It was revealed in previews threads that the family of the pilot stated that the flight simulator had been inoperative for the prior six months before MH370 due to a Windows re-install issue.

If the plane were to be purposefully re-directed with the intention of not being traced, the most logical person to achieve this would be the captain. With 15+ years on the 777, he had extensive knowledge of the plane itself, as well as the route. Any hijacking or catastrophic event would not have the same likelihood of carrying out the rest of the flight without detection. Some say that he was assigned to the flight last minute and did not have time to plan. I would say that he could have been thinking about doing this for some time. Perhaps the government(s) know more, and it has never been revealed. I don't know the life history/background of the captain, but given the basic evidence we have, it seems like he is the most logical culprit.

So if there is any real evidence that the plane was "flown" into the water (implying control), then once again the most logical person to achieve this is the experienced pilot.

b747400erf wrote:

The authorities from the start tried blaming the pilot because of his political affiliation. But you think they'd turn around and cover it up after their first accusations?

More nonsense...

The Authorities and the Malaysians have always distanced themselves from the pilot (Captain) did it scenario.

Only until very recently the Authorities (including Australia) have started taking the pilot did it scenario somewhat more seriously.

The Malaysians have never really considered the pilot did it scenario likely and have always tried to cover up any sugestion headed in that direction.

The Malaysians have pretty much said 'a Malaysian would never do something like that' - sound familiar? Egypt Air 990.

Sure, the Malaysians, especially the Government, could have easily pointed the finger at the Captain and tried to score some cheap political brownie points given his links, relations to Anwar, and support for the opposition. But Malaysian politicians took the same stupid path Egypt took with flight 990 and tried to protect the reputation of one of their nationals at all costs.

Maybe the pilot did it. Maybe it was something else. Out of all the possibilities adding up to 100% - I give 96% to the Captain doing it. Flame away...

As I have said before, the cover up from Malaysia from the beginning was disgusting. Are they aware of much more than we know? Of course! Was there a failed negotiation in which blame could be pinned on the government for the end result hence the cover up? Who knows... Anyway, we will probably never know. That plane will probably never be found. But one thing is certain, I will never set foot in Malaysia again nor fly any airline connected to Malaysia.

Why are you all stuck up on the captain did it scenario ? Mandala has shown us in a previews post that if it had been a pilot suicide it would've been much more likely the first officer who had reasons to mysteriously disappear in an aircraft accident.

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

Honestly, there is ZERO NEW "EVIDENCE" here! This is the exact same story that the "pilot did it" crowd brought out within a day or two of the original disappearance. And now a Canadian says it again so it's back in the news. The "flight sim data" has been discredited literally years ago...

There's probably three things changed though:
- The priority search area, based on the assumption that no-one was at the controls during the final moments, has been nearly completed - casting doubts on that assumption
- A credible person (Larry Vance) has looked at the flaperon and concluded that "Somebody was flying the airplane into the water. There is no other alternate theory that you can follow."
- The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search for the plane off Australia’s west coast, told the Guardian on Thursday that “the MH370 captain’s flight simulator showed someone had plotted a course to the southern Indian Ocean”. (link)

I've loathed the characters on here who've led the lynch mob against Zaharie on the flimsiest of evidence. Mercifully only one is still active on this thread, but it's a crying shame that they've chased off many of those in the industry who can make insightful comments on this subject. But the balance of probability seems to be shifting in that direction.

Deanger wrote:

3. Other press outlets, including the AP, dig into this and now find confirmation that in fact there was a route flown that was erased. That the data was NOT discredited.

Nope. That's exactly what was concluded about one week after the disappearance. That in fact thousands of previous flights had been "erased" (which was actually because files are naturally overwritten by new flights after a period and also because the flight sim had been reinstalled IIRC).

ComeAndGo wrote:

Why are you all stuck up on the captain did it scenario ? Mandala has shown us in a previews post that if it had been a pilot suicide it would've been much more likely the first officer who had reasons to mysteriously disappear in an aircraft accident.

Well that's the other thing I don't understand about the "pilot did it" crowd - not only is there no real evidence for it (only a heck of a lot of innuendo and supposition), there's absolutely no reason for someone, even if they had a motive (which I really don't see), to have pulled such a bizarre series of stunts instead of just staging a spectacular crash (for glory / political reasons) or just flying into a mountain / the sea (for suicidal reasons).

Stickpusher wrote:

klm617 wrote:

... if there is now evidence he actually landed the plane in the water then why not. If in fact he did do this I think he would have had someone in the area in a boat or some kind of ship pick him up remember the plane actually went into the water at day break ironically when the chances of him being seen by the boat that picked him up much greater "IF" this is indeed what happenend and that's a big if. But this I am sure of somebody doesn't want that plane found for whatever reason.

What suggests to me that there was nobody there for a pickup (apart from the sheer difficulty of meeting in that area at all, not to mention the non-appearance of an email trail or other evidence suggesting that something that big was being arranged - you'd need an oceangoing vessel out there built to withstand those kinds of seas) is the track itself. When I look at the Inmarsat visualisations it strongly suggests to me that coriolis force was at work on an aircraft flying a heading (e.g. 180), which would have the overall effect of shifting the track to the left when you are flying south. Localised winds would create a degree of deviation from the perfect curve, but I would expect it to be similar to the track we see. If the perpetrator was alive and awake, they were either unaware or unconcerned that the track was bending towards Australia. IIRC, the winds were, in the latter part of the flight, from the south, so the ground speed would have decreased and the coriolis effect would have more proportional influence, increasing the curve a little, and the fact that the aircraft was continually getting lighter, lessening inertia, probably increases it even more. But this is getting too far into speculation - the curve of the track suggests to me that nature was in control of the final destination rather than any perpetrator - who decided to take control for the water landing presumably to minimise a debris field. I'm still a bit suspicious of a controlled landing by a person though, at least until we know there are no other explanations for the trailing edge damage. If it was gliding in phugoids as suggested further up there is always the possibility that the aircraft managed a messy arrival similar to a controlled one, if it went into a spiral dive then obviously there'd have been a sizeable debris field even through there'd have been a minimal fuel slick for obvious reasons. There's just not enough data points to make any real opinions, let alone conclusions!

The debris has undoubtedly been scrutinised for evidence of how it came away. Hopefully the sea trips haven't obscured any fracture patterns or witness marks. Fracture patterns on the flaperon would at least suggest the angle it had to the rest of the aircraft when it departed the airframe, marks on its sides might reveal whether it contacted adjacent control surfaces as it went. When there's nothing much to go on, you make the best of what you have - and wait.

Thank you very much for your very insightful post as I am always willing to learn and your comment made a lot of sense why my idea might not be feasible.

The reason for the condition of the pieces and the sparsity of finds is that MH370 crashed violently into the sea,like SR111. So,when I read comments like "when the plane is found" I wonder,is there anything to find? Two shattered engines at most,what else? And the reason why readers have stopped contributing to this topic is that finally they have been convinced,as my "friend" the mechanic at Olympic airlines,that a major electrical failure took place. As if the triple seven were immune to such shortcomings (and short-circuits)! And as if the "experts" made no mistakes....

Actually, the finding of a flap and a flaperon and NOT lots of debris like seat cushions suggest (as does the condition of the flap and flaperon) controlled flight into the water, followed by a partial break up of the fuselage which takes things like the seats and seat cushions to the bottom. It is the opposite of SR111. As the investigator of SR 111 states in the article and on TV.

