> Forensic examinations of Zaharie’s simulator by the FBI revealed that he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370—a flight north around Indonesia followed by a long run to the south, ending in fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean. Malaysian investigators dismissed this flight profile as merely one of several hundred that the simulator had recorded. That is true, as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone.
This seems as close to a smoking gun as we're ever likely to get.
When I was hearing that first reported it was much fuzzier and they only recovered small portions of the data for the flight which makes me much less certain of the 'he simulated the exact flight' theory.
Edit: Found a source for my memory, it's from Lemino's pretty great video: [0] "the data recovered consists of 7 coordinates ... however it's not clear if the coordinates originate from the same flight session."
The part about how it was "only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight" makes it sound like at some point they found evidence that the co-ordinates which supposedly made up his simulation of the exact flight couldn't have actually come from the same simulated flight - and took this as more proof that it was in fact evidence of him rehearsing for it.
The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche, and it doesn't offer any support for any competing theories. But it does pose one question I haven't seen addressed. Why, if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into the middle of nowhere, didn't he turn right instead of left?
His route took him through populated airspace for no apparent reason. If numerous authorities in multiple countries hadn't been asleep at the switch, there would have been no mystery at all about what happened.
I find the counterargument unpersuasive. The situation is:
1) Someone flew the plane south
2) The senior pilot had the ability to do so
3) His marriage had failed and he was possibly depressed, which is a possible reason.
4) Nobody else had the ability to do so with the possible exception of the junior pilot, who seemingly had much less reason.
This countergument, such as it is, seems to be that we don't have a lot of data to support point 3 above, which is quite true, and indeed, one of the main points of the article: That the official report did not dig into point 3 in detail, and in fact seems to have omitted some key details.
But what of it? At most this is an argument that we shouldn't rule out the junior pilot, but no evidence is advanced, however weak to suggest he was to blame. And the author does themselves no favours with trivial logic errors like this:
> this flap could only be activated for takeoff or landing by command of the pilot. It could not be independently moved by the autopilot. After several weeks of detailed scrutiny, investigators concluded that the flap had not been deployed, and therefore the jet had plunged into the ocean once its fuel was exhausted without any human intervention. Langewiesche, suggesting the opposite...
If the flap had been deployed, we would know that the pilot was alive at the end. Since it had not been deployed, we don't know if the pilot was alive at the end. Langewiesche explicity gets this right; Irving gets backwards.
If you can't even construct an internally consistent argument, your attempt to debunk others will come across as lacking.
> The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche
I would say it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the simulator Langewiesche relies on and his complete omission of the fact that the Malaysian government absolutely wanted to blame Zahierie, a fanatical supporter of the opposition party, but the evidence was pretty thin.
< if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into the middle of nowhere, didn't he turn right instead of left?
Which begs the bigger question of why not just fly the plane straight down into the ocean? The problem with the crazy suicide pilot theory has always been that it's become basically unfalsifiable. Plane went left? Suicide pilot wanted to go left. Plane turned right? Suicide pilot wanted to turn right. Plane turned left again? Suicide pilot must have had his reasons.
That the crash was intentional is basically the only plausible explanation given the information at hand though, and given nothing was heard on the radios, the most likely explanation is one of the pilots. If it had been an accident, it would make a lot more sense to have crashed much sooner or otherwise have been more like Helios Airways Flight 522. (In that flight, a technician had set the pressurisation system to manual to do a test and forgot to reset it, and then the pilots didn't properly check the switch on any of the three checks they were meant to do. As they ascended, they became confused by the various alarms that went off and didn't put on their masks. Falling unconscious the plan continued on its autopilot heading towards its destination.)
Given MH370 making multiple turns over a long period, and transponder and other electrical systems probably having been manually switched off, it's the most likely explanation. We may never know for sure though.
I personally don't find it that plausible. Is it the least implausible explanation? Maybe.
> If it had been an accident, it would make a lot more sense to have crashed much sooner or otherwise have been more like Helios Airways Flight 522.
This is just hand waving, we can just as easily say "if it was a pilot suicide it would have been like the known pilot suicide crashes". The fact is that there are all sorts of mechanical events many of which bear zero resemblance to the most common or best known ones.
> Given MH370 making multiple turns over a long period, and transponder and other electrical systems probably having been manually switched off, it's the most likely explanation. We may never know for sure though.
This is circular reasoning. There's no shortage of other reasons the plane could make multiple turns. There are plenty of reasons the transponder stops working. Both could happen due to a mechanical event.
> I would say it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the simulator Langewiesche relies on.
Irving's claim in this regard is a non-sequitur: the fact that the flight's early stages, after the departure from the planned route, did not follow the simulated track, is beside the point.
There is another non-sequitur in Irving's argument about the flap deployment: while deployment would indicate that there was someone flying the airplane at the time of the crash, its non-deployment tells us nothing. And to claim that Langewiesche is wrong because this flap was not literally "shredded into confetti" is just silly.
Meanwhile, Irving ignores the satellite evidence that the turn to the south was performed at a higher rate of turn than the automated systems can achieve.
Irving also misrepresents the purpose of parts of Langewiesche's story. There is no evidence that Zahierie waited for the first officer to leave the cockpit for a break (or, as Langewiesche actually suggested, told him to go back and check something), but all Langewiesche is doing here is showing that there is a plausible explanation for how Zahierie could take control of the airplane. Similarly, the depressurization theory is merely a plausible explanation for how Zahierie could subdue the passengers, who, in this post-9/11 world, would surely try to break into the cockpit once they became aware of what had happened.
As to why Zahierie would initially turn west, there is at least the point that it is the direction in which last contact with radar is achieved as soon as possible (other than cutting across Sumatra, which might attract too much attention from the Indonesian defense forces).
