That was one disturbing read.
That paragraph imagining the rows of corpses belted in under the emergency lights… shudder
No wait, it’s worse.
If that pilot they talked to at the end of the article is correct, and Zaharie said “hey go check on that thing” and locked the copilot out of the cockpit- then the copilot would have been desperately trying to get back in. People would know something was off about the situation. They wouldn’t have just died peacefully in their sleep waiting for help like he envisioned.
oh god im not gonna sleep tonight
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.A rouge move would be a red one. You probably mean a rogue move.
I concur, having closely followed – as an armchair observer – the story from the beginning.
The Atlantic article doesn’t propose any new theory. It just expands the best one a bit.
What a great article. The flight simulator evidence, on top of everything else, wraps it up for me.
I read that article too - it’s quite convincing.
By chance, I met Blaine Gibson in Belitung, Indonesia right around the time he found the wreckage in Mozambique. I only talked with him for a few minutes, but he seemed like a pretty normal, nice guy.
A 727 is not a “jumbo jet.”
Good article. I think most of the details mentioned about the flight were already known, although I hadn’t heard the detail about Zaharie Shah advancing the flight simulator flight manually on that particular simulated route. Pilot suicide has always been the most-cited theory for what happened.
Yeah, it’s chilling to conjecture what might have happened in the cabin. Audio from the Germanwings flight captured the sound of the captain trying to break the door down, as well as screams from the passengers. In that case, which took place a year after MH370, the captain would surely have known what his co-pilot was doing, and hence I imagine things got frantic pretty quickly before the plane crashed soon after.
With MH370, it’s conjectured that it was the co-pilot who was locked out of the cockpit, while the captain was at the controls. This MH370 flight was the co-pilot’s final training flight, and he was scheduled to be examined on his next flight. The captain, on the other hand, was a flight instructor and examiner. So I wonder what the dynamic was, and how long it to took the student co-pilot, as well as cabin crew, to get to the frantic stage of perhaps trying to smash the door down.
If he had his phone on him, I guess the co-pilot might have tried to call the airline to ask what to do. The detail about the co-pilot’s cellphone registering with a tower has always intrigued me. According to the article, though, this happened at least half an hour after it is believed that control of the plane was seized, and after the decompression event that is hypothesized to have killed everyone in the cabin.
So I guess one theory might be that the co-pilot left or was asked to leave the cockpit, with the captain taking control of the plane. The co-pilot then returned and found the door locked. After some amount of time had passed, the co-pilot turned on his phone to try and call for assistance.
It’s interesting that it was only the co-pilot’s phone that registered (as far as I’m aware). If there’d been an extended period that the passengers were aware of what was happening, then it might be expected that they would also have turned their phones on. If they didn’t, then that might suggest that the ascent and decompression event took place early on. So perhaps the co-pilot turns his phone on, then there’s the decompression event killing everyone in the cabin, which explains why only the co-pilot’s cellphone is on half an hour later.
While the supposed death-by-decompression of the passengers is horrible, I think it’s slightly less worse than the idea of them all being aware of their impending doom for several hours before the plane crashed into the sea, while vainly trying to smash down the door.
It’s not known if there was anyone at the controls of the plane before it crashed, although it is suspected. I sometimes contemplate what a weird scene this must have been, as well as what might have been happening in the cockpit as the plane flew for several hours across the Indian Ocean towards the Antarctic. I think the final paragraph of the 6. The Captain section of the article depicts this well. If it was Zaharie Shah at the controls, then I get the sense that there was kind of a feeling in him, in those final few hours, of him being in his home flying on his flight simulator.
There’s an interesting section of the article in which it talks about how a person examining the flight simulator data has a theory that the captain “left a bread-crumb trail to say goodbye” in one of the flight simulator flights. There’s another potential breadcrumb, or at least a possible indication that it was Zaharie Shah at the controls, in that the plane, after deviating from its flight path, flew over Penang and then turned again. It’s speculated that Shah might have flown over Penang deliberately as it was his hometown, and the banking turn would have given a good final view of it.
The thing I take from that article that was not mentioned is that there could have been a actual note, if not a letter, explaining everything, and the Malaysian police buried it. He might even have left a neon sign saying “I did it” and the government would suppress it. But they didn’t think to look in the flight simulator, so they didn’t clean that up. That program wasn’t meant to be a deliberate breadcrumb, because the captain left a whole loaf on the counter, as it were. It was just a tool left out accidentally.
And barring anyone talking, we’ll never know.
Yes that’s quite possible. Corruption allegations have been levelled against Malaysia’s government at the time - prime minister Najib Razak, who gave press conferences on MH370, is currently under arrest for corruption.
I had no idea the pilot could manually dump pressurization in the cabin. AIUI, it doesn’t take long at all for the pressure to equalize, a minute or two is what I’ve read. Time of useful consciousness is going to be in the 15-30 seconds range at 40k-ish altitude, and cabin oxygen masks won’t help (PO2, even at 100 percent O2, is too low to sustain life at 40 k feet. The pilot’s mask supplies pressurized O2.)
Ran out of edit room. A mask delivering pure O2 at 40k feet should have the same O2 as the atmosphere at roughly 27 inches of mercury. Which is sustainable. I guess the mask/face seals in a passenger cabin emergency mask aren’t good enough to provide for that though. They’re only supposed to provide enough passenger air for the pilots to get the jet down to a life-sustaining altitude though.
This is what I came into ask. In what type of situation would you want to depressurize the cabin? Would it help to fight fire? Kind of silly if it kills everyone.
The situation I’d read of was where you had a faulty pressurization pump that wouldn’t shut off or an outflow that wouldn’t open, and manually stopping pressurization/lowering pressure was the only way to prevent the hull from failing.
That makes sense. Surprised their wouldn’t be a cut off for the lowest pressure you can dump to.
It might work if the amount of time it takes depressurization to extinguish a cabin fire is shorter than the time it would take to do serious harm to the passengers. Also might work if you are flying a freighter airplane with an onboard blaze and have no passengers to worry about.
I quite aware of the right word, sometimes I just have clumsy thumbs.
A great article, thanks Lucas. Finally read it.
Zaharie Ahmad Shah. Motherfucker. Mass murderer.
Left Hand and Lucas are using the same avatar. Confusing! Where is this article??