People have stopped contributing because there is rarely new evidence. Some see the 60 minutes report as 'new' evidence. Others have pointed out that it isn't.

The reality is the information itself is very hard to verify. Just a few lines above, one of the forum members said the flight sim route was just one of thousands that were over-written as part of the natural process of flying a lot of sims. But that's actually not what the FBI analysis (note - it wasn't an FBI report as some state, just an analysis) says (according to reports). They found this file which had been specifically erased in a manner to make it much harder to recover.

But when I try to find the source of the reports - I can't - so maybe this IS a rehashing of an old story despite them saying very specifically its not.

Last but not least, comes the variety of opinions. I know someone who was a project engineer on the 777 that says the order of failures - particularly of ACARS - rules out ANY electrical failure and all but guarantees human intervention. GZM's friend says otherwise.

All we know is a plane disappeared at hand-off - navigated deftly around radar - and apparently ended up in the Indian Ocean. Lest we forget, if it weren't for IMARSAT - we would probably still think it went down in less than two hours.

gzm wrote:

And the reason why readers have stopped contributing to this topic is that finally they have been convinced,as my "friend" the mechanic at Olympic airlines,that a major electrical failure took place. As if the triple seven were immune to such shortcomings (and short-circuits)! And as if the "experts" made no mistakes....

I don't think so. If there was a "major electrical failure" the airplane would still be manually flyable, so it would have to also include pilot incapacitation, in which case it wouldn't have continued flying for 7 hours. So you need a major electrical failure that is very selective about which systems fail (i. e. autopilot/autothrottle still available), two incapacitated pilots and several hundred incapacitated passengers -- that's a real stretch. That's in the less than 1 billionth of a percent range -- pilot (either one) did it has much better odds.

ComeAndGo wrote:

Why are you all stuck up on the captain did it scenario ? Mandala has shown us in a previews post that if it had been a pilot suicide it would've been much more likely the first officer who had reasons to mysteriously disappear in an aircraft accident.

Bollocks. Mandala gave reasons to why it could have been the FO. The reasons pointing towards the Captain far outweigh anything pointing towards the FO.

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

ComeAndGo wrote:

Why are you all stuck up on the captain did it scenario ? Mandala has shown us in a previews post that if it had been a pilot suicide it would've been much more likely the first officer who had reasons to mysteriously disappear in an aircraft accident.

Well that's the other thing I don't understand about the "pilot did it" crowd - not only is there no real evidence for it (only a heck of a lot of innuendo and supposition), there's absolutely no reason for someone, even if they had a motive (which I really don't see), to have pulled such a bizarre series of stunts instead of just staging a spectacular crash (for glory / political reasons) or just flying into a mountain / the sea (for suicidal reasons).

More bollocks.

*Make Malaysia / Government look like fools for losing a plane and not having a clue - that worked (required ditching as far away as possible in hope plane would remain relatively intact as possible and sink) - political reasons.

*Make it look like an accident to protect his family (like Calloway tried to do with FedEx 705 with the insurance policy / flying for long enough that the CVR would be recorded over the struggle) Luckily he failed because he could have made it look like an accident and taken out the FedEx HQ...

*Make it look like accident to shift blame away from him - many people on this site evidence that worked!

Seriously, just think for a moment why a pilot could have not chosen the more spectacular ending...

777Jet wrote:

*Make Malaysia / Government look like fools for losing a plane and not having a clue - that worked (required ditching as far away as possible in hope plane would remain relatively intact as possible and sink) - political reasons.

You seriously think that was "a plan"? All that effort for some mild bewilderment? To achieve what exactly?

777Jet wrote:

*Make it look like an accident to protect his family

Again, an extremely complicated a way to make it look accidental. And again - no evidence for suicidal tendencies...

And it seems again that we're talking only about the captain and not the co-pilot or some cockpit intruder. This is the issue - why are people fixated on the "one solution" and looking for confirmation bias rather than being open to what are statistically more likely reasons?

777Jet wrote:

Bollocks.
[...]
More bollocks.

And this has been the tone of the "captain did it" crowd from day one. And then they wonder why people no longer contribute to the MH370 threads.

In response to Zeke I have allowed for diversion to the alternate (no argument re alternate) plus a contingency and minimum reserve. The distances you give are misleading, with respect, and I mean that, as you are making serious points in a serious way, unlike some of the comments above, as MH370 did NOT fly south from KL. You have to allow for taxi, take-off, climb to altitude, flight at cruise power setting to near the Vietnamese coast, the published, violent manoeuvres of the aircraft, including a powered descent and further climb, then a fight back across the South China Sea, at an unknown speed, since no such flight was tracked by radar, then across the Malay Peninsular, then some way out into the Bay of Bengal to account for the fact that neither primary nor secondary civilian radar, nor military radar, tracked a target consistent with a 777 close to the Malay coast. Presumably the SIO theory posits a turn to port from a point outside Malaysian radar coverage. In my opinion, the SIO theory simply does not match the probable fuel load.

I grant you it would, IF MH-370 had headed for the SIO upon departing KL. In working this problem we need to allow for the known flight-path before speculating on possible flight-paths however.

In answer to the flaperon point the Chinese 777 flaperons have not been accounted for. In intelligence work we look for a solid audit trail. With a cover-up involving governments and hostile intelligence agencies almost any marking can be recreated and evidence emerging months, let alone years after the event, should always be viewed with suspicion. The washed-up wreckage is equally consistent with the SIO theory and a cover-up, i.e. it is at best neutral. Aircraft accident investigators tend to have a strong bias against sabotage, partly because they lack training in counter-sabotage techniques. They are not trained intelligence officers and rarely seek to fill this gap in their skills-set by bringing in aviation intelligence specialists, such as myself, please excuse the ad. Like policemen, with respect, they are easily fooled into accepting evidence which has been tampered with or fabricated, because they are not looking at it objectively and are not trained to establish an audit trail before accepting it as genuine.

The most famous example of this is RAE's acceptance of an ADF panel from an Air France Comet 1A as having come from BOAC Comet Yoke Peter. Even today many in the aviation community still think that ADF panel was recovered by the Royal Navy - in fact it was supplied by the Italians and never went anywhere near the crash site, which explains why the fuselage section surrounding the panel was recovered by the Royal Navy, but not the panel itself.

In response to Siren's thoughtful comments about HF, he is of course right re HF voice (and, I would add, Morse) transmissions. I have used HF myself and heard the crackles! Analogue HF legacy voice radio however lacks computer enhancement technology. The Jindalee system is digital and highly reliable. Its performance can degrade with sun-spot activity, but I am unaware of any unusual solar activity at the material time, i.e. the Laverton Jindalee Over The Horizon radar system was not compromised. Range is classified but assume over 3,000 nm.

The entire posited SIO flightpath was within range of the Laverton Jindalee station, indeed Laverton would probably have picked up the theorised turn to the south. There was no large target in that time-frame on that track, nor was any such flight caught by the NRO's birds. There are gaps in the SATINT and SIO satellite coverage is intermittent, but good enough to pick up a 777-sized target over a distance of more than 2,000nm. There is no reporting of either electro-optical or infrared capture of the posited target on or anywhere near the posited track, indeed there was no unusual activity over the SIO that day, hence the lack of any alert or ASR activity.

