Zaharie Shah’s Secret Psych Evaluation

571 thoughts on “Zaharie Shah’s Secret Psych Evaluation”

1. @Nederland: I appreciate what you are saying, and it may have been used internally by Malaysia as justification for the omission. But it is possible to present the raw data of a cell phone connection, which is an undeniable fact, without apportioning blame or liability. Considering that the transponder was not activated, this data is important for establishing that the targets captured on primary radar were indeed MH370, and therefore should have been included in the FI.

2. @jeffwise: I remain astounded by your confidence in the completeness of the presentation of the evidence and the soundness of the conclusions found in the official Malaysian reports. You are saying that the captain is innocent because the Malaysians have stated that he is.

3. It is interesting to see that Zaharie was not only a smoker but also suffered from asthma and smoked just before the flight, and that in his 50ies. Presumably this would give him a serious disadvantage in any (deliberate) depressurisation scenario, in comparison even to the 15 oxgygen bottles in the cabin (no pressure breathing, no 100% oxygen flow, but potentially enough volume to last for 2 1/2 hours).

4. @jeffwise said, “Indeed, I don’t think there has ever been a case where someone who is known to have carried out such an act had such an outward appearance of being balanced and well-adjusted.”

   You should re-read the facts surrounding SilkAir 185, which was ruled by the NTSB to be a suicide-by-pilot.

   Here is the new release from the Singapore police after it found that “After a careful examination and analysis of all the materials obtained, the Police investigation team found no evidence that the pilot, co-pilot or any crew member had suicidal tendencies or a motive to deliberately cause the crash of SilkAir MI 185 on 19 December 1997.”

   http://web.archive.org/web/20070323224159/http://www2.mha.gov.sg/mha/detailed.jsp?artid=375&type=4&root=0&parent=0&cat=0

   Here is the entire statement:
   Press Date
   14-Dec-2000
   Police News Release : Investigation into the Police Report lodged on 25 Aug 99 by the Singapore-Accredited Representative to the National Transportation Safety Committee, 14 Dec 2000

   In August 1999, Singapore Police initiated investigation to ascertain if there was evidence of any criminal offence that might have led to the crash of SilkAir MI185 on 19 December 1997.

   After a careful examination and analysis of all the materials obtained, the Police investigation team found no evidence that the pilot, co-pilot or any crew member had suicidal tendencies or a motive to deliberately cause the crash of SilkAir MI 185 on 19 December 1997.

   On 25 August 1999, the Singapore Police received a report lodged by the Singapore-accredited representative to the Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission, now renamed the National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC). The report stated that its findings then indicated that at impact, the horizontal stabiliser of the aircraft had a nose-down trim. This was different from the last known trim setting recorded by the aircraft’s flight data recorder (FDR) when it stopped, which raised the possibility that there had been a manual input from the cockpit. The report added that there was therefore reason to suspect that the aircraft crash had been a result of an intentional act by one or more persons on board the aircraft.

   The Accredited Representative further attached to the report a copy of the NTSC Next-of-Kin update issued on 25 August 1999, which stated that there were indications that at the time of the accident, the pilot had been facing financial difficulties, and had also been the subject of company disciplinary actions.

   Upon receipt of the report, the Singapore Police Force’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) formed a team of officers to spearhead the investigations, giving it topmost priority. For the purpose of investigations, the case was classified as suicide-cum-murder.

   Under the Convention on International Civil Aviation, exclusive responsibility for investigating the circumstances of the incident lay with the NTSC. The CID team therefore focused on whether the pilot, co-pilot or a member of the crew had any motive to deliberately cause the aircraft to crash. Aided by specialist white-collar crime officers from Commercial Affairs Department, the CID team examined and analysed the financial records of the pilot, co-pilot and cabin crew. The team also looked at the life histories of the pilot and co-pilot to ascertain whether there was any evidence of psychological instability in their personalities prior to the crash. In this regard, a team of psychologists and a psychiatrist from the Institute of Mental Health were enlisted to conduct independent psychological autopsies of the pilot and co-pilot, relying on statements of witnesses recorded by the Police and their own investigations. The CID investigations did not address the issue of the mechanical cause of the crash, as that was within the sole purview of NTSC.

   In total, more than 160 people were interviewed. These persons included SilkAir senior management and technical staff; and friends, colleagues and next-of-kin of the pilot, co-pilot and cabin crew. Some of whom were residing in Indonesia, India, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The CID investigators and the IMH psychologists also visited the Air Traffic Control authorities of Singapore and Jakarta, as well as the Indonesian Police to obtain information.

