Australia Confirms Zaharie Flight-Sim Route to Southern Ocean

In a posting to a section of its website called “Correcting the record,” the Australian Transport Safety Board today confirmed that the FBI found data on MH370 captain Zaharie Shah’s flight simulator hard drives indicating that Zaharie had practiced a one-way flight into the southern Indian Ocean, as I wrote in a story for New York magazine on Friday. Entitled “False and inaccurate media report on the search for MH370,” the post concerns several claims by Australian pilot Byron Bailey in The Australian, including Bailey’s interpretation of the flight-sim data:

Mr Bailey also claims that FBI data from MH370 captain’s home simulator shows that the captain plotted a course to the southern Indian Ocean and that it was a deliberate planned murder/suicide. There is no evidence to support this claim. As Infrastructure and Transport Minister Darren Chester said in a statement, the simulator information shows only the possibility of planning. It does not reveal what happened on the night of its disappearance nor where the aircraft is located. While the FBI data provides a piece of information, the best available evidence of the aircraft’s location is based on what we know from the last satellite communications with the aircraft. This is indeed the consensus of international satellite and aircraft specialists.

While ostensibly rebutting Bailey’s claims, the ATSB tacitly acknowledges the fact that the flight-sim data was in fact found by the FBI.

524 thoughts on “Australia Confirms Zaharie Flight-Sim Route to Southern Ocean”

  1. @DennisW: “I don’t understand why the IG is not embracing the sim data with enthusiasm.”

    The IG probably knows a lot more than Jeff has made public.

  2. @Klaus
    RetiredF4 dismissed altitude as significant.
    No further consideration of altitude required.

  3. For the data points to be useful as “Restore” points, they must contain quite a lot of status data, for example:

    – Zero fuel weight and center of gravity,
    – Fuel quantity in Left and Right main tanks,
    – Configuration and trim settings,
    – Airspeed and vertical speed,
    – heading, pitch and roll attitudes,
    – Autopilot and Autothrust modes, selections and status (FMA),
    – If autoflight modes were LNAV/VNAV, relevant information entered into the FMC,
    – Engines and APU operating or shut down
    – etc.

    All that has been withheld. I suspect Jeff and Victor are now wrestling with those data to make them fit the story.

  4. @Gysbreght
    Re ““the “missing” datapoint is on a straight line between the first 3
    datapoints before the turn to south.” ”
    I view this as merely that they recovered six datapoints, and decided
    that one of them could be omitted from the released list (for brevity)
    as the omitted point was not particularly relevant. For instance, in
    the case where the operator of the flight sim , whilst intending to
    ‘save’ a datapoint, accidently tapped twice rather than once, then a
    datapoint extremely close to one of the other datapoints (vis height,
    altitude and heading) would be saved.
    (Note, I do not have FSX flight Sim, so my above is purely theorizing.)
    I would add the comment that the FBI, or perhaps our host, has expressed this poorly – it would have been better to state it thusly;
    “the “missing” datapoint is on a straight line between 2 of the first
    3 datapoints before the turn to south.”

  5. @Richard Cole:

    “Signal data is authentic and accurate” (1)
    + “7th Arc indicated fuel exhaustion minutes earlier” (2)
    + “If the plane is down there, we’ll find it” (3)
    + “Cost is not a factor” (4)
    = We’ll find it

    …regardless of whether anyone was at the controls at 00:19 UTC.

    Do you dispute my math?

    If not: which of (1)-through-(4) are we being lied to about?

    For context on (4) ($USD):

    World GDP, 2014-2020 (proj): 562 trillion

    Cost of quintupling area scanned: 720 million (latest projected scan cost X 4)

    Percent of GDP required to fund search: 0.00013%

    Amount required to fund search, per $35k of everyone’s annual income: 4 cents

    (For clarity: I do recommend suspending search operations, but only until such time as a rigorous public enquiry holds search leadership (including Inmarsat) to full account. If exonerated – as I hope they are – I would highly recommend we invest a couple of pennies per person per year into the pursuit of solving this mystery.)

  6. Ok @jeff , you are the sheriff in these parts so point well taken and thanks for the clear ruling. Also agree to disagree regarding the theory’s validity. . But it will remain on my list nonetheless until conclusively debunked that is.

    Moving away from all that, it would be interesting to see how the pilot’ s NOK will react if it is officially affirmed that he is the purported culprit. One senses a long legal tussle ahead to clear his name. An approximate case would be SILKAIR 185 but in this case it was passengers’ NOK seeking restitution that indirectly cleared the pilot of alleged suicide-murder. Interestingly too, the judge barred the defense from appending the NTSB findings of suicide- murder as part of their brief.

    http://www.kreindler.com/Publications/ATLA-DeathOnHighSeas-Winter05-PaulEdelman.pdf

    Interesting too that the FBI revelation is almost similar to the Washington Post story I linked earlier. Sans the coordinates and map the WP story gets other facts such as the date spot on which raises the Q whether the WP had scooped the story back in 2014 but refrained from publishing it in its entirety for whatever reason. Probably they were told by the FBI to cold storage it until the FBI could build a solid case based on both direct and circumstantial evidence like online musings of jet fuel dumping by the individual in question

    Finally what if the country in charge of the investigation baulk at indicting the pilot or anyone else for that matter would that allow countries like the US to intervene by dint of their citizens being onboard the craft.? Do ICAO protocols permit such intervention?

    Interesting questions awaiting interesting answers indeed.

  7. @Ge Rijn

    Re the Pemba Island Flap: yes It’s good the ATSB have announced they are examining it to see if they can tell if the flap was retracted or extended. They would liked to have done the same with the flaperon, but were impeded by the French

  8. Question is what is meant by this straight line is it a continuing straight line SW from IGARI to just south of Penang and continuing SW and Crosses over between point 1 and 2. And point 6 is perhaps along that line SW towards to Mauritious. To even mention a line between these 3 points must mean something significant at either end of line.