No one has responded to my point that the shoot-down was caught by the Pinckney's SPY-1A radar. The posited 180 deg turn was well within range of the Pinckney, yet there has been no DOD confirmation of it, for the elegant reason that it didn't happen. The Obama Administration is going with the cover-up, but it's noticeable that the US Navy and the Pentagon are not.

Finally, if I may be allowed an anecdote abut HF. Some years ago I was sitting as an immigration judge hearing a political asylum appeal by an Ethiopian intelligence officer, whose claim to have been using HF and Morse transmissions on a recon mission was rejected by the Home Office (this is all published, indeed the Home Office appealed and the decision was promulgated), on the ground that the technology would not have been used in the late 20th century. I pointed out to the Home Office rep that so far to the contrary, Ethiopia was mountainous and that line of sight VHF transmissions would have been next to useless. I also accepted the intelligence officer's explanations that the rebels had few trained radio officers and could not readily intercept his coded Morse transmissions, and that Morse uses a lot less battery power. He had to lug heavy lead-acid batteries up mountains. The Home Office hadn't tested his Morse. We had an ex-RN Chief Petty Officer in another judge's court, and I tested the appellant in Morse with the parties' consent. His barrister looked a bit doubtful, not having thought his client's case through, with respect. As I gave the appellant the letters he didn't wait for the Amharic interpreter to translate them, he just tapped them out rapidly on the table in front of him. Appeal allowed. HF has its uses, and Over The Horizon Radar is one of them.

I ought also to have dealt with the point that you wouldn't shoot down an airliner just to murder one person of interest. This viewpoint makes a basic mistake, with respect. As I always told my intelligence students at AMU in order to understand what the Bad Guys are thinking you have to think like them. The US has only ever brought down one civilian airliner deliberately, to my knowledge - that DC-9 off Sicily. It's just not an American thing, let alone the US Navy, although aircraft from the USS Saratoga were involved in the DC-9 incident, the facts of which are a little obscure (the DC-9 captain was almost certainly warned)..

There are in fact multiple incidents of airliners being brought down because a person of interest was aboard or believed to be aboard. The most famous is the shoot-down of BOAC Flight 777 (DC-3, G-AGBB), operated by a KLM crew, the Leslie Howard flight. There is nothing in the theory that Alfred Chenhalls, Howard's agent, was mistaken for Churchill. The Germans had assets in the Cabinet Office and knew that Churchill was not on the plane. They also had access to the passenger list, indeed the Abwehr's Frank Foley, a key German double-agent inside MI6, was on the list, but pulled out of the flight at the last minute, presumably having been warned that it was being targeted.

Another notorious incident, this time involving the Abwehr's successor agency, the DVD (the 'D' stands for Deutscher by the way), who warned their asset not to board the flight, involved Cyprus Airways DH106 Comet 4B G-ARCO, blown up over the Med in 1967. The Cypriot EOKA terrorist General Grivas was thought to be on the flight. AF447 was the most recent incident before MH-370, the person of interest being Devon Oil geologist Michael Harris, who was flying to Paris with critical intelligence for President Sarkozy. Had Flight 447 arrived safely a multi-billion dollar DVD sabotage operation directed against BP would had to have been abandoned. 447 was a classic case of 'black box' fabrication. It was also brought down by a Fakour-2, this time launched from an Iranian Kilo. Most of the incident, including the warhead detonating near the aircraft, was caught on satellite, but in this case the only useful SATINT was infra-red, electro-optical sensors being unable to penetrate the cloud cover.

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

777Jet wrote:

*Make Malaysia / Government look like fools for losing a plane and not having a clue - that worked (required ditching as far away as possible in hope plane would remain relatively intact as possible and sink) - political reasons.

You seriously think that was "a plan"? All that effort for some mild bewilderment? To achieve what exactly?

777Jet wrote:

*Make it look like an accident to protect his family

Again, an extremely complicated a way to make it look accidental. And again - no evidence for suicidal tendencies...

And it seems again that we're talking only about the captain and not the co-pilot or some cockpit intruder. This is the issue - why are people fixated on the "one solution" and looking for confirmation bias rather than being open to what are statistically more likely reasons?

And what reasons are statistically more likely than a pilot did it given what is known about MH370?

UALWN wrote:

777Jet wrote:

Bollocks.
[...]
More bollocks.

And this has been the tone of the "captain did it" crowd from day one. And then they wonder why people no longer contribute to the MH370 threads.

Most of the others with more fantasy sounding theories stopped contributing because unlike you, they took the opportunity to stop making fools of themselves.

I wonder if Nav30 still thinks it went down "then and there" in the SCS? I bet he does!

GZM is still with us.

YoungMans and his "the data was spoffed... it flew north... it was taken for the tech employees... wait... maybe it went to Diego GarCIA" conspiracy / sophisticated operation James Bond 007 scenarios...

And who could forget, the spilled coffee scenario!

Quoting 777jet(Reply #71)

Gzm is still with us

Have you ever worked at the airport? Have you ever talked to airline captains face to face? If you think I can ever believe that an experienced professional with thirty years of experience would ruin his career and reputation like that for no reason, the answer is of course I don't.

Spyhunter wrote:

I ought also to have dealt with the point that you wouldn't shoot down an airliner just to murder one person of interest. (...)

The only thing preventing you from claiming similar "facts" about AF 447 (the A332 crashed in the south Atlantic) is because the aircraft was found. And the story is well understood, practically like a professionally shot movie. Almost everything about it is known to the second, and within precise coordinates.

They will find MH370, the main engines were very heavy. The pilot almost certainly brought it down. If and when they recover the black boxes, any "questions" you may pose will be answered.

You have the opportunity now to claim whatever you want. But, in the face of evidence, those claims will become be quite difficult for you to maintain. That type of thinking, contrary to directly known facts, could increasingly be interpreted as mental illness.

In response to Flighty's offensive insinuation of mental illness, I happen to be a member of British Mensa and the last professional estimate of my IQ was 185, not too shabby a score, I would suggest, although a bit lower than the CIA's estimate, I gather. Lavrenti Beria used to try this tactic in the bad old USSR and frankly it should have died with him. If you queried communism and said it wasn't working you were mentally ill - no, you were just using your brain.

The facts are that AF447 was shot down, by a Iranian Fakour-2 missile fitted with a proximity fuze, detonating, I believe, about 50ft below the starboard engine. The missile exhaust and explosion gave good infra-red images. The radios were jammed, but not the ACARS reporting system, which was disabled on MH370, to prevent the crew from acting on my published recommendation after 447 to use ACARS as a standby emergency reporting system.

I suspect what Flighty refers to as facts are the CVR and FDR printouts, but these were not retrieved from the aircraft, they were retrieved from the ocean, long after their pinger batteries had been exhausted, very conveniently. I don't accept the audit trail for these black boxes. It's not a question of rejecting facts, but of rejecting evidence for which an audit trail has not been established. It is important not to get into what I call 'Air Crash Investigation-style black box syndrome', i.e. according a near-sacred status to black boxes. These devices are easily fabricated, not least by the manufacturers. Before we take black box data into account we first have to be sure that (1) the black box in question was actually fitted to the crashed aircraft and (2) that the data has not been corrupted in any way. So far from being a sign of mental illness this is simply a rational approach to the evidence.