It is unfortunate that the Malaysian government attempted to blame Zahierie for the crash when there was no particular evidence that he was responsible, but that does not mean that he was not. I agree with Irving that, putting the simulation aside, the evidence for him being suicidal is very weak (and for him being homicidal, there is none), but I think Langewiesche makes a reasonable case for it being the least implausible explanation that fits the physical evidence.
Especially given the Malaysian government's smear tactics and general incompetence, I would like to know more about the simulation's provenance, and whether it could have been faked (even though the Malaysian government dismissed it as irrelevant, which seems to be an odd claim from an entity allegedly trying to blame Zahierie.) I also wonder if there is any evidence of other simulations of flights that end up in the open ocean.
> I would like to know more about the simulation's provenance ... I also wonder if there is any evidence of other simulations of flights that end up in the open ocean.
I'll second this. What little info we have seen can sound damning, at least as it's usually presented, but by all acounts there were over a hundred (hundreds?) of routes from the simultor, let's see them all and maybe the idea that one went into the southern indian ocean isn't actually so wild when you see a hundred plus of routes going everwhere from malaysia.
I was actually thinking of something rather different, but you have a point: if there were a lot of routes going nowhere, this one would not seem unusual... except for the fact that Zaharie apparently repeatedly came back to it, advancing it in steps to the point of fuel exhaustion. That seems very significant to me, assuming it is not a forgery or a misinterpretation of the data.
I was thinking that there might be evidence that Zaharie considered what Irving claims (mistakenly, I believe) was the only plausible course if Zaharie wanted to disappear: eastwards across the South China Sea.
What I read somewhere was that part of his flight took him in a sightseeing curve around the place where he was born, as if he was saying goodbye. The article says he "banked around the island of Penang", and other articles say he was born in Penang. It was dark at the time, though, I suppose.
I wonder what he was expecting to happen. The article gives the impression that he can't reasonably have expected to get to the southern Indian Ocean without being intercepted. So, if he'd planned to fly in that direction, was he expecting to be followed there by military aircraft? On the other hand, if he was expecting to be intercepted, why bother with all the trickery to remain undetected, seeing as they couldn't have stopped him anyway? We'll never know, I suppose.
> His route took him through populated airspace for no apparent reason. If numerous authorities in multiple countries hadn't been asleep at the switch, there would have been no mystery at all about what happened.
We might know what happened in that case... but what, exactly, do you think they could have done to change the outcome?
Say that he was "caught", jets were dispatched, and MH370 was intercepted. There's absolutely nothing that they could have done to change how the flight ends.
Only so far, no fighter planes are going to be able to match the range of a 777, without a prepared dedicated fleet of in-flight refueling, and in that region only really japan practices in-flight refueling - Indonesia has since (last year) expressed interest in buying some tankers, but still not committed to it.
"Subtracting the fuel" is a bit weird. I think even with the fuel filed until the planned destination it would have not made it nowhere on that flight path.
Also we have the last ping + some rough estimate of additional flight time (but minutes of uncertainty are already enough to have hundreds of kms of search radius)
Although I am quite familiar with Roanoke, VA. I didn't get that at first, thanks for pointing it out. I thought you were making some kind of redneck joke.
Incidentally it is 343 miles from Roanoke VA to Roanoke Island, NC.
William Langewiesche is a pilot himself, and has written many other articles over the last 2 decades detailing accident investigations (among other things). As much as the technical details, he often explains the organizational and political circumstances that are just as interesting. Some that stick with me: the late-90s ValuJet and EgyptAir crashes, and the Space Shuttle Columbia.
He is my favorite author on the subject of aviation. Lots of great reads here. Two standouts for my money are "The Devil at 37,000 Feet" and "The Human Factor."
“On the afternoon of last January 15, a flock of Canada geese flew about 3,000 feet above the Bronx in a loose echelon formation, tending to their own business as usual, with nothing special in mind. Much about those particular geese will never be known—for instance, where they came from, and where they were headed, and why—but it is likely that they were large, well fed, and self-satisfied. Evidently they were also fairly dumb. Their stupidity cannot be held against them, since they were just birds, after all, but geese are said to be adaptive creatures, and it is hard not to think that they should have had better sense than to go wandering through New York City’s skies”
[…] ”There was also an official collision with a fish, though the fish was in the grasp of an osprey at the time.”
This article reminded me of a long-form article I read on here (below) about a maritime disaster that was similarly well written. Not surprised that it turns out to have been written by Langewiesche as well.
I had no particularly noteworthy interest in the topic beyond empathy for the families at the time. Yet I found this a compelling read. The descriptions and details made the whole thing pretty easy to follow.
Langewiesche is one of the great narrative journalists of the last 30 years; a contemporary and colleague of perhaps better-known writers like Mark Bowden (Blackhawk Down), but I think probably the best of them. It's worth tracking his previous stories down.
I enjoyed this write up by Langewiesche, but the one thing that bothered me was the credence lent to the depressurization event without disclosing what if any evidence there is that it happened? Is there some? In the article he simply says "circumstances suggest" by which I assume he means the climb to 40k feet.
1) It seems pretty clear the plane took hours to crash
2) If the cabin was full of healthy, alive passengers, they could have done something during that time. (It's not a certainty, but it certainly seems plausible. Armored cockpit doors aren't meant to withstand dozens of super motivated people, including cabin crew, with literally hours of time on their hands.)
3) Apparently nothing was done, so apparently it wasn't full of healthy, alive passengers.
4) Although a number of things could have killed or incapacitated the passengers in the cabin, depressurisation is fast, reliable, under the control of the pilot, and doesn't require any elaborate assumptions about third parties or deus ex machina. There are other possibilities that have been discussed elsewhere (poisoned food, perhaps), but Occam's razor suggests depressurisation.