  9. Note, in my above post I meant to say “that they recovered six
    datapoints of that particular virtual flight”.
    We know that the word ‘numerous’ was used in regard to how many
    datapoints, of however many virtual flights, were recovered.
    Therefore (from the 5 HDD’s) you can bet there were probably
    hundreds or thousands of datapoints recovered, from very many
    virtual flights. I don’t regard these datapoints as any particular
    indicator of malign intent – indeed, if there are ‘numerous’ other
    recovered datapoints, purely numerical probability would instead
    suggest there is no malign intent in their generation, or there
    would be a proportionately greater number of similar ‘test/practice’
    flights into the SIO, thereby generating more opportunaties for
    datapoints of similar practice flights to have been recovered – but
    instead we have only these singular datapoints, indicative of only
    ONE ‘test/practice’ flight. (I acknowledge, however, that absence
    of other datapoints indicating ‘malign intent’ does not necessarily
    mean that there were no other such datapoints – because what is
    known is only what was ‘recovered’ and there may have been many
    more datapoints that were simply not able to be recovered.)
    _
    Those knowledgeable in computers could make a further arguement;
    that ‘IF’ these released datapoints ‘WERE’ generated with malign
    intent, then these released datapoints ‘SHOULD’ be amongst the
    most (or more) recent of ALL the recovered datapoints, as if a
    person used the FSX flight sim to plan a terroist act, that person
    is unlikely to thereafter play many more ‘innocent’ flights
    unrelated to the presumed ‘SIO practice terroist flight’.
    Therefore, it would be very relevant to know if that flight sim
    records a TIMESTAMP as one of the pieces of status data in a saved
    data point, and if the flight sim does not record that information,
    then what date/time did the computer operating system record for the
    particular computer FILE into which these released ‘saved datapoints’
    were stored.

  10. Wazir Roslan Posted July 29, 2016 at 11:49 AM: “Finally what if the country in charge of the investigation baulk at indicting the pilot or anyone else for that matter would that allow countries like the US to intervene by dint of their citizens being onboard the craft.? Do ICAO protocols permit such intervention? ”

    Although these questions have been discussed in extenso, it is perhaps useful to recall the essentials.

    The objective of the safety investigation of an aviation accident conducted under ICAO Annex 13 is to further aviation safety, by drawing lessons from an accident that can help to prevent other accidents. The investigation is to stay away expressly from questions of guilt or liability.

    The U.S. has an ‘Accredited Representative’ assigned to the safety investigation conducted by Malaysia who has access to all information available to the investigators. If the U.S. disagrees with the findings and probable cause(s) in the Final Report, is has the right to make its position known and to have that position attached to the final report.

  11. @Brock

    Sorry, I don’t understand your post to me. Which maths of yours am I supposed to be disputing?

  12. We need all the 24 files (4 files per datapoint) which contains all informations to analyze the virtual SIO-Route.

    The FBI owns this material. Jeff has only received a report from the malaysian police but surely not a single *.FLT, *.SVE, *.SSAVE and *.WX file from the restored FSX-User-Folder.

    Under this circumstances it´s completely impossible to come to any conclusions how to evaluate this datapoints.

    From my point of view, only one thing is sure :

    The 5th and 6th datapoint over the SIO (or currently the 4th and 5th datapoint) were not flown in real-/ or compressed time. The 6th datapoint was “cheated”. This is a very easy procedure in FSX to skip maneuvers you don´t like to fly.

    Simply go to the Menu und select “Map” and you are able to insert a new altitude to your liking and fly ahead from there. It´s even possible to “warp” your aircraft to any location on earth with just insert new coordinates any time.

  13. EAN HIGGINS
    The Australian12:00AM July 30, 2016
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    For the past two years, Paul Kennedy has led the most expensive, logistically difficult and publicly scrutinised underwater search to solve the holy grail of aviation mysteries, the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

    As the Perth-based project director of the Dutch Fugro survey group team whose vessels are still scouring the southern Indian Ocean for the Boeing 777, Kennedy is the man from the point of view of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is orchestrating the search and employing Fugro.

    In March last year, the ATSB media unit promoted a propaganda video, now on YouTube, featuring Kennedy, who answered some soft questions from an interviewer. The remoteness of the search zone and the wild seas meant the challenge was tough, Kennedy said in the video.

    “We’re more than seven days’ sail from the nearest civilisation, which is Western Australia, so that’s an awful long way if things go wrong,” he added. “It’s rough where we are, it’s terribly rough, so you don’t sleep particularly well, so fatigue is one of our biggest issues offshore.” But Kennedy also stressed the sophistication of the search effort.

    “The deep tow on board the vessel is called ‘Dragon’. It’s got three forms of sensors on board. The way I like to make an analogy, it’s got ears, it can listen, that’s the acoustic sensors on board; it’s got eyes, that’s the cameras; and it’s got a nose, it’s got a sniffer, it can sniff jet fuel. The acid test: people say, will you find it? The answer is: if it’s in the area we’re searching, we will find it.”

    GRAPHIC: MH370 timeline

    It was derring-do, Boy’s Own stuff, just the message the ATSB spin doctors wanted to get out there to suggest Australian taxpayers’ money was in the best hands for the search for the aircraft wreckage and its precious black box flight data and cockpit voice recorders.

    That’s why when Reuters last week reported that the ATSB’s pin-up boy Kennedy had told the newsagency he now thought the whole premise of the $180 million search had been wrong from the start, the story went around the world, and all hell broke loose. The way Reuters reported it, Kennedy had decided that the ATSB had erred in determining the search area based on its “ghost plane” type scenario in which the aircraft spirals down fairly quickly after running out of fuel, with unconscious or dead pilots disabled by oxygen deprivation.

    Rather, Kennedy said he now believed the “rogue pilot” theory, in which a fully conscious pilot glided the aircraft down to the sea, was probably right after all.

    “If it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else,” Kennedy told Reuters. “If it was manned it could glide for a long way. You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be, well, maybe that is the other scenario.”

    Reuters wrote this meant Kennedy thought his searchers “have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years”.

    As a case of biting the hand that feeds, it doesn’t get better than this.

    For about 18 months the ATSB has fought a running battle against Australian airline pilot Byron Bailey and other pilots and aviation experts who have promoted the theory that MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his own aircraft and flew it right to the end in a deliberate effort to disappear the plane.

    The ATSB has consistently described the controlled glide scenario as “very unlikely” and stuck to its preferred “unresponsive crew/hypoxia” type of end-of-flight model, in which some unforeseen event such as loss of oxygen through decompression leaves the pilots dead at the controls and the aircraft running on autopilot until fuel exhaustion.

    The ATSB and former transport minister Warren Truss repeatedly rubbished Bailey, who wrote about MH370 first in The Daily Telegraph and then The Australian. So now the ATSB’s $180m action man, Kennedy, seemed to be siding with its arch-enemy, Bailey, in supporting the rogue pilot end of flight theory.

    Fugro went into full PR damage control mode to try to mitigate the distinct impression that Kennedy had implied that the people running the ATSB — Fugro’s lucrative client — were idiots.

    “Fugro wishes to make it very clear that we believe the search area to have been well defined based on all of the available scientific data. In short, we have been thoroughly looking in the most probable place — and that is the right place to search,” Fugro said in a statement. The statement did not, however, claim Reuters actually misquoted Kennedy.

    But that was to be only the start of the ATSB’s credibility problems, and Bailey’s triumph, in recent days. Bailey, who consistently describes himself not as a journalist but a humble fly boy, flies corporate jets and before that made his living captaining aircraft such as the 777. He therefore knows a bit about practical aviation and broke one of the biggest scoops in the MH370 saga.