The official BEA explanation for the loss of 447 is that three pitot tube heaters failed nearly simultaneously leading to icing, leading to a loss of situational awareness on the part of a highly experienced and well-trained crew, who then flew a modern airliner fitted with GPS into the ocean. Please forgive my use of old-fashioned language for pitot tubes, by the way - they were called pitot tubes on the dear old Bulldog I learnt to fly on and I am afraid that still call a pitot tube a pitot tube, something Flighty will doubtless interpret as another sign of mental illness.

Why did the crew not use the GPS? Or the radar altimeter, the readout of which on the A330 is not limited as it is on say a 747 (from memory). Most GPS systems fitted to airliners will give you an altitude reading AMSL anyway, along with true airspeed and position. Why would you stall an airliner with a GPS readout to assist you? I have never taken the controls of a 330, but I imagine you get some warning of a stall from the controls and the aircraft's behaviour, even if not as clear an indication as we used to get on the Bulldog, on which a stall warning system would have been as superfluous a piece of kit as a galley stove.

And a pitot tube icing up causes a depressurisation failure, how, exactly? The hull depressurised because it had been pierced by shrapnel, and it depressurised slowly because shrapnel typically causes small holes. And how do iced pitot tubes cause the radios to fail, all of them? Or are we to be favoured with an explanation that the radios were 'them there new pressure radios' which naturally failed along with the pitot tubes?

The radios didn't work and there was no Mayday call because the ATC and guard frequencies were jammed.

If you're a pilot you might want to take note of this, because it could be your plane next. When your radios are being jammed you know you are under threat of immediate attack. If you are under threat you should do what Captain Shah had not been trained to do, which is exercise EMCON and switch off every radar transmitter you have, including your radar altimeter, as the Fakour-2 (AIM-54 Phoenix) uses semi-active homing. It also has terminal radar homing, so if it's got in close enough for terminal guidance you leave your evasive manoeuvre to the last possible moment, giving you the best chance of breaking the missile's lock. What you should NOT do is try and outrun or outclimb a Fakour/Phoenix, unless that is you're flying an SR-71, and even then you may not make it.

Nice to see the professionalism of pilots being defended. Airline pilots are NOT generally given to murdering their passengers, or committing suicide. Captain Shah was a good man, and a dedicated pilot. He took care of his passengers, exhibited a high degree of professionalism in his work and was proud of his profession. He had every right to be.

Is there any particular reason, by the way, why 777Jet's profile photo is of a 747-400, or am I just being picky?

So AF 447 was another missile shoot down due to secret agents onboard? Just trying to get some "facts..." As to respecting the dead... agree to disagree?

You are displaying knowledge, yet I question whether it is being used. For example, let's say the black boxes are faked. Are the voices faked? Wouldn't certain aspects of the faked black box be self contradictory? It would take a team of experts to do program the fake black box plausibly. From where is this team recruited? Are they sworn to secrecy? Isn't imagination your main source of evidence?

By the way, I fully support your contention that things are not always what they appear to be. There is deception in the world. But it is difficult work. And it should be as small in scale as possible. And very few complex deceptions have been successfully uncovered.

How about the other MH plane over Ukraine? Do you believe the Russian shoot down story? Or, because it is the official story, does that make it false as well? I will follow you as far as I can, but that isn't very far I am afraid.

From the NYT

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia has confirmed one of the pilots of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had plotted a course on his home flight simulator to the southern Indian Ocean, where the missing jet is believed to have crashed.

It's the first time Malaysia has acknowledged the route was on Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah's simulator. Australian officials overseeing the search for the plane last month said data recovered from the simulator included a flight path to the southern Indian Ocean.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/08 ... .html?_r=0

Yes, the pilot did it (Zaharie).

Now they may even have an indication of the actual path 9MMRO flew to the Southern Ocean, and if the indicated flight path jibes with the more northerly locations predicted by the reverse plots of the debris that has turned up, maybe even a fairly well defined location to search.

I personally think that the Malaysian government is unfit to conduct this investigation.

salttee wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/08 ... .html?_r=0

Yes, the pilot did it (Zaharie).

Now they may even have an indication of the actual path 9MMRO flew to the Southern Ocean, and if the indicated flight path jibes with the more northerly locations predicted by the reverse plots of the debris that has turned up, maybe even a fairly well defined location to search.

Ooh not so quick. There's a lot we don't know:
- What route was "flown" in the simulator, and how similar it was to the route taken by MH370? NY Mag put up a screenshot from google earth which is similar, though ends some distance away, but earlier Daily Telegraph (and "confirmed" by their sources in the FBI) had the flight going to an Island airport. The nearest I'm aware of that I would call the SIO is in Rodriquez, but wherever, that's nowhere near where MH370 went. Of course they could both be right . . .
- If we even have a route at all. NY Mag implied that what the FBI have is 6 points on a breadcrumb trail in a corrupt deleted file. If we had the entire file, what would it look like? Does the flight terminate at the 6th point? Or does he swing round and "land" at Perth?
- When did it happen? NY Mag, inspite of claiming to have seen the specifics, say a vague "many weeks". What does that mean? 520 weeks is many, too.
- When was it deleted? On it's own? As part of a reinstall (as suggested by some)? As part of general housekeeping? Was there an attempt at using a secure deletion tool?

We do know a few things:
- It was one of "Thousands" according to both the Aussies and the Malaysians
- In spite of seemingly being aware of this the Australians spent many millions on the search, so presumably it's not that convincing
- The first official confirmation came from Australian officials just at the point they're (rightly) going to spend no more. Handy.

One thing that puzzles me though - and this is a question rather than making a point - why would an experienced 777 captain want to dry run flying several hours over an ocean, even if he was planning the whole thing? Surely that's the easy bit.

It is not uncommon for people planing a suicide to do a "test run" and invest time in planing their own death.

Spyhunter wrote:

Another notorious incident, this time involving the Abwehr's successor agency, the DVD (the 'D' stands for Deutscher by the way), who warned their asset not to board the flight, involved Cyprus Airways DH106 Comet 4B G-ARCO, blown up over the Med in 1967. The Cypriot EOKA terrorist General Grivas was thought to be on the flight. AF447 was the most recent incident before MH-370, the person of interest being Devon Oil geologist Michael Harris, who was flying to Paris with critical intelligence for President Sarkozy. Had Flight 447 arrived safely a multi-billion dollar DVD sabotage operation directed against BP would had to have been abandoned. 447 was a classic case of 'black box' fabrication. It was also brought down by a Fakour-2, this time launched from an Iranian Kilo. Most of the incident, including the warhead detonating near the aircraft, was caught on satellite, but in this case the only useful SATINT was infra-red, electro-optical sensors being unable to penetrate the cloud cover.

So let me get this straight, a German intelligence agency had AF447 shot down by an Iranian Kilo using a Fakour-2 missile to sabotage BP?

777Jet wrote:

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

This is the issue - why are people fixated on the "one solution" and looking for confirmation bias rather than being open to what are statistically more likely reasons?

And what reasons are statistically more likely than a pilot did it given what is known about MH370?

Just about everything.