   Police investigation revealed that the pilot, co-pilot and all the crew members were financially solvent at the time of the accident. Further investigations into the background of the pilot and co-pilot, and their behaviour leading up to the incident did not reveal anything unusual or indicative of a criminal motive or intent.

   Having consulted the Attorney-General’s Chambers, the Singapore Police Force has ceased its investigations into the case. However, the Police will not hesitate to re-initiate investigations if there is any new evidence to warrant such a course of action.

   The Singapore Police Force has informed the Singapore accredited representative to NTSC of Police findings.

5. @VictorI, The totality of evidence, of which this strikes me as an important part, points towards Zaharie’s innocence. Indeed the only evidence at all that suggests his complicity are the two flight-sim data points.

   And I would point out that we have recently come into possession of another very powerful piece of evidence against Zaharie’s guilt: confirmation by the ATSB that the plane is not in the southern search area. If Zaharie had taken the plane and flown it south, the flight would have terminated in this area.

   “No!” I hear you saying. “After escaping radar coverage, he flew a holding pattern, then flew south and wound up at 26.9 degrees south!” For this to be true would require that a) the plane just happened to be descending at a rate that fortuitously happened to produce the observed BFO value, so accidentally mimicking a flight to the south b) a massive sea and air search happened to miss the resulting surface debris. I find the combination of these two improbabilities a great deal less likely than the possibility that Zaharie just happened to be experimenting with Gimli Glider scenarios in the SIO.

6. @Johan

   “1230pm” is not the altitude, but the time of day (12:30 pm).

7. @VictorI, Yes, the report issued to the public exculpated the SilkAir pilot. Behind the scenes, there were many signs he was a troubled man: http://newsstore.theage.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac?page=1&sy=age&kw=%22The+pilot+who+wanted+to+die%22&pb=all_ffx&dt=selectRange&dr=entire&so=relevance&sf=text&sf=headline&rc=10&rm=200&sp=nrm&clsPage=1&docID=news990710_0523_1914
   One might expect a public report to be a whitewash; the document we’re discussing here is a confidential report intended for internal use only. What’s more, Zaharie’s friends, relatives, and colleagues have all publicly backed this assessment. Anyone can look at the self-help videos he published on YouTube just before his disappearance and see a man who apparently delights in helping others in an unassuming way.

8. @JeffW
   I am not a professional aircraft crash investigator such as Greg Feith formerly of NTSB. So I ask myself, how would NTSB weigh such information? My perception is they might conclude (a) still looks like apparent intentional diversion, apparently by pilot, and (b) as a heads up to airline industry, predicting or explaining such behavior of a deceased pilot is extremely difficult. I get zero warm fuzzies that MY is really digging into this case like NTSB would.

   Now if Greg Feith or NTSB came forward and says this report changes their whole opinion on MH370, I’d listen.

   Remember, we are not here to blame Z, at least not me. Rather we are trying to define the likely cause(s) of this airline industry tragedy. We need the intellectual freedom to consider pijacking, but in a court of law, we may not have the evidence to prove beyond a shadow of doubt. If it went to Russia, I have a guess who helped.

9. @VictorI

   Perhaps the problem with that approach was that the information of the copilot mobile phone connection had already been leaked to the press. This means confirmation of such a connection, even if anonymous, would be pretty much a give away. I’m not saying I endorse that decision, but there is a rational explanation for it imo.

10. Another perspective of Silk Air 185 pilot

    https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/silkair-captain-claims-he-quit-over-crash-pilot-57382/

11. Your post specifically addressed the psychological profile of Zaharie, which you say is clean. I’m saying that the report is not to be trusted. If Singapore can write a sham profile to protect the reputation of its pilot, Malaysia certainly can, and for that reason, the report is meaningless. But now you want to discuss the totality of the evidence.

    We know things are omitted from the report. For instance, there is no mention of Tim Pardi and Zaharie’s break from her and her children after they became very close. That is based on words from Tim Pardi. That is a change in behavior that should have been noted. It was not.

    As for the descent at 18:40, that is really not as remarkable as you suggest. The facts are that the SATCOM logged on due to manual intervention at 18:25, and the aircraft performed what we believe was an offset manoeuver from an airway between 18:25 and 18:28. So we know that at this point, the pilot was making changes in the configuration. A long descent to a holding altitude of around 20,000 ft during a time interval that included 18:40 is very credible. The descent could have lasted 12 minutes or longer. There is no precise alignment of times that is required.

    I don’t know if the flight ended at 26.9S. However, it is a theory that can be tested, and it is data-driven. How would you like to test your Kazakhstan theory? Start digging at Baikonur? Interview people at Almaty to see if a B777 had an unexpected landing?