    Writing in The Weekend Australian in January, Bailey said he had been told relatively early on by an Australian government source that “the FBI had recovered from Zaharie’s home computer deleted information showing flight plan waypoints”.

    “Here, I assumed, was the smoking gun. To fly to the southern Indian Ocean, which has no airway leading from north of Sumatra to the south, the pilot would need to define flight plan waypoints via latitude and longitude for insertion in the flight management computer.

    “When nothing about this emerged from ATSB I rang my source. He confirmed what he had told me and left me with the impression that the FBI were of the opinion that Zaharie was responsible for the crash.”

    The significance of Bailey’s claim was huge. It suggested the FBI had secretly found Zaharie planned, then rehearsed on his home computer flight simulator, a specific and complex flight to what is absolutely the middle of nowhere in the southern Indian Ocean. When The Weekend Australian asked the ATSB at that time in January if this sensational and crucial claim was correct, ATSB spokesman Daniel O’Malley dodged the question.

    “The ATSB cannot comment on the accuracy of an alleged conversation … the ATSB is not responsible for the investigation of the accident; that … belongs to the Malaysian government,” O’Malley said in an email dated January 8.

    Last week the ATSB’s efforts to marginalise Bailey, and steer around his claim that the FBI had found the critical flight simulator data and Australian investigators knew about it, were blown out of the water.

    New York magazine revealed it had obtained a secret Malaysian police report on the findings of the FBI analysis of the hard disk drives on Zaharie’s flight simulation computer, which showed waypoints for a simulated flight that was eerily similar to the zigzag route MH370 actually took on March 8, 2014, when it reversed course on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

    The simulated flight, conducted only a month before MH370’s disappearance, like the actual flight deviated west back over Malaysia, over the Andaman Sea, then took a sharp turn south before ending in the southern Indian Ocean.

    New York quoted one excerpt from the report that showed investigators regarded the find as significant: “Based on the Forensics Analysis conducted on the 5 HDDs obtained from the Flight Simulator from MH370 Pilot’s house, we found a flight path, that lead (sic) to the Southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the Flight Simulator.”

    Between Kennedy’s suggestion that the pilot hijack theory was right, and the confirmation of the FBI discovery of the simulated flight, Bailey claimed he had been vindicated and that the ATSB and Truss had been hiding the truth for two years while sledging him.

    “How is it that a taxpayer-funded government department can be so devious?” Bailey asked in The Australian this week. During the past week Bailey has been one of the most sought-after talents on television and radio.

    Stung by all this, the ATSB renewed its fierce personal attack on Bailey in a statement on its website this week, saying it was concerned about “the intense personal impact that claims such as Mr Bailey’s has on those who are suf­fering as a result of this tragedy”.

    But, interestingly, the ATSB for the first time tacitly admitted the story about the FBI findings was true, though it downplayed its significance, saying: “The simulator information shows only the possibility of planning. It does not reveal what happened on the night of its disappearance nor where the aircraft is located.”

    While the ATSB media unit was keen to disseminate this “correcting the record” bulletin, its spokesman Tim Dawson failed to answer questions from Inquirer put to the organisation this week.

    The man who replaced Truss as transport minister, Darren Chester, this week refused a call from Labor’s transport spokesman Anthony Albanese to come clean on what the Australian government really knew about the evidence indicating that Zaharie hijacked his own aircraft, as did Malcolm Turnbull, with both men saying this was up to Malaysia. The 777 was Malaysian-registered, which under international law makes Malaysia the lead investigator.

    A Malaysian government agency has produced reams of interim technical reports, but none that makes any definitive statement of what happened or, revealingly, any mention of the FBI report.

    The question that just about everyone — from aviation experts and the families of the victims to millions of interested bystanders around the world gripped by the addictive mystery — wants the answer to is this: why have Australia and Malaysia tried to suppress this evidence all along?

    Why do the two governments seem to have done their best to avoid providing credence to the scenario that increasingly is viewed by the majority of informed opinion as being by far the likeliest: that, for whatever reason, Zaharie planned and executed a mass murder-suicide?

    Aviation experts such as John Cox, an American airline pilot turned air safety consultant who has worked on many major air crash investigations, says all the evidence has always pointed towards a deliberate act by the pilot. He says the FBI find on the flight simulation, while not conclusive, adds to that conclusion.

    Radar contact was broken 39 minutes into the flight and the plane’s radar transponder turned off, the route appeared to be deliberately flown to try to confuse or evade Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian radar, and there is no evidence of mechanical failure or a fire since no distress called was received and the aircraft flew on apparently smoothly for many hours after the final turn. Hijack by a passenger does not work well as a scenario because there was no claim of responsibility.

    Cox believes it is imperative the FBI report and any other related material be publicly released.

    “I believe in transparency in investigations,” Cox tells Inquirer. “If there is evidence, then it should be shared when it is proven and verified.”

    There are several reasons Malaysia would not want a conclusion that one of its nationals committed such a heinous crime. One is obvious: it’s not a good look good for the Malaysian government or its majority state-owned flag carrier.

    There are precedents for governments to try to resist such findings. In 1999 EgyptAir Flight 990 went down over the Atlantic en route from the US to Cairo, killing 217 people. The US National Transportation Safety Board concluded that, after the captain left the cockpit, first officer Gameel al-Batouti pushed the stick all the way forward to nosedive the aircraft into the ocean, with the repeated incantation, “I rely on God” in Arabic.

    The Egyptian Air Agency put the crash down to mechanical failure of the elevator control system, but the NTSB said that could not explain the crash.

    It would be particularly embarrassing to the Malaysian government if Zaharie brought down MH370 as a political statement. Zaharie was a supporter and, it is thought, distant relative of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

    According to some reports, he attended a court hearing the day before the flight when Anwar’s acquittal on sodomy charges was overturned in what is widely seen as a politically inspired trial.

    A second reason relates to compensation claims from the families of those who died — excluding Zaharie, 238 murder victims in such a scenario. While the position is not crystal clear, some informed observers say that if Zaharie were proved to have deliberately taken down MH370, it would nullify Malaysia Airlines’ insurance, and also expose the airline to a whole new and higher level of potential lawsuits based on criminal liability.

    A spokeswoman for Malaysian Airlines says: “MAS has adequate insurance coverage in place to meet any legal liability that we may have in respect of those claiming as a consequence of the incident.” The spokeswoman describes allegations of pilot suicide as “unfounded and speculative”.

    Australia is, at Malaysia’s request, leading the underwater search and is putting up $60m towards it, when only a handful of victims were Australian citizens.

