Two men, strangers to one another, go into the cockpit of an airplane and lock the door behind them. They take off and fly into the night. One radios to ATC, “Good night, Malaysia 370.” One minute later, someone puts the plane into a turn. It reverses direction and disappears.
Question: Did one of the men take the plane?
For many, it’s inconceivable that there could be any other answer than “of course.” Moreover, that since the details of the incident suggest a sophisticated knowledge of the aircraft, the perpetrator could obviously only be the man with the vastly greater experience — the captain. As reader @Keffertje has written: “Though I try to keep an open mind to all other scenarios, the circumstantial evidence against ZS simply cannot be ignored.”
For others, blaming the captain without concrete proof is immoral. There are MH370 forums where the suggestion that Zaharie might be considered guilty is considered offensive and hurtful to the feelings of surviving family members. Even if one disregards such niceties, it is a fact that an exhaustive police investigation found that Zaharie had neither psychological problems, family stress, money problems, or any other suggestion that he might be suicidal. (Having broken the story of Zaharie’s flight-simulator save points in the southern Indian Ocean, I no longer think they suggest he practiced a suicide flight, for reasons I explain here.) And far from being an Islamic radical, he enjoyed the writings of noted atheist Richard Dawkins and decried terror violence. And he was looking forward to retiring to Australia. If he was trying to make the Malaysian government look bad, he failed, because in the absence of an explanation there is no blame to allocate. And if he was trying to pull off the greatest disappearing act of all time, he failed at that, too, since the captain would necessarily be the prime suspect.
So did Zaharie do it, or not?
This, in a nutshell, is the paradox of MH370. Zaharie could not have hijacked the plane; only Zaharie could have hijacked the plane.
I’d like to suggest that another way of looking at the conundrum is this: if Zaharie didn’t take the plane, then who did? As has been discussed in this forum at length, the turn around at IGARI was clearly initiated by someone who was familiar with both aircraft operation and air traffic control protocols. The reboot of the SDU tells that whoever was in charge at 18:22 had sophisticated knowledge of 777 electronics. And the fact that the plane’s wreckage was not found where autopilot flight would have terminated tells us that someone was actively flying the plane until the end. But who? And why?
If Zaharie did not do it, then one of the passengers and crew either got through the locked cockpit door in the minute between “Good night, Malaysia 370” and IGARI, or got into the E/E bay and took control of the plane from there.
If we accept that this is what happened, then it is extremely difficult to understand why someone who has gone to such lengths would then fly themselves to a certain demise in the southern Indian Ocean. (Remember, they had the ability to communicate and were apparently in active control of the aircraft; they could have flown somewhere else and called for help if they desired.)
Recall, however, that the BFO values have many problems. We get around the paradox of the suicide destination if we assume that the hijackers were not only sophisticated, but sophisticated enough to conceive of and execute a spoof of the Inmarsat data.
Granted, we are still left with the issue of the MH370 debris that has been collected from the shores of the western Indian Ocean. Many people instinctively recoil from the idea that this debris could have been planted, as a spoof of the BFO data would require. Fortunately, we don’t have to argue the subject from first principles. Detailed physical and biological analysis of the debris is underway, and should be released to the public after the official search is called off in December. As I’ve written previously, several aspects of the Réunion flaperon are problematic; if further analysis bears this out, then we’ll have an answer to our conundrum.
Cont.:
Here’s a read about the sim and his socialising from back then:
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N0MI05A20140324
@Johan,
Nice paper about Z passion. I think it is more passionated than anyone. It is also a real father for Fariq in regard of flying a 777. This compassinated guy have act under pressure of a hijacker, no more.
Find the plane first.
there is much possibility that there are people on earth.
interesting from the simulator article:
“Erasing data may have been part of a regular maintenance routine or done to help improve the simulator’s performance, flight simulator users say.
He could not have practiced evading radar, for instance, because radar is not part of the simulation, Nunez said. (Additional reporting by Niki Koswanage in KUALA LUMPUR and Noel Randewich in SAN FRANCISCO; Editing by Alex Richardson)”
seems a lot of expense for little benefit if applied to this disappearance.
@MH,
too much time and money spent without result. Perhaps we should change our approach, consider the facts as witnesses Kota Barhu and data only until 1:22. we did not witness the west side of the peninsula except Kate who saw a Russian military plane a bit special.
I saw this plane a night over the Atlantic. Big orange fire with black smoke.
@Normand, Please stop writing insane things.
@Jeff Wise,
Well, you are the owner of this blog, please delete all about me. I’ m very sorry for that. Make sure now i just observe your blog.
Sometime the truth is too simple to be true.