    As for the two innocent points simulator points in the SIO, you fail to acknowledge that they are connected to a point in the Andaman Sea, whether or not the plane was manually moved from one place to the other.

    And there is no need to move the plane to the SIO to practice gliding because you would never find yourself in the middle of the SIO with no fuel. If you wanted to experiment with the Gimli Glider scenario, as you propose, you would do it near an airport and try to approach and land there. Or, if he wasn’t interested in landing at an airport, he would have simulated fuel exhaustion in the Andaman sea and glided to the ocean surface. There is no reason to move the plane to the SIO.

    As for the failure of the massive surface search in the area to the north of the current search area, you have forgotten that in the ATSB’s own report from June 26, 2014, on the heels of the surface search, they recommended searching the part of the 7th arc that some of us are now recommending. So obviously at that time, they felt the surface search was not sufficiently comprehensive and efficient to eliminate a terminus in that region. In fact, they viewed it as most probable at that time.

12. A little bit more on Captain Tsu….apples to oranges here

    By WILLIAM M. CARLEY and DIANE BRADY Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal
    Updated March 10, 1998 2:35 p.m. ET
    The SilkAir Boeing 737 was cruising smoothly over Indonesia at 35,000 feet last Dec. 19. Suddenly the jet nosed down, diving at supersonic speeds until it smashed into a river, killing all 104 people aboard.

    The crash has baffled safety experts ever since. Not only was the weather generally good, but the jet was brand new; SilkAir and its parent, Singapore Airlines, are noted for having excellent pilots and maintenance crews; and the pilots on this flight radioed no distress calls.

    Now, however, accident investigators are increasingly focusing on a troubling possibility: That the captain of the plane may have deliberately put the aircraft into a suicide dive.

    So far as is publicly known, there is no direct proof that the crash was caused by a suicidal act. And there may never be proof: Someone, possibly a crew member, apparently turned off the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. The Indonesian government, which is in charge of the crash investigation, says only that it is looking into all possibilities, including suicide. Singapore Airlines has declined to comment.

    Circumstantial Events
    But weeks of intensive investigation have turned up not even a clue suggesting any other cause. And people close to the investigation say a series of circumstantial events increasingly point to suicide.

    “It looks like there were a number of deliberate acts preceding, and apparently leading up to, the crash,” says one air-safety expert familiar with the SilkAir investigation.

    The crash already has upset aviation authorities and airlines around the world that fly the 737. In recent years, there have been two unsolved cases of 737s crashing during approach to an airport — a United Airlines jet near Colorado Springs, Colo., and a USAir plane near Pittsburgh. A third mysterious crash won’t bolster confidence in the Boeing plane.

    Any loss of confidence in the 737 would have major repercussions. The Boeing plane is the most popular jetliner in history, with carriers now flying about 3,000 of them. Boeing is currently making and selling them at a record clip.

    Rare Suicides
    A Boeing spokeswoman says the 737 has an excellent overall safety record. Some fasteners and bolts missing from the SilkAir tail initially sparked fears that the missing components caused the crash, but investigators now believe the parts separated during the jet’s steep dive or at impact.

    Cockpit suicides, while extremely rare, aren’t unheard of. In 1994, an Air Morocco regional jet plunged to the ground, killing all 51 people on board. A final report hasn’t been issued, but after listening to the cockpit voice recording, investigators concluded that the captain had deliberately steered the plane into the ground. And in 1982, while approaching Haneda Airport in Japan, the captain of a Japan Airlines DC-8 deliberately pushed the nose down prematurely. As the captain and co-pilot wrestled over the jet’s controls, the plane plunged into Tokyo Bay, killing 24 people and injuring 141. The captain, who survived, was put in a psychiatric institution.

    SilkAir flight MI 185, taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, at 3:23 p.m. local time Dec. 19, was headed north toward Singapore. The Boeing jet, delivered just 10 months earlier, was SilkAir’s newest. On board were German, American, French, British and Japanese citizens, as well as many Singaporeans and Indonesians.

    Experienced Crew
    The captain was a 41-year-old Singaporean, Tsu Way Ming, an experienced pilot with 6,900 hours of flight time. The co-pilot was a 23-year-old New Zealander, Duncan Ward, experienced for his age, with 2,200 flight hours.

    According to one pilot who examined the training records of both SilkAir aviators after the crash, both had done “very well” in their recurrent flight-simulator training and during flights when they had been checked by a training captain. The two SilkAir aviators, according to this pilot, were both “very good.” Capt. Tsu, however, had encountered some career problems at SilkAir in the recent past.