I know you won't agree with that, but statistically - and I mean this quite literally - pilot suicide is waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy down on the list of causes for accidents. I'm not excluding it since it's happened before - *very* rarely - but approaching this from a rational investigative point of view there is just so much more chance of it being human error and/or mechanical failure. And despite what people say here there is - again quite literally - no evidence that precludes any of the usual human error or mechanical failures from being the root cause of the whole thing.

It's baffling, yes, and baffling mysteries cause people to explain away their own discomfort at not understanding what's happened by placing the blame either on a freak event or the conscious actions of some perpetrator. This is a psychological known. But usually, like AF447, all the conspiracies will vanish in a puff of logic when real evidence finally emerges.

Unfortunately for us pilot-didn't-necessarily-do-it members, that evidence shows no sign of turning up just yet.

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

why are people {NOT} open to what are statistically more likely reasons?

777Jet then queried:

what reasons are statistically more likely than a pilot did it given what is known about MH370?

SomebodyInTLS 's response:

Just about everything (bla bla)..........................................................................................................................................

But 777Jet's question remains unanswered:

what reasons (Known to SomebodyinTLS) are statistically more likely than a pilot did it given what is known about MH370?

The response here would have to provide specific scenarios of something or somethings that are " statistically more likely than a pilot did it given what is known about MH370"

Until a specific response is provided, this conversation is just an exercise in vagueness.

In response to Seahawk (interesting ID - did you use to fly Armstrong-Whitworth Seahawks?), yes. The DVD sponsored the Iranian Revolution and work closely with the Iranians. The DVD and VEVAK are effectively sister agencies, as I learnt to my cost in some 15 years ago when they teamed up to target me after my discovery of the DVD.

In response to Flighty, I would not use the words "secret agent", which belong in the mouth of a Louisiana sheriff in a Bond script. There was a person of interest on 447, Mike Harrison. Over $10 billion was at stake - more people have been wasted for less. Neither the DVD nor the Iranian Government attach much value to human life, indeed the British Cabinet Office doesn't either. Your try getting through a policy which saves lives but costs £10 per life saved!

Pilot suicide is exceedingly rare, outside the Japanese Army Air Force and Imperial Japanese Navy Air Force at any rate. - the Germanwings incident doesn't look like suicide, although I've not written about it or studied it closely. If it wasn't that just leaves Egyptair. Suicide can safely be ruled out - there are simply no indicators of it, and it's effectively just a wild allegation against professional pilots who can't answer back. Malaysian Airlines are quite a well-run outfit. I can't speak for their Economy Class but their First Class used to be very good, and the professionalism displayed in the cabin runs through their operational side. They have a common heritage with Singapore Airlines of course, and have not been to blame in any of their fatal crashes.

More to the point an exhaustive search of the SIO has failed to find the aircraft, as I predicted in 2014, and warned the Australian Government, who in fairness scaled back their search effort after a review of the Laverton Jindalee data and a meeting between Tony Abbott, a nice man, and the Malaysian PM. Since the plane is on the floor of the South China Sea I'm not surprised that the search in the Indian Ocean has not borne fruit. That's another thing I taught my masters intelligence students - when searching for a wreck, of either a ship or a plane, first make sure that you have the right ocean.

MH17 was shot down by the Chinese version of the Buk, a Chinese crew having flown into a Ukrainian air base in the 7 days prior to the crash, I believe in an IL-96. They had been practising high-altitude interceptions for weeks before that. In order to make sure the plane made the kill zone, which was tightly confined due to the need to blame the Russian rebels and by implication President Putin, the aircraft was attacked by a Ukrainian Su-25 fitted with an upgraded radar and fire-control system, with its titanium armour tub removed, giving it an adequate performance at altitude. The Frogfoot attacked from the port side, aiming at the cockpit, with a view to killing or disabling the pilots. The radios were jammed again. An armed Ukrainian intelligence officer was in Kiev ATC, making sure the plane was funnelled into the war zone. It shouldn't have been anywhere near where it shot down. Listening to some commentators you would think the Russian rebels had set up their own ATC and were controlling their airspace.

Exit holes from the cannon (23 mil from memory) are visible in the wreckage. The Russian rebels were trapped into acquiring a Buk, but they had a launcher only without radar, making it useless for a high-altitude interception. They also lacked the arming codes, without which a Buk cannot be fired, in short they are blameless.

Some intellectually dishonest commentators alighted on the service ceiling of the Su-25, ignoring both the argument that it had been lightened (it did not need armour to engage an unarmed civilian airliner) and official statements of the Russian Ministry of Defence, confirming that a -25 could reach MH17's altitude on combat power, and could maintain that FL for about 10 minutes. That makes sense - one always has to be wary of published performance figures for military kites. Are the figures for combat power, or are they sustainable?

The target was clearly the Russian government, and President Putin, a nice man I gather, in particular. My assessment of the shoot-down is I believe shared by the GRU. My published commentary on http://www.VeteransToday.com was monitored in Russia, indeed I copied my articles on MH17 to a nice, retired GRU colonel as a courtesy, who happens to know the president.

[quote="Spyhunter"][/quote]
Easy there, Tom Clancy.

stburke wrote:

Easy there, Tom Clancy.

Shhh.....he's writing his greatest novel; "The Final Flights of HM073 & HM71".

klm617 wrote:

What makes this so different a 777 landing at low speed in the water is certainly do able.

Based on what?

...go ahead, tell us all about the last time that someone was able to land a widebody jet on sea water (very different than a flat river) WITHOUT causing a breakup that killed nearly half the people on board or more?

We'll wait.

It is easy to mock that which you do not understand, neutrino and stburke. With respect, you are clearly out of your depth. The problem is that the mainstream media and politicians are mostly aviation illiterate and couldn't tell a C-2 from an E-3,, an F-4 or a G-5. I do by the way know the difference, indeed I've been flown in a C-2A (onto and off the Enterprise (CVN-65)), and waited to take off at the runway hold position behind an F-4, a longer wait than normal of course, since I was in a Bulldog and ATC at St Athan, the RAF's Phantom maintenance base, were always careful not to have an overturned Bulldog blocking their active runway.

A more sensible comment. with respect. from LAX772LR (do you fly 777-200ERs out of LA by any chance?). Examples of the successful ditching of a wide-body airliner or military airlifter on the open sea are indeed exceedingly rare. Until we start fitting explosive bolts to the engine pylons of widebodies, ditching on the open sea is not a practicable option. Indeed, it's never actually been attempted (most widebodies brought down over the ocean have been shot down, like AF447 or MH370, or blown up by an IED, as with the Air India 747-200).

The hazards of such a course were amply demonstrated with the Ethiopian 767 ditching, which was more of a controlled crash. It's not what my old friend Captain 'Winkle' Brown RN would call a ditching, nor, given the immense loss of life, could be it called successful.

In fact there are very few successful examples of ditching even narrow-bodied podded-engine transport aircraft - I can't recall, e.g. a successful ditching of a 707 or DC-8. The last long-range airliner with good ditching characteristics was arguably the superb Vickers-Supermarine VC-10.