Regards
@all
I’d be curious to know if the MS Flight Sim shows the undersea mountains like we see so often on Google Earth MH370 flight paths, or if it has an Plug_in to do that
Dear Everyone,
first of all, thank you for the great work you’re all doing.
I am a long-time reader and admirer of your group, and have finally found the courage to post. I would like to point out that I am in no way an expert, thus should you consider my post to be inappropriate in any way I apologize and ask you to just delete it.
To jump straight in, I have two questions.
1. Regarding radar. How plausible is it that MH370 apparently crossed the Malaysian peninsula, close to KL, and wasn’t intercepted? My (layperson’s) impression of Malaysia is that of an at least somewhat competent country. How could they risk a Petronas-WTC-type situation if they really had no contact as in, a hostage-type situation? Further on radar: There seems to exist a long range radar station in north west Australia. How plausible is it that a passenger plane can travel for hours down the west coast of Australia without being detected?
2. I looked at the “ping rings” here (http://www.duncansteel.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ping-Rings-2D.png). (Is that your “rival” or is the guy your ally? I hope I am not pissing you off/that this is “politically incorrect”? If so, my apologies). Why is the “north” route not being seriously considered? Could the plane not have turned north after the last (possibly unreliable) radar sighting? To a layperson at least, it looks like there is a nice flightpath north towards Bangladesh, Bhutan, and then onto the Tibetan plateau with a heading for Urumqi. The plane could have either crashed somewhere in Tibet, where only Chinese officials would know, or fly on to Xinjiang for a hostage situation. Again, knowing China, in the West, we wouldn’t know a thing. Also, knowing China, the implications of this (planting debris etc) seem completely plausible to me. Would someone give me a brief idea why this is not a more wide-spread hypothesis?
Thank you and again, I apologise if this is dumb…
@Nonexpert, Welcome! Thanks for joining in the conversation. As to your questions:
1. Malaysia has stated that the target was not regarded as hostile, and so there was no need to intercept it. There is some question as to whether it was actually observed in real time by the Malaysian military. Your impression that the country is “at least somewhat competent” is not universally shared.
2. Duncan does his thing, I do mine. There’s no bad blood. We used to play in the same sandbox until he and his friends kicked me out over the exact question you’re posing here. I think it is possible that the plane headed north (though to Kazakhstan, not China) and Duncan and the rest of the Independent Group thought it wasn’t. If you’d like to read more about my theory, I’d encourage you to read my Kindle Single “The Plane That Wasn’t There,” handily advertised on the right of this page. (I’m turning into a regular plug monster lately.)
@Nonexpert:
As always answers you will get here may all have an individual inclination, but some things are probably of a kind that you won’t need a second opinion.
As to the inteception I would say that most people would hold today that ground and ATC reacted on the plane’s disappearance and going silent as if it was in distress and was coming back (possibly) for an emergency landing. It seems, if the military even knew of this in realtime, they considered the plane as friendly and saw no reason to send up jets. Maybe they knew it wasn’t heading for KL but seemed to be heading towards Langkawi, without expressly trying to avoid radar but ostensibly trying to avoid appearing as a threat to a high prestige target as the capital.
The Jorn has been discussed for ages here, but I can’t tell you much more than that maybe neither knew of each other, and the Aussies might have been barbecuing. Puns aside, I believe the reach ofJorn is one in handbooks and another on any given evening. Others will tell you how it is. It wasn’t exactly “along the coast” either.
The north route has been discussed from the beginning and times even more than a southern path. Whether seriously is a to some degree a question of taste. I believe it fell out of significant grace within the first year, and it has a few weak spots. One is that the satellite data falsifies it (if the data are not fasified), and as long as you choose to accept the data as they are then the plane flew south (otherwise it could be anywhere in the world, and you should consult a clairvoyants’ group),
another that radar was invented also in the tracts you mention. Thirdly, no intelligence or indications since then (satellite imagery or the like) have managed to unearth any clues in that direction. Fourthly, the savages inhabiting King Kong’s Island in the motion pictures are living closer to Sumatra, and there have been few reasons to believe that a similar tribe in the suggested areas would have devoured the plane and its passengers and have the competence to spoof data and plant debris. The Chinese are of course a tricky lot, all 1.4 billion of them, but with no proof there is anyway little chance of sending them all upstate. Lastly, no one has managed to convey a minimum of realism or likelihood to why anyone (up there, or anywhere for that matter) would want to steal a plane in the air and hurt a lot of poor innocent good people without any apparent reason, gain or purpose for doing so.
By the time it took me to write this you have probably received one or two more nuanced answers than mine. 🙂
Closing comments here. Please add your thoughts to the newest post. Thank you!