    The flight to Singapore was scheduled to take nearly two hours. The two pilots apparently had snack trays delivered to the cockpit by a flight attendant.

    As the plane cruised at 35,000 feet, the cockpit voice recorder was operating normally. So was the flight-data recorder, which records things such as speed, altitude, direction, engine performance and — perhaps most important in this case — the pilots’ inputs into the controls. For example, the flight-data recorder would show whether a pilot deliberately pushed forward on the yoke, which would push the jet’s nose down.

    As the jet continued, according to another pilot familiar with the investigation, Capt. Tsu may have gotten up to leave the cockpit, possibly to return the snack trays and use the lavatory. And at this point, the cockpit voice recorder stopped.

    A few minutes later, co-pilot Ward, who was flying the jet, engaged in a routine radio conversation with an air-traffic controller, betraying no hint of anything amiss.

    About six minutes after the cockpit voice recorder stopped, and with the jet still cruising smoothly at 35,000 feet, the flight-data recorder stopped. Capt. Tsu, some investigators suspect, had returned to the cockpit.

    Air controllers, meanwhile, were routinely watching the plane on radar. Just a few minutes after the flight data-recorder stopped, the controllers were amazed to see the jet go into a steep dive.

    The jet’s electronic transponder, which responds to radar queries with location and altitude, showed the plane plummeting from 35,000 feet to 19,000 feet, when transponder responses stopped. Meanwhile, the jet, now diving at supersonic speed and beyond its design limits, began breaking apart in midair.

    Seconds later, the main fuselage smashed into an Indonesian river. The jet’s tail and other parts that had broken off in midair fell to the ground two or three miles away. It was about 4:13 p.m. Jakarta time, 50 minutes after the jet had taken off.

    What happened?

    When a plane suddenly falls out of the sky in good weather and with no distress calls, investigators immediately suspect a bomb. Because American citizens were on board, a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration bomb expert flew to Indonesia to help with the investigation. In Washington, the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board both declined to comment.

    No Bomb Evidence
    When Pan Am 103 was blown apart over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the cockpit voice recording contained a tell-tale clue. After the blast cut electrical power, momentum kept the voice-recording reels turning for another split second — long enough to capture the sound of the bomb.

    Newer jets, including the SilkAir 737, have digital cockpit recorders rather than spinning magnetic tape reels. But U.S. authorities, to preserve evidence of any terrorist bombs, asked manufacturers of the digital units to make sure the new units could capture bomb sounds. The new digital units do, by continuing recording 200 milliseconds after power is cut. The SilkAir recorder showed no evidence of a bomb.

    Investigators also doubt a bomb went off later because of co-pilot Ward’s normal call to air controllers, because until the flight recorder stopped it showed the plane cruising normally, and because radar showed the plane flying smoothly for a brief time after that.

    Nor have there been any suspicions of a hijacking, because of co-pilot Ward’s routine radio conversation with the air controller after the voice recorder stopped — and because the jet’s transponder wasn’t switched to a special frequency that is used by pilots to secretly signal a hijacking.

    Could the airplane’s two recorders have been shut off by some freak electrical fault that eventually brought the plane down? Boeing has done a failure analysis, seeking any scenario in which the recorders might stop sequentially. Thus far, they have found none.

    “That leaves deliberate acts by a crewmember,” says one safety expert close to the investigation.

    Reduced to Theories
    Some investigators theorize that Capt. Tsu, as he was leaving the cockpit, pulled out the circuit breaker for the cockpit voice recorder, shutting off power for the unit. The circuit breaker is on an electrical panel a few feet behind the captain’s left seat, a location difficult to observe by the co-pilot in the right seat flying the plane, especially if the captain’s body blocked his view of the panel. Capt. Tsu, this theory continues, might have also removed the circuit breaker for the flight-data recorder upon his return to the cockpit six minutes later.

    Whatever happened, the effect of turning off the recorders was to mask what occurred in the cockpit as the jet went into its fatal dive.

    What might have motivated Capt. Tsu to put the plane into a suicide dive — if he did — is a mystery. Little of his background is known, except that before joining the airline in 1992, he was in the Singapore Air Force and a member of its elite acrobatic team, the Black Knights, according to someone close to the crash investigation.

    At Singapore Air, Capt. Tsu was soon promoted from co-pilot to captain, and last year was promoted again to a training captain post, a prestigious job. But several months ago, SilkAir officials took the unusual step of removing him from that post, returning him to the status of captain.