    As Frankfurt-based British aerospace engineer Richard Godfrey puts it to Inquirer, one would have thought the Australian government would feel obliged to reveal what inside knowledge it had about what happened to MH370, since that impinged on where to search.

    “In the light of the fact that the Australian people and the taxpayer have spent so much on the search, I think they should get some value for their Australian dollars,” says Godfrey.

    Godfrey is a member of an international association of scientists, aviation experts and engineers known as the Independent Group, which continues to review the scientific evidence surrounding MH370.

    The fact the ATSB, Chester and Turnbull won’t say what they know, Godfrey suggests, “points to the Australian government not wanting to upset the Malaysian government”.

    The timing of Kennedy’s comments and the FBI revelations comes at a crossroads in the MH370 saga. Late last week, Chester and his Malaysian and Chinese counterparts met for an MH370 summit in Malaysia, and confirmed the stance that the three governments have maintained for months: once the sweep of the current 120,000sq km search area is complete in coming months — and less than 10,000sq km remain now — the two Fugro ships and a Chinese vessel will pack up and head for home.

    In his statement on the decision, Chester says: “In the absence of credible new evidence to assist in identifying the specific location of the aircraft, a further search is not currently viable.”

    Critics including Bailey and Godfrey say there is plenty of credible evidence already in the ATSB’s hands to indicate alternative locations of where to search — not new, but suppressed or inconvenient.

    The final route MH370 took on its long leg south is, experts including Godfrey who has worked on satellite tracking technology agree, quite well established along what is known as the “seventh arc” of automatic electronic “handshakes” or “pings” exchanged between transmitters in the aircraft’s engines and a satellite.

    The issues are just where the aircraft ran out of fuel along that route, and whether it then went down in an uncontrolled fashion, or was glided much farther by Zaharie.

    Even if the controlled glide scenario were adopted, the current search area would, in fact, be an early part of where to look, as Fugro eagerly but correctly pointed out in its statement following Kennedy’s bombshell remarks.

    But it would dictate a search band that was three times wider and longer because Zaharie could have glided the aircraft up to 100 nautical miles off, or farther along, the seventh arc.

    The ATSB and Godfrey say a glide is not indicated by the satellite data, which can track flight path and vertical movement. In this case, they say, they show a very sharp end descent — an uncontrolled crash.

    “The satellite data shows a dive in excess of 15,000 feet per minute, but accelerating,” says Godfrey, who independently has reviewed the satellite tracking material.

    However, Godfrey and his Independent Group colleagues believe it would be productive, once the search of the current target zone is complete, to start a new search farther north along the seventh arc.

    That suggestion is based, Godfrey says, on the fact while the hourly satellite handshakes show a consistent final leg south, the gaps between the earlier pings mean investigators cannot tell when the pilot began that final leg.

    The turn might have been later and farther northwest than assumed by the ATSB, meaning MH370 would have run out of fuel earlier and farther north along the seventh arc.

    Coincidentally, this week a team of researchers in Italy published a paper in the journal of the European Geosciences Union using the location of confirmed debris from MH370 to determine where the airliner might have crashed.

    It also suggests that could be farther north.

    Combing the difficult and deep waters of the southern Indian Ocean is an expensive exercise. The mathematics are pretty straightforward: trebling the search area, for example, would treble the cost.

    But as Cox and Godfrey point out, collectively the government agencies of the world have never given up on trying to find lost airliners, whatever the cost.

    The broader negative implications for aviation, they say, are just too great if the reason an aircraft goes down is not finally determined.

    “The public will no longer enjoy flying, and the aviation industry will dive,” Godfrey warns.

    “It’s important to find out: is Boeing at fault? It’s important to find out if this was a suicide pilot again”

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/what-lies-beneath-malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-search-a-sham/news-story/9dbf4f810694c7991ecff1837379db0e

    Copyright The Australian. All times AEST (GMT +10:00)

  14. @ROB

    Yes, now the ATSB have a similar piece as the flaperon. Maybe even a better one for the investigation.
    It seems to me they still haven’t got information on the flaperon from the French.
    Otherwise they allready would know how the flaperon seperated and in what attitude and which ~impact speed.

    I’m quite sure the French allready know and I suspect they allready figured out the plane ditched with flaps deployed thus actively piloted.
    That’s why they still treat it as a criminal/terrorist case and keep their mouths shut close. They just wait for the investigation results still to come and the final report IMO.

    This piece is going to be key IMO.
    And if confirmed that it was extended (thus actively piloted)it will maybe also give more weight and significance to this simulator data which are now not more than an anyones guess ridle to me.

  15. Maybe premature but the article above implies that closure is at hand whichever the tea leaves fall : glide-ditch vs high impact.

  16. @Wazir, Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    This piece, apart from cutting through the fog of bad reporting in internet insanity that has shrouded this case from the beginning, suggests that it is now a respectable mainstream position to question the assumption that the ATSB had everything well in hand.

    In particular, the writer very clearly explains something that was pointed out in this space a year or more ago: that if the plane was not found close enough to the 7th arc that an unpiloted plane could have flown there by itself, then it must not have been unpiloted.

    It’s extremely gratifying that the wider world is gettign on board.

  17. If it was a ditch why not a scenario where one of the pilots wakes up from whatever reason and tries to save everyone?

  18. Yes @jeff it does feel good that the wider world is coming aboard and hopefully get the NOK the closure they yearn.

    It also does show you were right along in August 2015 when the intensive search commenced. Just wondering if as suggested, the turn happened further North would that plausibly bring back into the equation the mysterious pings detected further north during the early days of the preliminary search.

    @ DennisW did mention IG is not enthusiastically embracing this revelation. Is it because they are exclusively privy to other info in cahoots with ATSB that burnishes their pilotless high impact theory. A dollar for your thoughts on that.

    @Gysbreght
    Thanks. Appreciate that info

  19. @Dennis
    1> suicide and mass murder

    2> safely landing somewhere

    Um, the 6 simulated data points would also seem to rule out the goal of safely landing somewhere…

  20. This is empire strikes back version :

    MH370 Pilot’s Flight to Nowhere Proves Nothing
    CLIVE IRVING07.30.162:04 AM ET

    The vilification of Zaharie Ahmad Shah began early. Within a week of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014, it was Shah, the captain flying the Boeing 777, who was being portrayed as the prime suspect.

    Malaysian authorities staged a very public raid on captain Shah’s home. Police were filmed carrying away his personal computer. Shortly thereafter they said he had a flight simulator program in his computer. (Many professional pilots use simulators to keep themselves sharp in an age when most of a flight is on autopilot.) They suggested that he had used the simulator to rehearse his plan to, in effect, hijack his own airplane.

