen 90 degrees to the normal track for something like 15 seconds. If there was a fire in a cargo bay viewed from below that meant it burned through the door seals and the flames reached outside the plane. Such a fire would have triggered an emergency turn to the nearest airport by the pilot. Cargo doors are on the side of the plane so as it turns 180 degrees it would be briefly seen.
A fire or explosion of that magnitude could easily destroy the wiring to the UHF antenna on the bottom of the plane. Cargo bays consist of a roller system mounted to the spine of the plane. The rest is sheet metal heavy enough to walk on and that’s it. It’s not structurally integral to the plane. In fact, to save weight, some of the latest cargo planes don’t even cover this area. You see the exposed wiring running down the length of the plane.
What the plane needs to fly and what people need to survive are not mutually inclusive. The plane’s engine management system doesn’t need clean air to operate. It needs electrical power and instructions. It’s not dependent on the communication system in any way. In the event of an emergency the PIC would dial in the nearest airport and set the auto pilot for course and altitude. This frees up pilot and copilot to focus on the emergency. The plane will now turn and descend independent of the pilot.
An emergency situation such as this is consistent with a report of a fire, a change in direction,change of altitude, loss of communication, loss of crew, and a plane computer carrying out it’s last instructions until it runs out of fuel.
ugh… “sighting”, not “siting”. I’m tired.
I’m not going to go search through all 25 pages, but I do remember those questions being addressed. The bottom line is the pilot might want to make the plane as near-impossible to find as he could for, as one example, insurance purposes. Insurance companies don’t pay out for suicides. He may have been counting on no one figuring out he’d left the South China Sea area.
This post below is representative of what has been gone over earlier:
FWIW I saw a 777 pilot on CNN yesterday who said due to the way the wiring is routed on the plane there was no spot on the plane where all the different systems what went off line were in the same place. This means that no localized fire could have taken all of them offline.
Not having a wiring diagram for a 777 handy I can’t verify this claim.
The “sea floor” is a bit of a misleading term, since it suggests a flat surface. There are flat surfaces at the ocean bottom, but there are also extremely rugged mountainous terrains; see the schematic of the area where Air France crashed.
As it turned out, the debris field for the Air France was in a relatively flat area, rather than the undersea mountains where it was first assumed to be. Nonetheless, it took two years to find it, using underwater search techniques, and with a pretty precise knowledge of the last location of the airplane.