    ‘Cowboy’ Complaints
    At the time, they cited a specific incident in which a New Zealand co-pilot — not Mr. Ward — had complained that Mr. Tsu failed to conduct himself properly — it isn’t clear how — during a landing in Indonesia. Capt. Tsu also allegedly didn’t comply with proper procedures in reporting the incident, and subsequently argued about the matter with the same co-pilot during another flight. There also were informal complaints by other pilots that the former acrobatic flier was a “cowboy” pilot who didn’t follow the rules.

    Apparently upset by his demotion, Capt. Tsu appealed the move within the airline. His appeal was turned down.

13. I apologize, all I meant to include were the last 2 paragraphs, you may want to delete it Jeff, major oxygen.

14. @jeffwise said, “Anyone can look at the self-help videos he published on YouTube just before his disappearance and see a man who apparently delights in helping others in an unassuming way.”

    Anybody that takes the time to read his Facebook posts sees he was politically active, angry, and frustrated. “Democracy is dead”. To say there are no signs that he was troubled is just not true.

    His relatives said things to protect his reputation after the disappearance. That’s what families do. They also swore that he hadn’t used his simulator in a year because it was broken. We now know this to be false.

    And then there was this interview with Zaharie’s daughter that was published three weeks after the disappearance. Unless the quotations were just bold lies, she said:

    – He wasn’t the father I knew. He was lost and disturbed
    – Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was about to divorce his wife of 30 years
    – He had refused to attend marriage counselling with Islamic elders
    – He shunned family and spent hours alone on his flight simulator

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592436/He-wasnt-father-I-knew-He-lost-disturbed-Daughter-MH370-pilot-raises-alarming-new-questions-state-mind-weeks-planes-disappearance.html

15. @Jeff Wise

    Thank you for your hard labour with this translation

16. @Jeff

    “And I would point out that we have recently come into possession of another very powerful piece of evidence against Zaharie’s guilt: confirmation by the ATSB that the plane is not in the southern search area. If Zaharie had taken the plane and flown it south, the flight would have terminated in this area.”

    You keep saying the above over and over despite the fact that the statement has a significant negative attribute – it is not true. The ISAT data is, as has been pointed out many times, under-constrained. There are many places on the 7th arc which have not been searched that can satisfy the ISAT constraints. Debris drift analysis suggest these places are likely to be North of the current search area.

    I find it odd that the Z evaluation made no mention of Pardi. His relationship there was strange at best. The evaluation made no mention of a completely empty social calendar after the accident flight. This fact was featured rather prominently in the days after the diversion. The evaluation makes no mention of any research into Shah’s political affiliations or that most of his online activity showed him to be very critical of incumbent government.

    The suggestion that Z went to the SIO with his sim toy to practice Gimli Glider scenarios is truly bizarre.

17. @DennisW said, “The suggestion that Z went to the SIO with his sim toy to practice Gimli Glider scenarios is truly bizarre.”

    Especially since there were no airfields to reach. The suggestion is not just bizarre–it is provably false.

18. @DennisW, You have been saying for years now that the Inmarsat data is under-constrained, but that is only because you do not understand the DSTG methodology.

    I asked you to show a route that fit the Inmarsat data and hit the seventh arc outside of the search zone and you produced a loiter scenario.

19. @DennisW: And of course there is this post on Facebook by Zaharie which people seem to forget:

    “There is a rebel in each and everyone of us…let it out!”

    Those are not the words of an “unassuming man”. Rather those are those are the words of somebody about to take action.

20. @Susie Crowe, No worries, thanks for sharing that.

    @Cosmic Academy, You’re welcome!

    @VictorI, The Daily Mail from three weeks after the disappearance? Really? {rolls eyes}

21. A rebel does not mean a mass murderer….

22. @VictorI, You wrote, ““There is a rebel in each and everyone of us…let it out!”

    I think that’s a Mountain Dew ad.

23. @Jeff

    “@DennisW, You have been saying for years now that the Inmarsat data is under-constrained, but that is only because you do not understand the DSTG methodology.”

    Actually, I do have a good grasp of the DSTG methodology.

    How can you reconcile your statements with the fact that in a very recent meeting involving Boeing, Inmarsat, Thales, DSTG, NTSB, and other credentialed and respected scientists and organizations that a conclusion was reached that the current search area probably did not contain the aircraft, and a recommendation was made to move the search area North? Are you suggesting that these people also do not understand the problem statement?

    You are beating on a very dead horse. All of your posts are a transparent attempt to reinforce your Northern path theory. That theory died with the flaperon and subsequent debris finds.