    This scenario has been resurrected in the past week, beginning with two reports, one published in the U.S. and one in Australia, and since then has wide coverage around the world. Responses from authorities in Malaysia have been confusing and in some cases contradictory. In order to judge how seriously to take the charge that this was a deliberate case of murder-suicide in the air it’s necessary to go back to the night of March 8, 2014.

    Flight 370 had inexplicably broken away from its flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and, after a series of erratic course changes, headed off into the void of the southern Indian Ocean. Malaysian officials inferred that Shah had rehearsed this exact course on his simulator.
    Once it became part of the news cycle this explanation was difficult to discredit or dislodge. It was the simplest theory to accept. It didn’t involve pursuing complex technical issues about whether some sudden and serious technical failure had overtaken the airplane, its crew and passengers. The pilots (the copilot was a young man named Fariq Abdul Hamid) were missing, presumed dead, and could not respond to the accusations and the airplane itself had left behind few clues to its behaviour

    The only problem with this scenario was why? Why would a pilot with an impeccable record who, at the age of 53, had flown more than 18,000 hours on commercial jets, 8,659 of those hours on the Boeing 777, go rogue and destroy himself and 238 other mortals?

    Or, if the crew were innocent but had been overpowered and the airplane taken over by hijackers or terrorists why was there no ransom request or claim by a terrorist group?

    After a while the trashing of the pilots lost traction. Malaysian officials had proved themselves to be serial bunglers when handling news conferences. Other, more bizarre theories were floated, including by Mahathir Mohammed, a former Malaysian prime minister who still retained enormous political influence, who said that he believed the airplane’s navigation system had been hacked by the Central Intelligence Agency and the 777 spirited away to a secret location.

    Later, according to various reports published at the time, the role of Captain Shah’s personal flight simulator was the subject of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in their labs in Washington, D.C. – the Malaysians said they had turned over the hard drives on his home computer and, after a few months, they confirmed that the FBI had found nothing incriminating.

    On the first anniversary of the catastrophe, the international team conducting the investigation issued a report, nearly 200 pages long, called “Factual Information.” In the absence of any physical evidence to examine according to the normal protocols of a crash investigation this was a gathering of all the technical records and history related to the airplane and the flight, its crew, and the (disastrously muddled) efforts to track its course when it vanished.

    The report included what amounted to a thorough background check on Captain Shah. It covered his financial affairs (there was no record of him taking out a life insurance policy) and his medical records (he passed all his regular six-monthly examinations).
    Investigators looked at surveillance video of the Captain’s behavior at Kuala Lumpur Airport while preparing for four flights, including the final one.

    “There were no behavioural signs of social isolation, change in habits or interest, self-neglect drug or alcohol abuse” the report said.
    And, under the heading of “Psychological and Social Events” the report concluded: “The Captain’s ability to handle stress at work and at home was good. There was no known history of apathy, anxiety or irritability. There were no significant changes in his life style, interpersonal conflict or family stresses.”

    With that, for most observers any lingering suspicions directed at the pilots seemed to have been laid to rest. Significantly, the Malaysian officials who had once been so ready to malign the crew (in a country where political character assassination was a favored instrument) allowed this seemingly impartial verdict to stand without challenging it. From this it was fair to assume that their conspiracy theory had come up empty.

    To be sure, some aviation experts and some factions in the aviation industry persisted in believing that – of all the credible scenarios that could explain how the airplane had continued to fly for more than six hours without anyone on board being heard from – the likeliest explanation was an action by the pilots. For example, David Learmount, the consulting editor for Flight Global and a very respected veteran analyst, admits to no alternative, and a number of airline chiefs feel the same way.

    However, the belief that Captain Shah carried out a premeditated murder-suicide flight suddenly gained renewed attention a week ago from two sources. Jeff Wise reported in New York magazine that a confidential Malaysian police memo confirmed that Shah had used his simulator to practice a route deep into the southern Indian Ocean. And a similar story by Byron Bailey in The Australian newspaper also added that the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, ATSB, leading the undersea search for the airplane, were in denial because they rejected any suggestion of the crew’s involvement.
    Since then Captain Shah’s reputation has, once more, been traduced with reckless enthusiasm.
    One reason is that the ATSB has made confusing responses to the new allegations. Initially they said of Bailey’s assertion that the flight was a planned murder-suicide: “There is no evidence to support this claim.”
    Two days later the ATSB appeared to walk back on this rebuttal by fudging.

    In a new statement they said, “This type of scenario is not new and has been reported in the media previously. The [investigating team] has considered the information and it will be dealt with in its final report.” And later they said, “The simulator information shows only the possibility of planning.”

    Were they confirming the use of the simulator or confirming the media reports of the simulations? The Daily Beast asked the ATSB for clarification, and a spokesman, Tim Dawson, responded (the emphasis below was bold in his statement):

    “1. It was evident from data recovered from the flight simulator that a course had been flown in the simulator that tracked well south in the Indian Ocean.

    2. The simulation may show the possibility of planning, but the simulated flight in itself is not evidence of murder-suicide (ie there is no evidence to support the claim that it was murder-suicide).

    3. We have known about the FBI report for two years and it was widely reported. This is not new.”

    In fact, the first reports of Shah using the simulator came after the police raid on his home, as I record above. Reports that the hard drives had been examined by the FBI and that nothing incriminating had been found on them came months later.

    However, the role of the FBI has now come into question
    Malaysia’s national police chief, Khalid Abu Bakar, said this week – astonishingly – that his police force had never handed any documents or information to any authority abroad, including the FBI.

    And Liow Tiong Lai, the Malaysian transport minister, said there was no evidence to prove that Captain Shah had used the simulator to plot the course eventually taken by the 777.

    “We are not aware of that and there is no evidence that he was flying on that route. As of today, the criminal investigation is still ongoing.”

    This confusion should act as a timely reminder to regard any utterance from Malaysian sources with more than usual skepticism. There are many factions within the Malaysian political regime and the police, and as many motives for what they say.

    In his New York story, based on the Malaysian police document, Wise does prudently include a caveat.
    “However, it’s not entirely clear that the recorded flight simulator data is conclusive. The difference between the simulated and actual flights are significant, most notably in the final direction in which they were heading. It’s possible that their overall similarities are coincidental – that Zaharie didn’t intend his simulator flight as a practice run but had merely decided to fly someplace unusual.”

    Indeed, in a later posting, Wise gives some of the navigation way points that he says were recovered from the simulator and one of them includes the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that are on a main air lane west from Malaysia to India, and the altitude shown is 40,000 feet, which would be the normal cruise height for the last leg of a flight.