Since a successful ditching could safely be ruled out as an option, it begs the question of why Captain Shah would want to fly to the SIO. On the posited track, he was way beyond his Point of No Return - I don't accept he had enough fuel to reach the SIO, never mind Perth, the nearest airport to the proposed track capable of handling a 777. He certainly didn't have enough fuel to reach the nearest land-mass, Antarctica, on the posited heading, and even if he did there are no airfields on Antarctica capable of handling a 777, nor had he made any attempt to establish radio communication with McMurdo or Ross, or any other Antarctic station. I am aware there some longish ice runways, but they are really only designed for C-130s, not widebodied airliners. He had no arctic survival gear aboard and crash-landing, even if he had the fuel, would have posed extreme hazards.

So what was he doing wandering about the SIO, with no plan and no destination? Suicide, say the anti-Shah brigade, but if he wanted to commit suicide he could have done that over the South China Sea, indeed he he could have committed suicide on his way to the airport.

Another powerful argument against suicide is that neither Captain Shah nor his first officer exhibited suicidal tendencies, nor any sign of distress or emotional turmoil. Had either done so they would not have been permitted to take the aircraft out. I've saved a suicide, and believe me there are plenty of warning signs, which is why I was on the alert.

I repeat - suicide can safely be ruled out. The entire SIO theory rests on a shaky foundation. never mind that 2 years of searching have failed to find a sonar target the size of a 777. As I have said from day 1 the SIO theory is red herring, designed as a distraction strategy,to divert attention from where the doomed plane really lies, on the floor of the South China Sea, where search efforts should now be concentrated.

Spyhunter wrote:

In response to Siren's thoughtful comments about HF, he is of course right re HF voice (and, I would add, Morse) transmissions. I have used HF myself and heard the crackles! Analogue HF legacy voice radio however lacks computer enhancement technology. The Jindalee system is digital and highly reliable. Its performance can degrade with sun-spot activity, but I am unaware of any unusual solar activity at the material time, i.e. the Laverton Jindalee Over The Horizon radar system was not compromised. Range is classified but assume over 3,000 nm.

The entire posited SIO flightpath was within range of the Laverton Jindalee station, indeed Laverton would probably have picked up the theorised turn to the south. There was no large target in that time-frame on that track, nor was any such flight caught by the NRO's birds. There are gaps in the SATINT and SIO satellite coverage is intermittent, but good enough to pick up a 777-sized target over a distance of more than 2,000nm. There is no reporting of either electro-optical or infrared capture of the posited target on or anywhere near the posited track, indeed there was no unusual activity over the SIO that day, hence the lack of any alert or ASR activity.

This is assuming the OTH radar was on and active and had the ability to track an aircraft over the Malacca Strait.

Please, what is DVD supposed to mean?

777Jet wrote:

The Malaysians have never really considered the pilot did it scenario likely and have always tried to cover up any sugestion headed in that direction.

The Malaysians have pretty much said 'a Malaysian would never do something like that' - sound familiar? Egypt Air 990.

Sure, the Malaysians, especially the Government, could have easily pointed the finger at the Captain and tried to score some cheap political brownie points given his links, relations to Anwar, and support for the opposition. But Malaysian politicians took the same stupid path Egypt took with flight 990 and tried to protect the reputation of one of their nationals at all costs.

Unlike the Egyptians who have nothing to lose from protecting Batouti, it makes ZERO sense for the Malaysian government to protect Zaharie's reputation because it's in their BEST INTEREST to pursue & play out Zaharie's suicide angle and they have EVERYTHING TO GAIN by doing so. And nobody, I mean NOBODY, has ever given a logical response as to why they should protect Zaharie's reputation at all cost that takes into account the dynamics of Malaysian politics. Had they been smart, they should have fabricated evidence showing complicity among the Air Force radar staff manning the radar that night, Zaharie & Anwar to eradicate Anwar & his political faction once & for all and thus avoid the circus show that had happened over the past year or so. It's not like the previous administrations had never done that before; just ask Anwar who was once the government's brightest shining star until he chose to go against the leader at the time and was brought down on trumped up charges. The ruling party will throw anyone under the bus if it benefits them & has done so for ages.

As I've said over the past 80+ threads concerning this flight's disappearance - the Malaysian government response hadn't been stellar, but given the lack of experience over such a global catastrophy (remember, the deadliest air accident in Malaysia killed all of 100 people, 37 years prior to MH370) it's not really unexpected. They were unprepared, and what you see is a case of unpreparedness rather than a case of active cover-up. It's a far contrast compared to Russia's actions post MH17 shootdown - the coverup is patently clear in that one.

Spyhunter wrote:

So what was he doing wandering about the SIO, with no plan and no destination? Suicide, say the anti-Shah brigade, but if he wanted to commit suicide he could have done that over the South China Sea, indeed he he could have committed suicide on his way to the airport.

Another powerful argument against suicide is that neither Captain Shah nor his first officer exhibited suicidal tendencies, nor any sign of distress or emotional turmoil. Had either done so they would not have been permitted to take the aircraft out. I've saved a suicide, and believe me there are plenty of warning signs, which is why I was on the alert.

If only you knew about Malaysian politics. Captain Zaharie loathed the ruling government and is an ardent supporter of the opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. In fact his niece is Anwar's daughter-in-law, and he's known to some of the top brass in Anwar's political party so he's more than just a typical political supporter. He had campaigned for Anwar's party during the previous general election the year before, when Anwar's faction won the popular vote but lacked the seat count to form a government. So the seeds of resentment is certainly there. But the straw that broke the camel's back was the fact that ON THE DAY OF THE FLIGHT, the Malaysian Supreme Court overturned Anwar's acquittal over charges of sodomy which his faction said was politically motivated. Therein lies the motive.

IF the captain did do it purposely, he didn't do it to kill himself. He did it to be a martyr for his political cause, hence no signs of suicide are necessary.

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

it makes ZERO sense for the Malaysian government to protect Zaharie's reputation because it's in their BEST INTEREST to pursue & play out Zaharie's suicide angle and they have EVERYTHING TO GAIN by doing so.

You state this quite emphatically as if it is fact; however, this is just your opinion: better preceded with an IMO. The facts are that the Malaysian government was caught reacting to the disappearance of MH 370; the government didn't directly take over the public relations management of this story until several days after the event.

In hindsight, we can see that the Malaysian government was trying to contain and manipulate the story in the early days. It took the Malaysian government about six days to acknowledge to the world that 9MMR0 had made a 180° turn and had overflown the Malaysian peninsula before turning west, heading out of the strait towards open ocean. We now know, (and the Malaysians have since acknowledged) that they knew about this turnaround on the first day, yet they kept mum while other nations searched where the plane could not have been.

If one wants to form an opinion of where the Malaysian government believed or believes it's "best interests" lie, it seems logical to begin by trying to understand why they withheld from the world this pertinent information in those early days.

IMO it looks like they were trying "contain" the story, rather than investigate the disappearance. Why would they want to do that?

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

And nobody, I mean NOBODY, has ever given a logical response as to why they should protect Zaharie's reputation at all cost that takes into account the dynamics of Malaysian politics.

It appears to me that they were trying to "contain" the story and were hoping that it would die off over time. This might have happened if not for the Inmarsat revelations. Or maybe it has happened anyway.

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

Had they been smart, they should have fabricated evidence showing complicity among the Air Force radar staff manning the radar that night.........

But their initial kneejerk reaction was to deny that there was any radar data, they stuck to this line for weeks (or months), so I don't understand how this suggestion of yours would work.

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

As I've said over the past 80+ threads concerning this flight's disappearance - the Malaysian government response hadn't been stellar...........