I think that's what the author was getting at with the "circumstances suggest". Given what is known about the plane, depressurisation is the most logical explanation for one of the mysteries.
Depressurization also circumstantially connects with the otherwise unexplained climb to 40,000 feet, and with the disconnection and reconnection of the electrical system.
I agree that it's a likely theory and fits much of what's known, but there can be other reasonable explanations for the things mentioned above. The aircraft was already assigned 35k feet, was a climb to 40k feet really necessary to ensure the passengers and crew would be incapacitated? Might he not have been trying to avoid traffic in established flight corridors, since the transponder was not operating and he wasn't talking to anyone? Anyway, to be clear I'm not challenging the overall conclusion. It's the best theory I personally have heard, but I am also not an expert on any of this. I just felt like the article didn't make it clear enough that the depressurization event was complete conjecture.
Shutting down most/all of the electrical systems on the plane suggests depressurization. Also it just makes sense to do so; a plane full of dead people can't engage in heroics to save the day. And he might have seen it as the humane thing to do, rather than leave people in fear for hours up to the actual crash.
But agreed that there's no hard evidence for this, or even for much of the entire story. Just a bunch of circumstantial evidence that suggests a lot.
I don't watch CNN and don't know Lemon. But here's a possible alternative explanation (hardly a defense):
Wikipedia says he graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism. He probably didn't pay much attention to science in high school, and almost certainly wasn't required to take any science classes in college.
So, he might not even understand science as simple as F=ma. In his defense I'd bet that if you surveyed the adult population, the majority couldn't tell you what F=ma means.
The above is a long way of saying that most journalists aren't literate in science. And, we know that black holes are "sexy". Many books have been written about them. Many movies made that feature them as key plot points.
So, why not ask about black holes as a possibility? It's as plausible an explanation as whatever it was that happened to that airplane in the Lost TV series of about 10 years ago.
Having said all that, yeah, the guy is probably an idiot. As are quite a few TV journalists.
I always assume reporters ask these kinds of 'dumb' questions because they know they're the questions the audience wants answered. They play the part of their audience, basically. (I have no idea whether or not Don Lemon is an idiot.)
Back when this happened, me and a friend spent some time coming up with the most ridiculous conspiracy theories about how the plane disappeared , just for fun. The best one that I could invent with was that MH370 flew right next to another plane in order to appear as a single, really big plane on the radar.
A few weeks later my stupid conspiracy theory was all over the media thanks to a blogger who proposed the same thing (but not as a joke, apparently) [1][2][3]
Amazing prose here. The description of the death of the passengers, and the final moments of within the cockpit before the plane ran out of fuel, were chilling in their capacity to imply a peaceful bliss in the wake of hundreds of needless lost lives.
I had the same thought! Something about how the author describes the rush of air, the security and known 'homeliness' of the cockpit resonates with me.
Im sitting in airport lounge about to hop on a transatlantic. Dreaming of drifting to sleep up in the air and never waking up is a bit scary but also peaceful (I am not suicidal, thanks). travel is definitely an easy escape and repetitious in my life. I like routine and always book the same seat, same flight to get to Europe, etc. There's comfort there for me and I really identify the way the author describes the peacefulness of a nighttime long haul flight.
I was reading about ADS-B, FlightAware and Aireon [1] earlier.
Apparently they've completed a network of satellites in January 2019 and can now monitor (ADS-B equipped) aircraft anywhere over earth?
Does anyone know more about how this works, does that mean we will never have a MH370-like situation again because nowadays aircraft can be tracked much better?
Depends on how it's set up precisely, ADS-B will still require power from somewhere. At some point in MH370's flight all the power systems were turned off for a bit so unless it's connected to it's own battery and ADS-B would still be disconnected.
y, it should be required for all airliners to have a tracking system that can not be disabled from inside the plane, and has a backup power system. For situations like this, hijackings, etc.
Also seems like streaming black box data and even cock pit recordings would already be something that is standard. As a backup/additional data to the physical black boxes. That could be accessed right away or even in real time.
Maybe, but having an electronic system on an airliner that can't be disabled could potentially lead to a fire that can't be extinguished and that's why you can shut down every system as the pilot.
It seems reasonable to transmit as much info, including who initiated the shutdown, at that point so that you can at least attempt to attribute the reason the transponder went offline.
Maybe power it the way the black box is powered, a stand alone system that transmits location and data that is typically also logged to the black boxes.
I'm sure satellite coverage is an issue with getting data in remote areas, maybe SpaceX's StarLink system could provide a way to stream data from airliners in more locations.
No I'm asking how do you put attribution to the physical flipping of a breaker especially against someone just cutting the whole electrical system out at the same time with a master breaker.
Satellite coverage isn't really an issue there's already stuff like Inmarsat's network that covers all but basically the poles. [0] Has SpaceX advertised or said anything about covering the poles? I doubt they will just because there are so few customers.
The pilot can switch off the ADS-B transponder, so assuming that MH370 was intentional (which seems to be the best explanation), no, this could still happen.
Langewiesche's a great author but this article doesn't add much in the way of new information from all the writing of the past three years. One off the record source about the pilot's mental state, that's about it. I happen to agree with his speculative conclusion, deliberate action by the pilot, but there's not really anything significant and new here to support it.
I'm not sure that was the point? I imagine given that you know enough to be able to make that claim that you've followed coverage of this incident pretty closely. As someone who hasn't, and mostly came at it from an "oh yeah, that thing, whatever ended up happening there?" perspective, I found this article to be an engaging and informative summary of what has happened in the years since and what we now know.
I thought it was valuable. I'd on-and-off casually followed news of the disappearance for months afterward, but I don't think I'd read anything before that ties everything known together. The writing was also excellent and gripping.