    It seems highly possible that the southern Indian ocean route in the simulator was only one of what could have been others that were, in fact, exercises in virtual globe-trotting beyond Shah’s normal routine.
    It’s important to recognize that in the beginning, more than two years ago, the case against Shah was reinforced by details that did, superficially, seem sinister.
    One was that the two key ways the airplane had to keep contact with the ground ceased to function after the pilots drastically altered course: the transponder that sent signals enabling the flight to be tracked by radar, and a system automatically transmitting the technical health of the airplane every 30-minutes.

    Most of the reporting said these systems had been “turned off” … presumably as the first malicious step by the crew to make the airplane vanish. In fact, the reasoned response would have been to say that the systems had failed, that they had stopped working, as the result of a technical emergency.

    Also cast as equally sinister was the sudden change of direction of the airplane toward the Strait of Malacca. In fact, this turn to the southwest was consistent with the pilots desperately needing to find the closest airport in an emergency. There was such an airport on nearby Langkawi Island with a 12,500-foot runway, ideal in such an emergency.

    Experienced 777 pilots believe that the changes of course suggest that the pilots were dealing with cascading technical challenges, not deliberately evading radar and heading off on a prolonged murder-suicide mission.

    As it turned out, the flight never descended from its cruise height. As it flew northwest over the Strait of Malacca it was tracked by radar until it reached a point midway between Indonesia and Thailand. Langkawi Island was at the southern tip of Thailand, immediately on the right.

    A few minutes after that last radar contact, the 777 made its final turn toward the southern Indian Ocean. According to calculations made by the ATSB it remained at its cruise height of 35,000 feet and there is no way of knowing whether the autopilot had been programmed to make that turn. The ATSB has, however, been firm in saying that by the end of the 5.8 hours the jet had left to fly before it ran out of gas and crashed into the ocean it was not under the control of pilots.

    The problem here, once more, is that everybody in this cauldron of speculation, including me, is lacking one thing: incontrovertible evidence. With very little verifiable information to go on there is no real level of confidence that any scenario seeking to explain what overtook Flight 370 will ever be complete enough to solve the mystery—that would need to be informed by the discovery of the remains of the airplane at the bottom of the ocean.

    The ATSB’s position in the controversy is difficult. They are caught between a rock and a wet place, between the Malaysian leadership of the investigation, with all the political pressures that that involves, and their own role in professionally designing and executing the deepwater search. Their most ardent defense is devoted to assuring the world that they have been searching in the right place.

    The search, delayed by bad weather, is due to end in the next month or so. The governments of China, Malaysia and Australia have said that when it does, it will be “suspended” rather than terminated, to be resumed only if credible new evidence appears causing the search to be resumed at a different location.
    And now that issue has become more acute because of what amounts to conflicting approaches by two teams of oceanographers.

    Since last summer several significant pieces of wreckage from the Malaysian 777 have turned up on beaches in the western Indian Ocean.
    An Australian team of oceanographers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, CSIRO, have taken the locations where debris has been found and reverse-engineered its course using computer programming called drift modeling. If these tracks converge at a point in the eastern Indian Ocean that falls within the area being searched it would increase the ATSB’s confidence that they have been searching, all along, in the right place.

    The Australian oceanographers have not yet published their findings, but another team of oceanographers, based in Italy, has. And they have suggested that a more promising area to search lies some 500 kilometres north of where the current search is about to end. This team, from the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, is using a European drift model that, they say, is so precise that if a new piece of debris turns up they can update the result “in a matter of minutes.”
    The Australians have yet to respond.

  21. @Wazir, OK, the Australian is behind a paywall so you it’s great to paste the whole thing, the Daily Beast is open access, a URL would have sufficed!
    Especially given the contents…
    Honestly, I found it both amazing and dismaying that in the year 2016 people who pass themselves off as aviation journalists can still stump for the hero-pilot theory.

  22. @Billy

    Few days ago you asked me about my ‘Dordrecht Hole’ suggestion and how a pilot could have gone there.

    Now I’m not a pilot too so I cann’t walk you to the details but I have some thoughts on it.

    I had the ‘Dordrecht Hole’ idea long time ago allready but it seemed always impossible for it was too far off the current search area to be reachable with a glide.

    Now with Victorl’s flighpath study of June 25th 2016 and Jeff Wise simulator ‘Red route’ the idea came back.

    Victorl’s end point in that study was 31.5S 96.7E and the ‘red route’ also crosses the 7th arc ~on that location.
    Both routes when followed further south from this coördinates go directly to the Dordrecht Hole which center is at 33.3S 101.2E.

    Now the Dordrecht Hole is as you say ~50km wide. But it’s more like a crater shaped hole with a diametre of ~50km. Rather a big target to fly to.
    And it’s the deepest spot in that whole area of the SIO with over 7000m depth.
    A perfect place to hide a plane and all evidence of who was the culprit.
    The bottom of this hole can not be reached by sonars or robot submarines (as far as I know).

    How did he get there you asked.

    I think if the flight was planned from the start (as it starts to look like more and more) by the pilot, he also planned his end point with a specific goal; the hide the plane and all evidence as best as possible.

    He would have known the coördinates of the Dordrecht Hole on forehand and just had to enter them in the FMC.

    That’s why I asked Jeff if those coördinates 33.3S 101.2E (or some very close) where maybe in the simulator too (got no answer yet..).

    Hope I’ve been clear enough.

  23. Sorry @ Jeff, adrenaline short circuited my thought synapses for a moment there regarding URL and all. Silly of me but this thing is becoming addictive. :D. Apologies again.

    Yeah, I do find the hero-pilot narrative disconcerting but I reckon they have their reasons for that.

    But ironically the two articles are actually control-glide/ ditch vs hypoxia pilot/high impact crash in a different guise. Two schools of thought and their diehard adherents in existential combat. So maybe the Pemba debris (if authentici) could be the deal breaker. Cheers

  24. @Ge Rijn

    “A perfect place to hide a plane and all evidence of who was the culprit.”

    You make it sound like an easy Sunday drive.

    How would anyone know the state of the ocean swells on that particular time of the hour? No one can plan to land on the ocean. It doesn’t work that way.

  25. @Trond

    I can imagine it sounds that way..

    I think any pilot can plan to land on the ocean if he wants to. No one will if not forced by circumstances but with a specific goal in mind it can be planned.

    And if he planned it, it was probably not his first concern to leave the plane intact as a whole but to sink at least most of its mainstructure intact as deep and remote as possible. A quiet ocean surface would be a ‘bonus’.

    If planned this way offcourse he would have known debris would occure and the risk of the fuselage breaking in pieces would be great. But then still the main structures would sink rather concentrated together.
    It would be a risk he had to take.

    Then the beginning of March is still summer there and the ocean in that time of year is often a lot calmer than in winter.

    The date therefore could even have been a part of his timing of the disappearance for this reason.
    As would be the timing of the night flight and the arrival in the area at dawn. All planned, possibly..