24. @VictorI. As well as omission of the alleged phone registration I find the omission of Thai radar detections from the FI to be completely bizarre and inexplicable. All it says is something along the lines of …it wasn’t in their airspace, they weren’t paying any attention. And yet we know from Thai official statements (AP) that they specifically disclosed that their radar had detected a non-normal return, within ~7 minutes of disappearance from secondary radar, and that they had continued intermittent detections thereafter. Inter alia, they said it was initially heading towards KL (which, on a heading of ~205 is a whole lot different from ~240).

    Any such detection should provide excellent corroboration of the “air turn back” and initial trajectory.
    Why on earth should such a detection, already made public, be omitted from the FI? Perhaps there are legitimate reasons, but one that comes to mind is that it didn’t match the MY authorised version of events.

25. @jeffwise: Despite the mountain of evidence that Zaharie was responsible for the disappearance, you accuse Blaine Gibson of planting debris. You believe he is a Russian agent that was recently re-activated by Putin to mislead the MH370 investigation. Do you know how utterly ridiculous this sounds to everybody but you?

    Your evidence that Blaine is a Russian agent is that he spent time in Russia and earned money while there. That and the fact that he is good at finding aircraft debris.

    Do you know how utterly ridiculous this sounds to everybody but you? Do you see anybody, on your own blog, agreeing with that accusation? That should tell you something. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

26. “03.03.2014 before his flight to Melbourne, Australia.”

    well, well…was it here that he got(or reinforced) the idea to go to Australia in case Anwar gets convicted? It was his last flight before MH370… “escape to democracy”

27. @VictorI, Two data points does not a mountain make.

    Yes, I’m well aware that a small army of experts, official and amateur, have been saying for a long time that I’m crazy and that the plane will be found in the southern Indian Ocean. Well, those experts were wrong, and my job as a journalist is to explain why. I cannot do this by marching along with everyone else. I have to gather and assess information by myself.

    It’s funny that you find this so outlandish, since you and I collaborated for quite a while. What made you change your mind, you recently said, wasn’t that Gibson found the first piece, but that he found several–which of course had just the oppposite effect on me. And, of course, the flight sim data.

    I actually find it kind of baffling that we’ve been going at it tooth and nail lately, because in terms of what we’ve found suspicious, and what we consider possible that few others have even thought about, we are probably more similar than any other two researchers out there.

28. @Victor,

    From the last post, I understand that the sim points suggest a diversion from either a KL-Chennai route or a KL-Jeddah route.

    If that is correct, then there is indeed another coincidence – that being that the accident flight diverted in roughly the same area.

    That would suggest that the diversion point itself had some significance. Three explanations would be: 1) the point itself has some meaning, like a rendezvous of some sort, 2) the point is recognized for its radar profile, or 3) the point has some special connection to the IOR satellite.

    If the coincidence we previously mentioned existed on any other route at or near 10n 90e, it would no longer be a coincidence but an indication that the diversion was somehow timed to the satellite. (For what reason, I don’t know, but I could speculate for example that the BFO is fully compensated at the instant the satellite changes direction, and thus the best time to “ditch” the satellite.)

    Do you happen to have a link to calculate the satellite’s position at a given time?

29. Isn’t there issues with the satellite data in relation to orbit inclination and the pings falling not inside the timing protocols that still need further investigation to clarify where mh370 actually flew??

    Still waiting for all the detailed planning ZS must have done to make this disappearance so successful by himself.

    Not seeing the mounts of evidence against ZS.

    Just as usual for anything that points to guilty there are other information that clears him.

30. MH, we don’t know if crash in SIO and permanent disappearance was intentional or not. Nobody knows what happened on that plane.

31. @jeffwise: No, you are dead wrong about our similarities. After you falsely and publicly accused me of deliberately misleading you and others to further my agenda, I assure you we have little in common. The fact that I have changed my opinion as to what is the most likely scenario as new evidence has surfaced demonstrates that I have no agenda. On the other hand, you will NEVER change your opinion unless the plane is found in the SIO, and even then I think you will find a way to believe the evidence is planted. And your obvious obsession with Putin is going to totally consume you, if it hasn’t already.

32. Also it seems strange the volume shadow set was created the same day he is flying to Bali.. not sure if an automated process was cleaning up his computer or the times

33. @VictorI, It’s not my fault all the new evidence keeps coming in in favor of a spoof scenario.

34. @JS

    sk999 recently posted a paper that contained a blueprint for computing the position and velocity of 3F1. I simply implemented it in Python 2.7 code. If you are running Python, or are using something like Python Online, you can copy paste the code directly. It found it to be very very accurate.

    http://tmex1.blogspot.com/2016/11/public-service.html

35. @JW

    ” It’s not my fault all the new evidence keeps coming in in favor of a spoof scenario.”