>>as soon as MH370 disappeared from secondary radar, it turned sharply to the southwest, flew back across the Malay Peninsula, and banked around the island of Penang. From there it flew northwest up the Strait of Malacca and out across the Andaman Sea, where it faded beyond radar range into obscurity. That part of the flight took more than an hour to accomplish and suggested that this was not a standard case of a hijacking.>>
What about this suggests that this was not a standard case of hijacking?
> Was this a hijacking? A hijacking is the “third party” solution favored in the official report. It is the least painful explanation for anyone in authority that night. It has immense problems, however. The main one is that the cockpit door was fortified, electrically bolted, and surveilled by a video feed that the pilots could see. Also, less than two minutes passed between Zaharie’s casual “good night” to the Kuala Lumpur controller and the start of the diversion, with the attendant loss of the transponder signal. How would hijackers have known to make their move precisely during the handoff to Vietnamese air traffic control, and then gained access so quickly and smoothly that neither of the pilots had a chance to transmit a distress call? It is possible of course that the hijackers were known to the pilots—that they were invited into the cockpit—but even that does not explain the lack of a radio transmission, particularly during the hand-flown turn away from Beijing. Both of the control yokes had transmitter switches, within the merest finger reach, and some signal could have been sent in the moments before an attempted takeover. Furthermore, every one of the passengers and cabin-crew members has been investigated and cleared of suspicion by teams of Malaysian and Chinese investigators aided by the FBI. The quality of that police work is open to question, but it was thorough enough to have uncovered the identities of two Iranians who were traveling under false names with stolen passports—seeking, however, nothing more nefarious than political asylum in Germany. It is possible that stowaways—by definition unrecorded on the airplane’s manifest—had hidden in the equipment bay. If so, they would have had access to two circuit breakers that, if pulled, would have unbolted the cockpit door. But that scenario has problems, too. The bolts click loudly when they open—an unambiguous sound that would have been familiar to the pilots. The hijackers would then have had to open a galley-floor hatch from below, climb a short ladder, evade notice by the cabin crew, evade the surveillance video, and enter the cockpit before either of the pilots transmitted a distress call. It is unlikely that this could have happened, just as it is unlikely that a flight attendant held hostage could have used the door keypad to allow sudden entry without firing off a warning. Furthermore, what would the purpose be of a hijacking? Money? Politics? Publicity? An act of war? A terrorist attack? The intricate seven-hour profile of MH370’s deviation into oblivion fits none of these scenarios. And no one has claimed responsibility for the act. Anonymity is not consistent with any of these motives.
Yes, but none of that relates to the hour long series of turns that ended with the plane pointed towards the Indian Ocean. The quote I pasted referred to these events as not being indicative of a standard hijacking. Maybe it was just a poorly worded conclusion. There are definitely other reasons - primarily the anonymity and lack of any money changing hands.
The "hour-long series of turns" themselves suggest that it was not a hijacking - one would expect a hijacked airplane to head towards its intended destination, regardless of the motive for the hijacking.
It does not seem likely that the path was intended to avoid detection, as it crosses Malaysia and was within range of Indonesian radar throughout that period, and it is rather implausible to suggest that these posited hijackers both wanted to be stealthy, yet chose a route that had no chance of achieving it. If these posited hijackers wanted their arrival at their intended destination to be a surprise, their best hope of achieving it would be to stage a hijacking on a flight close to that destination.
I guess one could suppose that this is the only flight the posited hijackers could hijack (suggesting help from insiders at the airline), and that the flight was intended to stay away from land as far as possible, but where, especially with that final turn, were they going? If their destination was, as has been suggested, Kazakhstan, they could hardly hope to avoid detection later in the flight. Nor would they be likely to suspect that the reporting of the disappearance of the flight would be delayed by hours.
The author did not say that this track proves it was not a hijacking, he wrote that it already "suggested that this was not a standard case of a hijacking."
> Forensic examinations of Zaharie’s simulator by the FBI revealed that he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370—a flight north around Indonesia followed by a long run to the south, ending in fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean. Malaysian investigators dismissed this flight profile as merely one of several hundred that the simulator had recorded. That is true, as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone.
This seems as close to a smoking gun as we're ever likely to get.
When I was hearing that first reported it was much fuzzier and they only recovered small portions of the data for the flight which makes me much less certain of the 'he simulated the exact flight' theory.
Edit: Found a source for my memory, it's from Lemino's pretty great video: [0] "the data recovered consists of 7 coordinates ... however it's not clear if the coordinates originate from the same flight session."
[0] https://youtu.be/kd2KEHvK-q8?t=953
The part about how it was "only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight" makes it sound like at some point they found evidence that the co-ordinates which supposedly made up his simulation of the exact flight couldn't have actually come from the same simulated flight - and took this as more proof that it was in fact evidence of him rehearsing for it.
This seems as close to a smoking gun as we're ever likely to get.
One interesting counterargument is brought up in a rebuttal at https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewie... .
The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche, and it doesn't offer any support for any competing theories. But it does pose one question I haven't seen addressed. Why, if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into the middle of nowhere, didn't he turn right instead of left?
His route took him through populated airspace for no apparent reason. If numerous authorities in multiple countries hadn't been asleep at the switch, there would have been no mystery at all about what happened.
I find the counterargument unpersuasive. The situation is:
1) Someone flew the plane south
2) The senior pilot had the ability to do so
3) His marriage had failed and he was possibly depressed, which is a possible reason.
4) Nobody else had the ability to do so with the possible exception of the junior pilot, who seemingly had much less reason.
This countergument, such as it is, seems to be that we don't have a lot of data to support point 3 above, which is quite true, and indeed, one of the main points of the article: That the official report did not dig into point 3 in detail, and in fact seems to have omitted some key details.