  26. Wazir Roslan Posted July 29, 2016 at 2:58 PM: “But ironically the two articles are actually control-glide/ ditch vs hypoxia pilot/high impact crash in a different guise. ”

    Thanks for posting those two articles. However, I feel that you’re not doing justice to them in that sentence. The article in The Guardian pays about equal attention to the ditch vs hypoxia issue as it does to the “Zaharie did it” issue, and the second article is almost entirely devoted to the latter, as is Jeff’s article in New York Magazine.

  27. @wasir Rozlan

    Wasir, I echo Jeff’s “Wow!!!” And most gratifying to note there’s not one mention of the Fat Controller anywhere! He must have been put on garden leave. 🙂

  28. @Klaus said:

    “I think it has already been mentioned by someone in the discussion on the last article that a likely reason to withhold the point would be very unusual altitude. This is even more likely as it was easily disclosed that the point lies on the straight line from KL to Nicobar Islands.”

    +1. Especially so if that ‘unusual altitude’ was a very low one, and directly over (or near to) an island.

  29. @Middleton

    If assumed the red route was a (not flown) route of first choice with a similar planning as the actualy flown route this could mean; also going dark just before a FIR boundary: Malaysia airspace/Chennai-India airspace.
    The point could be on that FIR boundary.
    It would be most important coördinates in the planning.
    But it’s anyones guess as long as this data are not revealed.

  30. @DennisW said:

    “Brian, that is so lame. Why would Shah chose to fly that route as a deviation from a route that he would normally use to fly to Europe? Why not fly it directly from KL?”

    The more relevant question might be: Why would he need to *practise* such a flight at all?

    A training captain with 30 years experience, 18,400 hours total with 8,600 hours on type would know how to fly that aircraft – he would simply need to program whatever route into the FMS, and the FMS would also (then) give him all the information he needed in respect of ETA’s and fuel exhaustion point. No need to run the whole flight on a sim to see where the fuel exhaustion point would be.

    However, if he hadn’t been to a particular airport before he might need to practise approach and landings. Especially if landing at night.

    If so, why only practise one flight? You would expect to find several (sets of ‘restore points’) at different times, on different days, all following the same (general) route.

    And note that these are (apparently, as far as we know) only some ‘restore points’ out of ‘numerous’ sim flights over 5 hard drives. It hasn’t been said they are specific routes, as far as I understand it.

    It would be necessary to see all of the other ‘restore points’ from all drives before a conclusion could be drawn, or not.

  31. It is encouraging that the establishment press is finally opening up to the idea that the search has been a sham.

    With the first narrative infiltrated the Western press, I took the attitude: “trust, but verify”. I’m encouraged to see the mainstream media stop treating with disdain those of us who’ve for YEARS risked our reputations to point out that things simply weren’t adding up. Better late than never, I guess…

    With this NEW narrative now infiltrating the Western press (“foreigner X did it, and foreigners Y & Z forced us to deny NoK closure!”…), I am going to save myself some time, and simply VERIFY.

  32. @Jeff Wise,

    You said: “In particular, the writer very clearly explains something that was pointed out in this space a year or more ago: that if the plane was not found close enough to the 7th arc that an unpiloted plane could have flown there by itself, then it must not have been unpiloted.”

    I agree with that statement. However, the ATSB has not searched all locations on the 7th Arc that can be reached using the auto-pilot and standard flight modes. Therefore we cannot say that the aircraft is not near the 7th Arc, even when the current search area is completed. We can only say it is not near the 7th Arc in the areas the ATSB has searched. These areas do no include all routes consistent with the satellite data.

  33. @Ge Rijn

    At the risk of sounding argumentative, I think the “red route” was set up Shah as a deliberate deception. It wasn’t a route he planned to take, just one he wanted investigators to think he took. He he guessed that investigators would be able to recover deleted files.

    It doesn’t make sense that he would want to end up so close to the West Coast of Australia. I believe he wanted to run out of fuel just after sunrise. The red route wouldn’t work for the March 8th flight to Beijing, local time of takeoff 00:41 , as sunrise in the SIO was many miles further west at the time of fuel exhaustion. I believe that the March 8th redeye to Beijing was the only one that could suit what he had in mind, coinciding as it did with the Anwar court verdict. Just my personal thoughts on the subject.

  34. @Ge Rijn

    I agree that the endpoint of the flight was likely carefully selected beforehand in order to hide the wreckage of MH370 and prevent recovery of the FDR & CVR.

    The Dordrecht Hole is a perfect place to hide any crash debris due to its great depth and extremely rugged bathymetry. However, the same can be said for almost anywhere along Broken Ridge which is nearly impossible to effectively search using any kind of Towed Side Scan Sonar. The rough seafloor & steep cliffs create shadow zones where sonar is ineffective, as well as presenting physical impact dangers to the towfish themselves.

    I believe Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was keenly aware of how difficult an undersea search would be in this particular area and deliberately crashed MH370 somewhere along Broken Ridge in order to hide the wreckage of the plane itself along with any hard evidence of his guilt.

    I see no reason however why he would make any attempt to ditch the plane in such a way as to leave it mostly intact. Why bother concealing the entire flight path only to risk setting off an ELT in a controlled ditch attempt thus revealing the secret terminus.

    More likely he flew south into the SIO until intersecting Broken Ridge, then turned east & flew along Broken Ridge straight into the rising sun until he was good and ready to terminate the flight via high speed dive & catastrophic ocean impact.

    MH370 is most likely somewhere on the deep seafloor right along Broken Ridge just east of where Broken Ridge intersects the 7th arc. Searching that forbidding area & finding it however will almost certainly require slow meticulous scanning by AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) as opposed to those towed sonars currently in use in the search area.

  35. @JoeNemo3, It is pretty much inconceivable that Zaharie would have had any inkling that the plane could be tracked the way it was. As far as he would have been concerned (assuming he did take it), once he turned south toward the heart of the southern Indian Ocean, there was no way that anyone was every going to find his plane, except for whatever debris eventually washed up somewhere.

  36. @Middleton

    You are asking why someone did something. I have no idea. The fact of the matter is that he did. Wrap your head around that reality.

  37. @Jeff Wise

    I agree Zaharie was almost certainly unaware of any INMARSAT ping tracking capability.
    However, he still had to consider the possibility of flying over a fishing vessel in the SIO, or some floating debris from the crash being recovered, or that the plane might be spotted in a satellite image at some later date.

    Crashing the plane along Broken Ridge was the surest way to minimize the probability of locating the wreckage and recovering the FDR / CVR even given some unforeseen in-flight detection along the way.

  38. @JoeNemo3

    “flying over a fishing vessel”

    Explain that one. Planning and knowing no boats and ships will see MH370 going down.