    What evidence?! I might have missed that…

36. JS asked, “Do you happen to have a link to calculate the satellite’s position at a given time?”

    I use the empirical equations of the PAR5 fit from Henrik Rydberg. The values are found here:
    http://bitmath.org/mh370/satellite-par5-ecef.txt.gz

    Others here (like @DennisW) are using a relation proposed by @sk999.
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7YQpAH4JIN5VjZ2cmFvSXl2T00/view

    I don’t think there is much difference as they are both based on the same satellite vectors from Inmarsat.

37. Interesting that the final conclusion on the last page of the forensic report into the flight simulator translates as:

    “The results of the examination of all goods across the case found that no unusual activity. The whole computer is used to host the game Flight Simulator only. There is also no information beyond that directly indicates across pipeline to eliminate MH370 found.”

    OZ

38. This was even more prevelant than the Daily “Fail” article

    Aishah Zaharie, the captain’s daughter, said the Daily Mail report was bogus.

    “Dear Daily Mail, You should consider making movies since you are so good at making up stories and scripts out of thin air,” she said in a posting late Sunday on her Facebook page, according to news portal Malaysian Insider.

    “May god have mercy on your souls. You can bet your ass I will not forgive you,” the 28-year-old added.

    Her brother Ahmad Idris Zaharie also responded angrily online, describing the story as “utter rubbish”.

    “im disgusted with this article … they are really pushing the human patience to the limit … how I wish its dat easy to get a lawyer n sue them. If I could I would sue them till the company needs to be closed down (which is very unlikely),” he posted on Facebook.

39. @all
    Regarding the prospect of Boeing assist on future search, I wonder if a joint-industry research project to find plane is under consideration. If it is not already under consideration, suggest that could be good approach.

40. @Nederland:
    Ouch. Well it is good to have people checking.

    I have appreciated your other comments of late.

41. @Susan Crowe: Yes, the family dismissed the article as false after it was published. The family did many things to protect Zaharie’s reputation, as families should do.

    The Daily Mail might not have the credibility of the Wall Street Journal, but do you think they completed fabricated quotations?

    If you want to learn more, I suggest you read the book Goodnight Malaysian 370 by Taylor and Wilson, and in particular Ch 13, which discusses Zaharie as the prime suspect. The authors conducted their own interviews of friends and family, including those that cooperated with the Malaysian police.

42. @VictorI said:

    “And then there was this interview with Zaharie’s daughter that was published three weeks after the disappearance. Unless the quotations were just bold lies, she said:

    – He wasn’t the father I knew. He was lost and disturbed
    – Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was about to divorce his wife of 30 years
    – He had refused to attend marriage counselling with Islamic elders
    – He shunned family and spent hours alone on his flight simulator”

    Victor, why are you again repeating false claims/inaccurate reporting (by media sites that only care for sensation and sales) that have been refuted in order to support your theory that the-Captain-did-it?

    A little Googling would bring up the refutation easily:

    http://m.thestar.com.my/story.aspx?hl=MH370+crash+Capt+Zaharie+family+and+friends+rubbish+Daily+Mail+report&sec=news&id=%7BCF515EEC-49A6-4009-8117-5CA4171E2827%7D

    http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaysia-airlines-mh370-pilots-daughter-accuses-daily-mail-making-stories-about-captain-1442657

    The Daily Mail is a tabloid that will print almost anything to gain sales – here’s another story it made up about Zaharie that has also been refuted by the person the Daily Mail reported (lied) it had interviewed:

    =============

    KUALA LUMPUR: A Malaysian pilot denied telling British tabloid Daily Mail that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was “psychologically unstable” over marital problems.

    Captain Abdul Manan Mansor, the vice-president of the Malaysian Pilots Association, said that he did not even speak to the Daily Mail or know Zaharie personally.

    “I didn’t speak to Daily Mail, I didn’t say that Zaharie was psychologically unstable.

    “You can disregard the entire article,” Abdul Manan was quoted as saying by local daily New Straits Times.

    http://malaysiandigest.com/news/495268-pilot-denies-spilling-beans-about-mh370-to-uk-tabloid.html

    Here’s the original fabricated ‘story’ in the Daily Mail (see the blue sidebar):

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592150/Chinese-aircraft-spots-three-suspicious-red-white-orange-objects-new-search-zone-Indian-Ocean-scoured-second-day.html

    =============

    You claim to be a person of science and yet you quote rubbish like this without cross-checking or taking the reputation of the source into account?

    Is this actually *you* posting these things or is someone faking your login?

43. @VictorIannello
    Are you saying the family is hiding the truth to be loyal to Z or that they are being truthful in their interviews with the author? Difficult to believe it could be both, either they are lying to protect him or they are not.