But what of it? At most this is an argument that we shouldn't rule out the junior pilot, but no evidence is advanced, however weak to suggest he was to blame. And the author does themselves no favours with trivial logic errors like this:
> this flap could only be activated for takeoff or landing by command of the pilot. It could not be independently moved by the autopilot. After several weeks of detailed scrutiny, investigators concluded that the flap had not been deployed, and therefore the jet had plunged into the ocean once its fuel was exhausted without any human intervention. Langewiesche, suggesting the opposite...
If the flap had been deployed, we would know that the pilot was alive at the end. Since it had not been deployed, we don't know if the pilot was alive at the end. Langewiesche explicity gets this right; Irving gets backwards.
If you can't even construct an internally consistent argument, your attempt to debunk others will come across as lacking.
> The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche
I would say it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the simulator Langewiesche relies on and his complete omission of the fact that the Malaysian government absolutely wanted to blame Zahierie, a fanatical supporter of the opposition party, but the evidence was pretty thin.
< if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into the middle of nowhere, didn't he turn right instead of left?
Which begs the bigger question of why not just fly the plane straight down into the ocean? The problem with the crazy suicide pilot theory has always been that it's become basically unfalsifiable. Plane went left? Suicide pilot wanted to go left. Plane turned right? Suicide pilot wanted to turn right. Plane turned left again? Suicide pilot must have had his reasons.
That the crash was intentional is basically the only plausible explanation given the information at hand though, and given nothing was heard on the radios, the most likely explanation is one of the pilots. If it had been an accident, it would make a lot more sense to have crashed much sooner or otherwise have been more like Helios Airways Flight 522. (In that flight, a technician had set the pressurisation system to manual to do a test and forgot to reset it, and then the pilots didn't properly check the switch on any of the three checks they were meant to do. As they ascended, they became confused by the various alarms that went off and didn't put on their masks. Falling unconscious the plan continued on its autopilot heading towards its destination.)
Given MH370 making multiple turns over a long period, and transponder and other electrical systems probably having been manually switched off, it's the most likely explanation. We may never know for sure though.
> the only plausible explanation
I personally don't find it that plausible. Is it the least implausible explanation? Maybe.
> If it had been an accident, it would make a lot more sense to have crashed much sooner or otherwise have been more like Helios Airways Flight 522.
This is just hand waving, we can just as easily say "if it was a pilot suicide it would have been like the known pilot suicide crashes". The fact is that there are all sorts of mechanical events many of which bear zero resemblance to the most common or best known ones.
> Given MH370 making multiple turns over a long period, and transponder and other electrical systems probably having been manually switched off, it's the most likely explanation. We may never know for sure though.
This is circular reasoning. There's no shortage of other reasons the plane could make multiple turns. There are plenty of reasons the transponder stops working. Both could happen due to a mechanical event.
> I would say it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the simulator Langewiesche relies on.
Irving's claim in this regard is a non-sequitur: the fact that the flight's early stages, after the departure from the planned route, did not follow the simulated track, is beside the point.
There is another non-sequitur in Irving's argument about the flap deployment: while deployment would indicate that there was someone flying the airplane at the time of the crash, its non-deployment tells us nothing. And to claim that Langewiesche is wrong because this flap was not literally "shredded into confetti" is just silly.
Meanwhile, Irving ignores the satellite evidence that the turn to the south was performed at a higher rate of turn than the automated systems can achieve.
Irving also misrepresents the purpose of parts of Langewiesche's story. There is no evidence that Zahierie waited for the first officer to leave the cockpit for a break (or, as Langewiesche actually suggested, told him to go back and check something), but all Langewiesche is doing here is showing that there is a plausible explanation for how Zahierie could take control of the airplane. Similarly, the depressurization theory is merely a plausible explanation for how Zahierie could subdue the passengers, who, in this post-9/11 world, would surely try to break into the cockpit once they became aware of what had happened.
As to why Zahierie would initially turn west, there is at least the point that it is the direction in which last contact with radar is achieved as soon as possible (other than cutting across Sumatra, which might attract too much attention from the Indonesian defense forces).
It is unfortunate that the Malaysian government attempted to blame Zahierie for the crash when there was no particular evidence that he was responsible, but that does not mean that he was not. I agree with Irving that, putting the simulation aside, the evidence for him being suicidal is very weak (and for him being homicidal, there is none), but I think Langewiesche makes a reasonable case for it being the least implausible explanation that fits the physical evidence.
Especially given the Malaysian government's smear tactics and general incompetence, I would like to know more about the simulation's provenance, and whether it could have been faked (even though the Malaysian government dismissed it as irrelevant, which seems to be an odd claim from an entity allegedly trying to blame Zahierie.) I also wonder if there is any evidence of other simulations of flights that end up in the open ocean.
> I would like to know more about the simulation's provenance ... I also wonder if there is any evidence of other simulations of flights that end up in the open ocean.
I'll second this. What little info we have seen can sound damning, at least as it's usually presented, but by all acounts there were over a hundred (hundreds?) of routes from the simultor, let's see them all and maybe the idea that one went into the southern indian ocean isn't actually so wild when you see a hundred plus of routes going everwhere from malaysia.
I was actually thinking of something rather different, but you have a point: if there were a lot of routes going nowhere, this one would not seem unusual... except for the fact that Zaharie apparently repeatedly came back to it, advancing it in steps to the point of fuel exhaustion. That seems very significant to me, assuming it is not a forgery or a misinterpretation of the data.
I was thinking that there might be evidence that Zaharie considered what Irving claims (mistakenly, I believe) was the only plausible course if Zaharie wanted to disappear: eastwards across the South China Sea.
>Which begs the bigger question of why not just fly the plane straight down into the ocean?
Probably pilot intended plane never to be found and blame never assigned to him. So it could be intentionally unfalsifiable.