  39. It was Jay Carney who drove the search to the SIO.
    Jay was gone pretty quick smart.
    The FBI initially said the simulator had “nothing sinister”.
    Two years of searching the seabed = nothing.
    A number of debris items wash up on African shores, but none of them, repeat none of them, have one single part number / serial number / anything (and virtually “every” aircraft part does) that can positively identify to 9M-MRO (except, we are “told”, the flaperon, but NO evidence “presented”).

    Two years on, and the world grows weary of, and suspicious of, “the SIO search”, but the “story will not die.

    Problem for someone.
    Re-energise the SIO search narritive.
    Now the “leaks” of the secret FBI report, via highly suspicious means, says “definite data points” in the SIO.
    Malaysia says rubbish, but PM Turnbul / Minister Chester say possible “evidence of planning”, but NOT the actual flight (conflicts with Isat), and then does the Pontious Pilot (yet again) on “the investigation” is for Malaysia.

    The whole SIO narrative has been managed from Washington.

    The Chinese abruptly abandoned the SIO search when the acoustic pings fiasco occurred.

    Their attitude to the SIO search for the next 18 plus months was “studied indiffernece”.
    Dong came down a few months ago.
    Q. What has it done since it got here ?
    A. Bugger all.
    Q. So why is it here now ?
    A. For show ?
    Q. What do the Chinese “really” know ?

  40. @All
    The water is now getting real muddy!

    A great who / why axiom: “Follow the Money”

    1. Motive
    2. Unknown Cargo

    What would make an apparently mild mannered professional man hijack the plane?

    The motive could be tied into the type of cargo.
    Was it Hi Tech? To be sold onto another state. e.g. China?
    Or was it the PM’s gold & paperwork in case he had to go into exile ?

    Maybe Shah knew something or needed to do something drastic to get a result
    to an obvious dilemma.

    I don’t think the court case of Anwar would warrant the actions.

    But getting rid of a very corrupt government would.

    As, I think it was @DennisW mentioned, that negotiations broke down
    and he didn’t achieve the required result.
    Solving 1 & 2 would clear a lot questions & conjecture.

    Unfortunately none of the above would find the plane.
    @ ventus45
    Just saw your post. YES the Chinese have kept a real low profile.
    I still think Malaysia doesn’t want to find MH 370.

  41. Has not seen this before;

    http://m.indiatoday.in/story/captain-zaharie-ahmed-shah-missing-malaysian-flight-mh370-pilots/1/349888.html

    According to this, Captain Shaw left the house with his wife at 9:00PM, the Interim Report has him going through security at 10:50PM, nothing unusual there.

    I am struggling to understand the blatant denials regardling anything suspicious or unusual on his simulator when the stories were everywhere saying otherwise. Also prolific, were the statements about the significant changes in his behavior, and yet the IR says;

    “There were no behavioural signs of social isolation, change in habits or interest, self-neglect, drug or alcohol abuse of the captain, first officer and the cabin crew,” the 2015 interim report stated.

    What was the problem with the individuals compiling this report?

  42. @Tom Lindaay
    You said…”I also took another look at the 4 corners interview with H.
    His body language at about 9:28 in regarding the question about shooting the plane down, H says”The Americans would” with a rapid glance off camera to somebody or ‘thing’.Extraordinary.”

    I also found that very telling. It’s been over a year I continually played that part, it was not so much the intention (if you have a shot, take it) of his words, it was the “rapid glance” that raised goosebumps on my arms.

    The cargo has always been forefront with me, not understanding why obtaining the manifest has not remained a major issue

  43. @DennisW said:

    “@Middleton

    You are asking why someone did something. I have no idea. The fact of the matter is that he did. Wrap your head around that reality.”

    I was posing the question of why he would *need* to do it – why should an experienced captain need to practise something he already is very experienced in? It makes no sense, unless he was practising a landing at an airfield he was unfamiliar with.

    That they were practise routes, and that he practised them (or not) is not yet demonstrated or proven and so is therefore not a fact – the ‘reality’ you refer to exists so far only in your thinking, and possibly, in your bias.

  44. @rob
    (gulp) the fat controller is indeed on life support now and any book deal is in tatters(sob) but not to worry, how about pilot glide-ditching ,sole surviving and vanishing from the scene on a prearranged russkie marine craft or submarine sound to you 😀

    Impossible? But hope springs eternal especially after @ventus45.

    @gysbreght
    Agreed partially for while the The Weekend Australian ‘s narrative comprehensively dismantles ghost flight and hypoxia, the Daily Beast one is more forgiving and still holds out more than a sliver of hope for proponents of the ghost flight/hypoxia scenario. My personal take (caveat: provided ISAT plus radar plus satellite plus debris analysis plus eyewitness corroboration plus early press releases all holds) is that it points to human intervention by virtue of all the flight acrobatics on display. Hence, either loss of control due to fuel exhaustion = high impact nose first entry or “Sully-type” expert ditching and sinking are both probable. That explains scant debris. Either way, manned flight till the end for me

    There is one remote possibile alternative to fuel exhaustion in that whoever was in control ingested cyanide or something to block out the unbearable inevitable prospect ahead, let go of the joystick as a consequence and down she spiralled headlong into the blue yonder……

  45. Does anyone remember reports, from way back, when the plane crashed, that the co-pilot’s cell phone was picked up by a cell tower and that he tried to make a call? Any thoughts on that @Jeff or anyone for that matter? was that report ever found credible? Was the co-pilot trying to get ahold of someone after being locked out of the cockpit by the Captain maybe????

  46. @Andrew
    Go back to “How We Know Where MH370 Went”
    July 15, you will find it on the main page, this contains the most recent discussions of the co-pilot’s cellphone.

  47. @Rob:
    “At the risk of sounding argumentative, I think the “red route” was set up Shah as a deliberate deception. It wasn’t a route he planned to take, just one he wanted investigators to think he took. He he guessed that investigators would be able to recover deleted files.”

    I, myself that know almost nothing about computer, knew in the years ’80s when we had our first 8088 PC using MSDOS 3:30 that deleting a file in fact only deleted the first letter of that filename, and when using the undelete program, all I had to do is typing back that first letter to recover the deleted files…
    A pilot that built his own simulator certainly knew how to completely erase a file so that nothing of the original data remains.

    An intelligent murderer will remove his traces to avoid being found, but a more intelligent one will also leave over false traces to blur the investigation…

  48. An intelligent murderer ………..blur the investigation..

    May I add “a super intelligent one would have modeled the flight path to glean the requisite info, deleted the file,trash the hard drive and wrecked the Fs before garbaging it or selling it as scrap stuff to the recycling guy for some spare change.

    Still have trouble figuring that part out unless he reckoned he would return alive ….man now that sounds weird and absurd in equal measure.

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