44. @VictorI said:

    “Your evidence that Blaine is a Russian agent is that he spent time in Russia and earned money while there. That and the fact that he is good at finding aircraft debris.

    Do you know how utterly ridiculous this sounds to everybody but you? Do you see anybody, on your own blog, agreeing with that accusation? That should tell you something. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.”

    And Victor, do you realise how ridiculous these attacks on anyone not agreeing with the viewpoint you keep putting forward might sound?

    There are many possibilities that still remain open, but in some posts you (and some others) seem to have ceased being open to any but your own pet theory (opinion) and instead attack anything contrary. That can not be said to be a ‘scientific’, open-minded or balanced approach.

    I repeat: Is this actually *you* posting these things or is someone faking your login?

    @Jeff – can you check the email addresses on those posts?

45. @Middleton

    “@Jeff – can you check the email addresses on those posts?”

    A rhetorical “wounded eagle” comment that fools no one.

    You are confusing attack with confront. When someone advocates the planting of debris when expert forensic analysts have looked at it and touched it without raising any issues, what do you expect? Of course, that point of view (planting) based on photographic examination by someone without credentials in that domain, is going to get confronted. That is not indicative of closed minded or biased thinking.

    Do you think the ATSB and all of their collaborators are party to a massive conspiracy when they conclude it makes sense to search for the aircraft further North on the 7th arc instead of Kazakhstan? And by implication conclude that the interpretation of the ISAT data is nuanced instead of concluding that a failed search in the SIO is indicative of the data being incorrect or spoofed as does our host?

    Please, don’t distort the pushback by assigning it to the “pet theory” category or an “attack”. It is neither of those things.

46. Based on the recorded fiight path of MH370 obtained from PDRM, it is noted that MH370 was flying in the coverage area of Sector 2 BBFARLIM2 Base Station at 1:52:59am at Flight Level 447, which is close to the time it was detected by the BBFARLIM2 Base Station.

    (PDF Page 95, Fariq-Report)

    FL447 ?

47. @Ge Rijn, Re your previous post on requesting flights by Pilots/crew. It is very common to do so, especially to destinations such as Curacao, Bonaire, Aruba, New York etc. when pilots/crew wish to add-on a vacation with family or go diving. A good friend of ours, is a FO with KLM and he often requests trips to Bonaire to dive or to New York when his wife wants to go shopping. Strange you have not heard of this before. As for ZS and request, in earlier post I said he could have requested the flight to Melbourne, since it is an outlier.

48. @All, The statements direct family/close friends make should be taken with a grain of salt. This is what you would expect them to do and perhaps MY government pressured them to stick to predefined comments and statements. The latter is really to be expected as we know that the MY government can come down on you like a ton of bricks. People will do and say anything to protect their loved ones or be in denial, even in situations where the evidence is overwhelming of an atrocious crime being committed. This is understandable. ZS family not only has to deal with the fact that he may have committed suicide, but in the process may have murdered 238 people. To survive such accussations one can only go into denial mode to stay sane, IMO.

49. @Middleton: Do you realize that the NST is a mouthpiece of the BN? Do you understand how pervasive the government propaganda machine is in Malaysia? Are you not aware of the steady stream of lies out of Putrajaya on matters pertaining to MH370? Are you aware of the 1MDB scandal, where billions of dollars are unaccounted, and a billion dollars somehow was deposited in the personal accounts of Najib? Why would you trust the conclusions of any Malaysian report?

    If you feel that in order to be “scientific, open-minded, and balanced”, I must treat a theory that revolves around Blaine Gibson as a re-activated Russian agent that is running around planting debris to mislead the MH370 investigation, then I guess I am unscientific, closed-minded, and unbalanced. And Jeff’s lists of Russian operatives keeps growing.

50. @DennisW, You wrote, “Do you think the ATSB and all of their collaborators are party to a massive conspiracy…” No, I think their motives are sincere, but I also think that they are also wrong, as they have demonstrably been over and over again in the past. And while we’re at it, you’ve complained constantly that you think they’re idiots, so I don’t know why you’re acting all shocked that I disagree with them.

    Listen, all kidding and quarreling aside, here’s the really important point: They haven’t come out and said that spoofing is off the table. They haven’t addressed it. They could have — they’ve taken time out of their busy schedules to debunk Byron Bailey, for instance. But they’ve never explained why it couldn’t be possible. If it really is as ridiculous as you and Victor say (Victor, btw, was the one who did the brilliant work showing how simply it could be done just by changing a single parameter in the SDU) then they could have dispatched the whole issue in five minutes two years ago.

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