What I read somewhere was that part of his flight took him in a sightseeing curve around the place where he was born, as if he was saying goodbye. The article says he "banked around the island of Penang", and other articles say he was born in Penang. It was dark at the time, though, I suppose.
I wonder what he was expecting to happen. The article gives the impression that he can't reasonably have expected to get to the southern Indian Ocean without being intercepted. So, if he'd planned to fly in that direction, was he expecting to be followed there by military aircraft? On the other hand, if he was expecting to be intercepted, why bother with all the trickery to remain undetected, seeing as they couldn't have stopped him anyway? We'll never know, I suppose.
Maybe he was hoping to get intercepted, not be completely ignored. That would make his last flight even more epic.
> His route took him through populated airspace for no apparent reason. If numerous authorities in multiple countries hadn't been asleep at the switch, there would have been no mystery at all about what happened.
We might know what happened in that case... but what, exactly, do you think they could have done to change the outcome?
Say that he was "caught", jets were dispatched, and MH370 was intercepted. There's absolutely nothing that they could have done to change how the flight ends.
Right, that's what I meant. The plane would have been tracked and/or followed by interceptors.
Only so far, no fighter planes are going to be able to match the range of a 777, without a prepared dedicated fleet of in-flight refueling, and in that region only really japan practices in-flight refueling - Indonesia has since (last year) expressed interest in buying some tankers, but still not committed to it.
He could have been talked out of it. Suicidal people are talked out of suicide all the time.
"Subtracting the fuel" is a bit weird. I think even with the fuel filed until the planned destination it would have not made it nowhere on that flight path.
Also we have the last ping + some rough estimate of additional flight time (but minutes of uncertainty are already enough to have hundreds of kms of search radius)
It is kind of funny that someone in Roanoke is doing extensive analysis on MH370
The reference here is to the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, in present day Dare County, North Carolina.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony#Lost_Colony
Although I am quite familiar with Roanoke, VA. I didn't get that at first, thanks for pointing it out. I thought you were making some kind of redneck joke.
Incidentally it is 343 miles from Roanoke VA to Roanoke Island, NC.
Roanoke, VA is not connected to the colony.
that just doubles the irony
William Langewiesche is a pilot himself, and has written many other articles over the last 2 decades detailing accident investigations (among other things). As much as the technical details, he often explains the organizational and political circumstances that are just as interesting. Some that stick with me: the late-90s ValuJet and EgyptAir crashes, and the Space Shuttle Columbia.
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/william-langewiesche
https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/william-langewiesche
He is my favorite author on the subject of aviation. Lots of great reads here. Two standouts for my money are "The Devil at 37,000 Feet" and "The Human Factor."
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/air_crash200901
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...
The Turn: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/langew/turn.ht...
Congo from the Cockpit: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/07/congo-flights-afr...
Columbia's Last Flight is his masterpiece IMO: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbi...
“On the afternoon of last January 15, a flock of Canada geese flew about 3,000 feet above the Bronx in a loose echelon formation, tending to their own business as usual, with nothing special in mind. Much about those particular geese will never be known—for instance, where they came from, and where they were headed, and why—but it is likely that they were large, well fed, and self-satisfied. Evidently they were also fairly dumb. Their stupidity cannot be held against them, since they were just birds, after all, but geese are said to be adaptive creatures, and it is hard not to think that they should have had better sense than to go wandering through New York City’s skies”
[…] ”There was also an official collision with a fish, though the fish was in the grasp of an osprey at the time.”
His book The Outlaw Sea is also a great read if you enjoyed this article and might find nautical incidents equally interesting.
Strongly seconded.
I'm about halfway through his book Sahara Unveiled, and it's also wonderful.
This article reminded me of a long-form article I read on here (below) about a maritime disaster that was similarly well written. Not surprised that it turns out to have been written by Langewiesche as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16757343
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w...
I had no particularly noteworthy interest in the topic beyond empathy for the families at the time. Yet I found this a compelling read. The descriptions and details made the whole thing pretty easy to follow.
Langewiesche is one of the great narrative journalists of the last 30 years; a contemporary and colleague of perhaps better-known writers like Mark Bowden (Blackhawk Down), but I think probably the best of them. It's worth tracking his previous stories down.
There is a really well put together video[1] by a YouTuber, who goes by the name of Lemmino, covering this topic (among others).
I highly suggest it if this story interests you! And if you like his style, his Cicada 3301 video is also a fascinating watch.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd2KEHvK-q8
That Cicada stuff is crazy!
I enjoyed this write up by Langewiesche, but the one thing that bothered me was the credence lent to the depressurization event without disclosing what if any evidence there is that it happened? Is there some? In the article he simply says "circumstances suggest" by which I assume he means the climb to 40k feet.
There's a fairly obvious argument here:
1) It seems pretty clear the plane took hours to crash
2) If the cabin was full of healthy, alive passengers, they could have done something during that time. (It's not a certainty, but it certainly seems plausible. Armored cockpit doors aren't meant to withstand dozens of super motivated people, including cabin crew, with literally hours of time on their hands.)
3) Apparently nothing was done, so apparently it wasn't full of healthy, alive passengers.
4) Although a number of things could have killed or incapacitated the passengers in the cabin, depressurisation is fast, reliable, under the control of the pilot, and doesn't require any elaborate assumptions about third parties or deus ex machina. There are other possibilities that have been discussed elsewhere (poisoned food, perhaps), but Occam's razor suggests depressurisation.
I think that's what the author was getting at with the "circumstances suggest". Given what is known about the plane, depressurisation is the most logical explanation for one of the mysteries.
Depressurization also circumstantially connects with the otherwise unexplained climb to 40,000 feet, and with the disconnection and reconnection of the electrical system.
