Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

The pilot of MH370 plunged the plane into the Indian Ocean in a “final sad act” to ensure no evidence was ever found, a new book has claimed. Experienced commercial pilot and air crash investigator Ewan Wilson and journalist Geoff Taylor claim to have studied all of the possible scenarios for how the Malaysia Airlines jet disappeared while researching their book "Goodnight Malaysia 370". They blame the flight’s pilot Ahmad Shah for the tragedy, claiming the passengers likely slipped into a coma and died after Shah deliberately depressurised the cabin.

Shah performed a controlled nosedive into the sea to take the plane as deep as possible to avoid leaving any evidence of the crash. The controlled ditch theory gels with the inability to find any trace of the missing flight, because the aircraft would have gone to the bottom of the ocean in one piece. The authors argue that the captain was suffering from mental illness and tricked co-pilot Fariq Hamid into leaving the cockpit so he could carry out his plan. "This would have been his final sad act to his family and to the world: 'try and find this one'."

I think the authors have probably got it exactly right. To me it's been the most probable explanation all along.

Today's news is that yet another search area in the Indian ocean has been announced - this is further south than the priority search area which the search team have been going through for the last month. With immediate effect the search is being switched to this new area.

I saw this comment in today's Times newspaper, which seems to contradict all the recent speculation.

"Australian air accident investigation authorities co-ordinating the search have assumed it likely that an event on the aircraft, either a malfunction or a small explosion, caused the two pilots and probably the 237 passengers and cabin crew to black out and die because of oxygen starvation hours before it crashed."

Call it a conspiracy theory if you will, but I think the captain contacted someone on the ground and made demands, threatening to fly the plane into oblivion. We know the captain was a supporter of the opposition leader, who had been convicted in court earlier that same day. The demands weren't met and the plane was flown to its watery grave, just as the pilot said he would do if the demands weren't met.

(25-09-2014 12:38 )bigglesworth Wrote:  another search area in the Indian ocean has been announced - this is further south than the priority search area which the search team have been going through for the last month.

The new search has begun today. The latest search area is described as about the size of Croatia or the US state of West Virginia.

(02-10-2014 10:31 )Wayne Rasputin Wrote:  The demands weren't met and the plane was flown to its watery grave, just as the pilot said he would do if the demands weren't met.

That would of course involve a huge cover up. But whatever his motivation, I have argued from the beginning that the obvious solution to the mystery is that the captain deliberately made the plane 'disappear'.

It looks like the captain's going to cop the blame because it's a solution which suits most people, although I still don't see a very strong case against him, apart from the (fair) contention that it's the easiest solution to the plane's disappearance.

Let's sum up the case against the captain.

Firstly, there were media reports that his wife and 3 children moved out of his house the day before the plane's disappearance and a friend claimed that he was seeing another woman and the relationship with that other woman was also in trouble. The claims of domestic problems have been denied by Captain Shah's family, although a fellow pilot stated the captain was terribly upset that his marriage was falling apart.

The Malaysian police investigation identified the captain as the prime suspect if human actions were the cause of the plane's disappearance, reporting that among deleted flight paths on his own flight simulator was a flight path into the Southern Indian Ocean where the plane landed on an island. They also noted that Captain Shah had made no social or professional plans for after 8 March, when Flight 370 disappeared.

Police also investigated reports that Captain Shah received a phone call just prior to the flight's departure from an unidentified woman using a mobile phone obtained with a fake ID. Captain Shah was also a keen supporter of Malaysian opposition politician Anwar Ibrahim, who was sentenced to jail on the day of the plane's departure from Malaysia in a move viewed by many as politically motivated.

Inmarsat have an analysis published in the Royal Institute of Navigation's peer-reviewed journal on the high tech detective work that went into establishing the current search area for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. It's available at http://journals.cambridge.org/downlo...32fec41a70bb64