That's a heck of an understatement.

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

Captain Zaharie loathed the ruling government and is an ardent supporter of the opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. In fact his niece is Anwar's daughter-in-law, and he's known to some of the top brass in Anwar's political party so he's more than just a typical political supporter. He had campaigned for Anwar's party during the previous general election the year before, when Anwar's faction won the popular vote but lacked the seat count to form a government. So the seeds of resentment is certainly there. But the straw that broke the camel's back was the fact that ON THE DAY OF THE FLIGHT, the Malaysian Supreme Court overturned Anwar's acquittal over charges of sodomy which his faction said was politically motivated. Therein lies the motive. IF the captain did do it purposely, he didn't do it to kill himself. He did it to be a martyr for his political cause, hence no signs of suicide are necessary.

We agree on all that.

salttee wrote:

The response here would have to provide specific scenarios of something or somethings that are " statistically more likely than a pilot did it given what is known about MH370"

Until a specific response is provided, this conversation is just an exercise in vagueness.

With what is actually KNOWN about MH370 it will never be anything else.

THAT'S MY POINT!

Spycatcher - you are making some very bold claims here. But, if you are an academic as you claim you to be, then you should know that claims without evidence are not facts, just claims. Unless you can provide some evidence, your theories are worthless. I've googled a few of the claims you have made, and unsurprisingly nothing has showed up.

I cannot for a second believe that AF447, MH370 or MH17 were shot down and covered up. No way coud all three of these have been shot down and without anyone coming forward with evidence to support this. The more complex a plot, the harder it is to cover up. Covering up three seperate aircraft shoot downs would be impossible.

And on to the next point, why? If someone wanted someone dead, there are a thousand easier ways to kill someone than blowing them up in a plane, using fighter jets or long range missiles, and then proceeding to invent a cause of the crash, all the while maintaining absolute secracy. It's utterly ridiculous.

Also, how can you rule out pilot suicide? I am not making any claims about MH370, but surely pilot suicide cannot be ruled out. It is probably the simplest explanation (Ocam's Razor, counts on the fewest assumptions) ie. Captain Shah just wanted to kill himself. Regardless of your claims about how professional pilots are, how great MH service and staff are etc. It cannot be ruled out that Captain Shah was not responsible. Awful if he was, but possible.

Also - you cannot dismiss evidence just because you do not know the "audit trail". Yes surely it is possible that the evidence is tampered with. But this returns to my previous point - with so many people involved multiple cover ups would be extremely difficult.

And once more please, provide something of substance. You are making the claim, therefore you must provide evidence of value. So far your claims seem about as likely as the Diego Garcia claims.

infinit wrote:

I dont think we will ever get to the bottom of what happened to MH370 with Malaysis being as corrupt as it is.

I've managed our SE Asian offices for 8 years. I was based in Singapore, and managed 7 other SE Asian offices. Malaysia is no more corrupt than Italy or Poland, from my experience managing in both areas.

You might have an argument that the Malay military is more secretive, but doing business and dealing with the government's regulatory and enforcement aspects were not onerous. You are also conflating an event that happened last week, as somehow a commentary on an event that happened nearly 2 years ago now.

Don't just take my word for it.

http://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results

[quote="Spyhunter"]I ought also to have dealt with the point that you wouldn't shoot down an airliner just to murder one person of interest. This viewpoint makes a basic mistake, with respect. As I always told my intelligence students at AMU in order to understand what the Bad Guys are thinking you have to think like them. The US has only ever brought down one civilian airliner deliberately, to my knowledge - that DC-9 off Sicily. It's just not an American thing, let alone the US Navy, although aircraft from the USS Saratoga were involved in the DC-9 incident, the facts of which are a little obscure (the DC-9 captain was almost certainly warned)..

Wait, what? What DC-9 did the U.S. government shoot down? I never heard about this. I know of the A300, but not the DC-9 incident.

salttee wrote:

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

it makes ZERO sense for the Malaysian government to protect Zaharie's reputation because it's in their BEST INTEREST to pursue & play out Zaharie's suicide angle and they have EVERYTHING TO GAIN by doing so.

You state this quite emphatically as if it is fact; however, this is just your opinion: better preceded with an IMO. The facts are that the Malaysian government was caught reacting to the disappearance of MH 370; the government didn't directly take over the public relations management of this story until several days after the event.

Given the fact that what I wrote is based on my first hand knowledge of Malaysian political dynamics, I would say that it's far stronger than mere opinions. And just to correct you - the government was managing the PR management from the get go. I know several people inside MH who were dealing with this right from the start & they can attest to the fact that members of the Prime Minister's Office PR team were right there with them from Day 1.

salttee wrote:

In hindsight, we can see that the Malaysian government was trying to contain and manipulate the story in the early days. It took the Malaysian government about six days to acknowledge to the world that 9MMR0 had made a 180° turn and had overflown the Malaysian peninsula before turning west, heading out of the strait towards open ocean. We now know, (and the Malaysians have since acknowledged) that they knew about this turnaround on the first day, yet they kept mum while other nations searched where the plane could not have been.

Based on this press conference on the 9th of March - the chief of the Royal Malaysian Air Force had acknowledged that there's a possibility of the aircraft turning back. Why should he go on the record saying that if he wanted to cover things up? That is why the search was extended to the Straits of Malacca on the second day.

Have you ever considered that the delay from them to confirm the turnaround is caused by them trying to be cautious as they fear that if they were wrong there would be egg on their faces?

Press conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soY45F3tgTk

salttee wrote:

But their initial kneejerk reaction was to deny that there was any radar data, they stuck to this line for weeks (or months), so I don't understand how this suggestion of yours would work..

Based on the press conference linked earlier which was held on 9th of March, this wasn't the case. The Chief of the Air Force did deny that they had conclusively confirmed that MH370 turned back, but they did not deny the existence of the radar data.

DDR wrote:

Wait, what? What DC-9 did the U.S. government shoot down? I never heard about this. I know of the A300, but not the DC-9 incident.

I believe he was referring to the Ustica massacre a.k.a Itavia 870.

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

With what is actually KNOWN about MH370 it will never be anything else.

There is a lot of information known about MH 370's flight. With a very small margin of error we know the plane's flight path from the time of takeoff until the radar track was lost at 1822:12 UTC, just past waypoint MEKAR (and even beyond that until the Inmarsat unanswered telephone handshake at 18:39:55.354 when the burst frequency offset indicated it's southerly heading). After 18:39 the lack of heading and longitude information, exact groundspeed and remaining fuel created an ever larger unknown in the position of the flight. But up until about 18:40, or two hours into the flight, we can give a pretty accurate location of the plane for any given point in time based on known positions of the aircraft and an understanding of the performance characteristics of a 772. We know the flight path to 18:39 was too complex to have been programmed into the FMC, so it had to have had human intervention.

We know a lot about Captain Zaharie, his political and social life; we know of his facebook posts, each of these things raise red flags and together they raise a neon red flag. We know that it was him who responded “good night Malaysian Three Seven Zero” to the ATC handover at 17:19:29 and we know that the turnaround occurred almost immediately after that transmission. We now know that he had plotted a flight path similar to what was flown on his home simulator.

We also have been witness to a long series of duplicitous statements and evasions by the Malaysian Government.