I agree that it's a likely theory and fits much of what's known, but there can be other reasonable explanations for the things mentioned above. The aircraft was already assigned 35k feet, was a climb to 40k feet really necessary to ensure the passengers and crew would be incapacitated? Might he not have been trying to avoid traffic in established flight corridors, since the transponder was not operating and he wasn't talking to anyone? Anyway, to be clear I'm not challenging the overall conclusion. It's the best theory I personally have heard, but I am also not an expert on any of this. I just felt like the article didn't make it clear enough that the depressurization event was complete conjecture.
Shutting down most/all of the electrical systems on the plane suggests depressurization. Also it just makes sense to do so; a plane full of dead people can't engage in heroics to save the day. And he might have seen it as the humane thing to do, rather than leave people in fear for hours up to the actual crash.
But agreed that there's no hard evidence for this, or even for much of the entire story. Just a bunch of circumstantial evidence that suggests a lot.
I remember watching the American news media go crazy over this airplane for around 1 month every night.
The CNN anchor Don Lemon asked one of the 6 guests on his panel whether it was possible that the plane had been sucked into a black hole.
I always thought Don Lemon was an idiot. Thanks for giving me the final proof I needed.
FWIW, I'm neither American nor a Republican. I just really think the guy is an idiot.
I just really think the guy is an idiot.
I don't watch CNN and don't know Lemon. But here's a possible alternative explanation (hardly a defense):
Wikipedia says he graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism. He probably didn't pay much attention to science in high school, and almost certainly wasn't required to take any science classes in college.
So, he might not even understand science as simple as F=ma. In his defense I'd bet that if you surveyed the adult population, the majority couldn't tell you what F=ma means.
The above is a long way of saying that most journalists aren't literate in science. And, we know that black holes are "sexy". Many books have been written about them. Many movies made that feature them as key plot points.
So, why not ask about black holes as a possibility? It's as plausible an explanation as whatever it was that happened to that airplane in the Lost TV series of about 10 years ago.
Having said all that, yeah, the guy is probably an idiot. As are quite a few TV journalists.
I always assume reporters ask these kinds of 'dumb' questions because they know they're the questions the audience wants answered. They play the part of their audience, basically. (I have no idea whether or not Don Lemon is an idiot.)
These are news readers. Not journalists.
If they’re just media presenters then maybe they should let a “journalist” do the interviewing?
He also once blamed a rape victim:
https://time.com/3596105/don-lemon-bill-cosby-rape-myths/
Dear god, you were not joking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVd7k1Uw6A
If I were the guest I would have said yes and seen how long I could keep that interview going
A small black hole would destroy our entire universe apparently
Well, it depends if they are speaking colloquially or not. If our “universe” is our Sun’s solar system, then yes...
Can't help but wonder if he mixed up black holes with the colloquial "air pockets" or something.
Back when this happened, me and a friend spent some time coming up with the most ridiculous conspiracy theories about how the plane disappeared , just for fun. The best one that I could invent with was that MH370 flew right next to another plane in order to appear as a single, really big plane on the radar.
A few weeks later my stupid conspiracy theory was all over the media thanks to a blogger who proposed the same thing (but not as a joke, apparently) [1][2][3]
[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-03-19/reality-check-could-m...
[2] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/03/5-not-so-crazy-malays...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26609687
It was actually Oceanic Flight 815 come to life.
By the same author, one of the most terrifying story I've ever come across:
A Sea Story https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-s...
Langewiesche is an excellent writer and journalist. The Outlaw Sea is a brilliant compilation of these articles.
Thanks for that, now I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight.
Amazing prose here. The description of the death of the passengers, and the final moments of within the cockpit before the plane ran out of fuel, were chilling in their capacity to imply a peaceful bliss in the wake of hundreds of needless lost lives.
I had the same thought! Something about how the author describes the rush of air, the security and known 'homeliness' of the cockpit resonates with me.
Im sitting in airport lounge about to hop on a transatlantic. Dreaming of drifting to sleep up in the air and never waking up is a bit scary but also peaceful (I am not suicidal, thanks). travel is definitely an easy escape and repetitious in my life. I like routine and always book the same seat, same flight to get to Europe, etc. There's comfort there for me and I really identify the way the author describes the peacefulness of a nighttime long haul flight.
I was reading about ADS-B, FlightAware and Aireon [1] earlier.
Apparently they've completed a network of satellites in January 2019 and can now monitor (ADS-B equipped) aircraft anywhere over earth?
Does anyone know more about how this works, does that mean we will never have a MH370-like situation again because nowadays aircraft can be tracked much better?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aireon
Depends on how it's set up precisely, ADS-B will still require power from somewhere. At some point in MH370's flight all the power systems were turned off for a bit so unless it's connected to it's own battery and ADS-B would still be disconnected.
y, it should be required for all airliners to have a tracking system that can not be disabled from inside the plane, and has a backup power system. For situations like this, hijackings, etc.
Also seems like streaming black box data and even cock pit recordings would already be something that is standard. As a backup/additional data to the physical black boxes. That could be accessed right away or even in real time.
Maybe, but having an electronic system on an airliner that can't be disabled could potentially lead to a fire that can't be extinguished and that's why you can shut down every system as the pilot.
It seems reasonable to transmit as much info, including who initiated the shutdown, at that point so that you can at least attempt to attribute the reason the transponder went offline.
How do you do that when power is ultimately controlled by a bank of physical breakers?
Maybe power it the way the black box is powered, a stand alone system that transmits location and data that is typically also logged to the black boxes.
I'm sure satellite coverage is an issue with getting data in remote areas, maybe SpaceX's StarLink system could provide a way to stream data from airliners in more locations.
No I'm asking how do you put attribution to the physical flipping of a breaker especially against someone just cutting the whole electrical system out at the same time with a master breaker.
Satellite coverage isn't really an issue there's already stuff like Inmarsat's network that covers all but basically the poles. [0] Has SpaceX advertised or said anything about covering the poles? I doubt they will just because there are so few customers.
[0] https://www.inmarsat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Inmarsat...
The pilot can switch off the ADS-B transponder, so assuming that MH370 was intentional (which seems to be the best explanation), no, this could still happen.
Langewiesche's a great author but this article doesn't add much in the way of new information from all the writing of the past three years. One off the record source about the pilot's mental state, that's about it. I happen to agree with his speculative conclusion, deliberate action by the pilot, but there's not really anything significant and new here to support it.
I'm not sure that was the point? I imagine given that you know enough to be able to make that claim that you've followed coverage of this incident pretty closely. As someone who hasn't, and mostly came at it from an "oh yeah, that thing, whatever ended up happening there?" perspective, I found this article to be an engaging and informative summary of what has happened in the years since and what we now know.
Yeah, this was definitely the case for me. This article summarized all the things that I was wondering about over the years regarding this tragedy.
I also agree that the speculative conclusion reached at the end is the most likely scenario, e.g., pilot suicide with everyone on-board.
Not every article needs to add new information, some can provide value in summarizing the current information in a digestible way.
I thought it was valuable. I'd on-and-off casually followed news of the disappearance for months afterward, but I don't think I'd read anything before that ties everything known together. The writing was also excellent and gripping.
>>as soon as MH370 disappeared from secondary radar, it turned sharply to the southwest, flew back across the Malay Peninsula, and banked around the island of Penang. From there it flew northwest up the Strait of Malacca and out across the Andaman Sea, where it faded beyond radar range into obscurity. That part of the flight took more than an hour to accomplish and suggested that this was not a standard case of a hijacking.>>
What about this suggests that this was not a standard case of hijacking?
From the article:
> Was this a hijacking? A hijacking is the “third party” solution favored in the official report. It is the least painful explanation for anyone in authority that night. It has immense problems, however. The main one is that the cockpit door was fortified, electrically bolted, and surveilled by a video feed that the pilots could see. Also, less than two minutes passed between Zaharie’s casual “good night” to the Kuala Lumpur controller and the start of the diversion, with the attendant loss of the transponder signal. How would hijackers have known to make their move precisely during the handoff to Vietnamese air traffic control, and then gained access so quickly and smoothly that neither of the pilots had a chance to transmit a distress call? It is possible of course that the hijackers were known to the pilots—that they were invited into the cockpit—but even that does not explain the lack of a radio transmission, particularly during the hand-flown turn away from Beijing. Both of the control yokes had transmitter switches, within the merest finger reach, and some signal could have been sent in the moments before an attempted takeover. Furthermore, every one of the passengers and cabin-crew members has been investigated and cleared of suspicion by teams of Malaysian and Chinese investigators aided by the FBI. The quality of that police work is open to question, but it was thorough enough to have uncovered the identities of two Iranians who were traveling under false names with stolen passports—seeking, however, nothing more nefarious than political asylum in Germany. It is possible that stowaways—by definition unrecorded on the airplane’s manifest—had hidden in the equipment bay. If so, they would have had access to two circuit breakers that, if pulled, would have unbolted the cockpit door. But that scenario has problems, too. The bolts click loudly when they open—an unambiguous sound that would have been familiar to the pilots. The hijackers would then have had to open a galley-floor hatch from below, climb a short ladder, evade notice by the cabin crew, evade the surveillance video, and enter the cockpit before either of the pilots transmitted a distress call. It is unlikely that this could have happened, just as it is unlikely that a flight attendant held hostage could have used the door keypad to allow sudden entry without firing off a warning. Furthermore, what would the purpose be of a hijacking? Money? Politics? Publicity? An act of war? A terrorist attack? The intricate seven-hour profile of MH370’s deviation into oblivion fits none of these scenarios. And no one has claimed responsibility for the act. Anonymity is not consistent with any of these motives.
Yes, but none of that relates to the hour long series of turns that ended with the plane pointed towards the Indian Ocean. The quote I pasted referred to these events as not being indicative of a standard hijacking. Maybe it was just a poorly worded conclusion. There are definitely other reasons - primarily the anonymity and lack of any money changing hands.
The "hour-long series of turns" themselves suggest that it was not a hijacking - one would expect a hijacked airplane to head towards its intended destination, regardless of the motive for the hijacking.
It does not seem likely that the path was intended to avoid detection, as it crosses Malaysia and was within range of Indonesian radar throughout that period, and it is rather implausible to suggest that these posited hijackers both wanted to be stealthy, yet chose a route that had no chance of achieving it. If these posited hijackers wanted their arrival at their intended destination to be a surprise, their best hope of achieving it would be to stage a hijacking on a flight close to that destination.
I guess one could suppose that this is the only flight the posited hijackers could hijack (suggesting help from insiders at the airline), and that the flight was intended to stay away from land as far as possible, but where, especially with that final turn, were they going? If their destination was, as has been suggested, Kazakhstan, they could hardly hope to avoid detection later in the flight. Nor would they be likely to suspect that the reporting of the disappearance of the flight would be delayed by hours.
The author did not say that this track proves it was not a hijacking, he wrote that it already "suggested that this was not a standard case of a hijacking."
Good point. Maybe he's just referring to the fact that the diversion was timed to coincide with the handoff, and not the entire series of maneuvers.
Can someone post a TL;DR? Can't be assed to read this long form article.
Plane crashed, most likely by the hands of the pilot.
I don't think it's in the atlantic.
Diego Garcia, Rothschilds, ARM patents. Just for the record as I know no-one will believe me.
You've been breaking the guidelines quite a bit. Could you please review them and start posting more substantively?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sure. In the meantime, I believe the relevant xkcd - because there's always a relevant xckd - is 137.