I and a number of other people have gained a lot of information about the flight of MH 370, and "information" is just evidence by another name.
If you can't see it, that's on you.

If you really think it was a controlled lading, the pilot could have flown the aircraft until there was only a few hundred pounds of fuel and ditched the aircraft in a level "controlled manner." All the speculation is NOT going to prove a thing as the aircraft is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and will be harder to find than the Titanic. It is not worth the time, effort and money to keep looking for this aircraft until some real hard evidence is found and/or new technology is available to greatly improve the likely hood that the aircraft will be found.

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

Given the fact that what I wrote is based on my first hand knowledge of Malaysian political dynamics, I would say that it's far stronger than mere opinions.

You do realize that here you are giving testimony to support the veracity of your own statements. I hope you can understand that I see that as a non-sequitur. Again, what you are giving is your opinion, nothing more. Unless your real name is Hishammuddin or Razak you have no way of knowing what the Malaysian government saw as it's best course of action re: MH 370 at any given point in time. But we can easily see that their initial and later actions were to claim to have seen nothing and to have known nothing: they stonewalled it.

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

And just to correct you - the government was managing the PR management from the get go. I know several people inside MH who were dealing with this right from the start & they can attest to the fact that members of the Prime Minister's Office PR team were right there with them from Day 1.

To correct your correction, the Military remained in charge of the PR effort until the morning of Tuesday March 11th we know that the transition had occurred by then because of the complete blackout that went up to news organizations along with Daud's "I wish to state that I did not make any such statements as above" statement.

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

Based on this press conference on the 9th of March - the chief of the Royal Malaysian Air Force had acknowledged that there's a possibility of the aircraft turning back. Why should he go on the record saying that if he wanted to cover things up? That is why the search was extended to the Straits of Malacca on the second day.

Yes on March 9th the military was still releasing information that would later be backtracked and denied. On the 11th Air Force chief Rodzali Daud was forced to reverse an earlier statement and issue his infamous "I wish to state that I did not make any such statements as above" retraction. This is all covered in the original MH-370 thread on this site, we shouldn't need to re-hash all this now.

However I will offer this:
The record shows that on March 13th Hishammuddin denied a WSJ report claiming the plane flew for as many as four hours after disappearing from tracking systems.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... w-ups.html

And on the 14th, Hishammuddin stated: "I would like to refer to news reports suggesting that the aircraft may have continued flying for some time after the last contact, as Malaysia Airlines will confirm shortly, those reports are inaccurate."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_ ... 40314.html

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

Have you ever considered that the delay from them to confirm the turnaround is caused by them trying to be cautious as they fear that if they were wrong there would be egg on their faces?

They watched the flight in real time and they had the radar track recording of the flight. How could they be unsure????

TheFlyingDisk wrote:

Based on the press conference linked earlier which was held on 9th of March, this wasn't the case. The Chief of the Air Force did deny that they had conclusively confirmed that MH370 turned back, but they did not deny the existence of the radar data.

Yes there was also a lot of interesting information being leaked in the first few days: before the ministry of defense took over the situation management and ordered everyone else to shut up.

salttee wrote:

You do realize that here you are giving testimony to support the veracity of your own statements. I hope you can understand that I see that as a non-sequitur. Again, what you are giving is your opinion, nothing more. Unless your real name is Hishammuddin or Razak you have no way of knowing what the Malaysian government saw as it's best course of action re: MH 370 at any given point in time. But we can easily see that their initial and later actions were to claim to have seen nothing and to have known nothing: they stonewalled it.

I don't think it's a non-sequitur given that I based my opinions on information gleaned from people in the know, people who were actually involved in the entire event.

salttee wrote:

To correct your correction, the Military remained in charge of the PR effort until the morning of Tuesday March 11th we know that the transition had occurred by then because of the complete blackout that went up to news organizations along with Daud's "I wish to state that I did not make any such statements as above" statement.

Given that my sources are first hand, people who were ACTUALLY INVOLVED in MH370's crisis management group, I stand by my statement. As for the so-called blackout - ever considered that they chose to slow down the pace of information release because they've nothing new to report?

salttee wrote:

Yes on March 9th the military was still releasing information that would later be backtracked and denied. On the 11th Air Force chief Rodzali Daud was forced to reverse an earlier statement and issue his infamous "I wish to state that I did not make any such statements as above" retraction. This is all covered in the original MH-370 thread on this site, we shouldn't need to re-hash all this now.

No, we should re-hash it because old incorrect facts are being bandied about over & over again. Based on the 9th March press conference which IIRC was the only PC that he was involved in at that point, what he said to a question by CNN's Jim Clancy was that there is an INDICATION that the plane might have turned back. That was the official response of the Royal Malaysian Air Force at that time. But a local reporter had reported that General Rodzali went on the record stating that military radar tracked MH370, without proving that he had actually interviewed General Rodzali & or that he had stated it on the record. Maybe he had gotten an unofficial source but screwed up by attributing said quote to the General. Maybe the General had stated his assumptions on the basis that it was off the record while awaiting confirmation that the blip that the found by checking the records was MH370. However as there is no proof that General Rodzali had actually gone out to make that statement as a form of public release, he was correct in stating that he did not make such statements.

Remember at that same time the press reported that one of the Iranians flying on a fake passport looks like soccer player Mario Balotelli on the premise of this statement by the head of the Malaysian DCA: ""Do you know a footballer by the name of Balotelli?".

Note also that General Rodzali did not retract his statement about the possibility of a turn back.

salttee wrote:

They watched the flight in real time and they had the radar track recording of the flight. How could they be unsure????

The military radar data is actually primary radar data. At night Malaysian airspace would have been full of planes heading to Europe flying not just from KUL but also SIN & CGK as well, not to mention North Asian flights & early morning cargo flights coming into KUL. There is no certainty that officials had actually watched the plane in real time, and even if they did, they may not have been able to identify anything different about one blip in a sea of blips. That is why they had to corroborate it with other sources, which had been alluded to in the 9th March press conference.

In the early days of the crisis there is bound to be confusion, even more so for an agency not prepared to handle the intense media spotlight. But to take pockets of confusion and build a case of an active cover-up is just stretching things.

gzm wrote:

Quoting 777jet(Reply #71)

Gzm is still with us

Have you ever worked at the airport? Have you ever talked to airline captains face to face? If you think I can ever believe that an experienced professional with thirty years of experience would ruin his career and reputation like that for no reason, the answer is of course I don't.

Yes to both of your questions.

You still say the Captain had "no reason" after all of these discussions... Unbelievable... No, not really...

salttee wrote:

SomebodyInTLS wrote:

why are people {NOT} open to what are statistically more likely reasons?

777Jet then queried:

what reasons are statistically more likely than a pilot did it given what is known about MH370?

SomebodyInTLS 's response:

Just about everything (bla bla)..........................................................................................................................................

But 777Jet's question remains unanswered:

what reasons (Known to SomebodyinTLS) are statistically more likely than a pilot did it given what is known about MH370?

The response here would have to provide specific scenarios of something or somethings that are " statistically more likely than a pilot did it given what is known about MH370"

Until a specific response is provided, this conversation is just an exercise in vagueness.

Thank you.

I thought I was being very clear when I said "given what is known about MH370" when I asked the question - obviously not...

SomebodyinTLS can't answer the question I asked, it's quite simple.