Use your intelligence – how could it possibly be suicide? And suicide actually means the mass murder of 238 people.
I can’t believe that people are still going on about pilot suicide, long after the fact became known that the Malaysian plane we’re all talking about flew on for seven hours – to the point where it would have run out of fuel – after changing course.
You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that when people commit suicide, they don’t spend seven or eight hours doing it. Somebody who plans to jump off a cliff does not spend seven hours standing at the cliff face before deciding to go over.
Somebody who swallows pills does not sit there with the bottle in her hand thinking about it for eight hours.
They just do it.
All the few cases of pilot suicide so far have illustrated exactly this: the pilot takes the plane down the first chance he gets. He takes it down. He doesn’t change course (why would he change course?), set it to cruise and then wait for hours until it runs out of fuel.
Hearing this over and over again makes me so cross. It is not only stupid and senseless, but terribly unfair. The pilot of a passenger jet who commits suicide in this way is not only committing suicide. He is also committing mass murder. How can the suicide-yakkers possibly be oblivious to that small fact?
Imagine how the pilot’s family feel, hearing him accused of suicide-cum-mass-murder, even as they are trying to deal with the horror of it all? Suggesting that he killed himself is bad enough, but when the unavoidable parallel accusation is that he killed 238 people, which constitutes mass murder, it is reprehensible.
We don’t know what this man may have had to deal with. He may actually have tried to save those 238 people.
Then thank heavens, I heard one former flight accident investigator say yesterday what I had been thinking all along: that pilots who wish to kill themselves do not set their planes to cruise and sit about killing time for seven hours until the plane crashes. They just take their plane down the first chance they get. For a start, to sit about for seven hours waiting for a plane to crash, the pilot would have to kill the co-pilot first.
Ridiculous, and offensive.
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http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
“For a start, to sit about for seven hours waiting for a plane to crash, the pilot would have to kill the co-pilot first”.
In seven hours, he could also have changed his mind about suicide.
Same as above but in a simulator Sky News:
http://news.sky.com/story/1228359/missing-malaysia-plane-mystery-live-updates
This is what pilot suicide/ mass murder looks like;
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/09/egyptaircrash.usa
http://www.ibtimes.com/pilot-suicide-when-its-captain-who-crashes-plane-1519756
It’s quick, and does not take seven hours.
This whole suicide/mass murder theory really seems implausible and is terribly cruel towards the surviving members of the pilots families.
It’s very saddening to see that people assume the worst about individuals when they can’t make head or tail of the information available.
Suicide should only be cited as the cause only when there is compelling evidence, such as in the case of the Air Mozambique plane last December.
Until such evidence comes to the fore, suicide should not be discussed as a possible cause, at least out of respect towards the surviving family members of the pilots and the passengers.
Daphne, I have defended the theory of “pilot suicide” as very plausible in previous comments, so I will courageously try to defend it again.
That does not mean that I am excluding other scenarios, but the possibility of “pilot suicide” looks probable, and frankly, intriguing. But what has not been intriguing about MH370?
Let me also say that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
Although I called it a “spectacular pilot suicide,” this is for use of better words. In my opinion, Mr. Ahmad Shah would not have simply been committing a suicide for his own personal reasons.
The attack on the New York twin towers was not an act of suicide for personal reasons by those who controlled the planes. It was a terrorist attack with suicide. It’s motivations were not personal problems of the terrorists, but political issues – an attack on America. And those terrorists wanted to commit as much damage as possible. More than 2,000 people died in that attack.
The typical pilot suicide cases reported in history involved cases where the pilot was going through some crisis and chose to use the plane as a tool for suicide – hence that short moment in which the plane is made to dive with its nose down. And in doing so, they committed mass murder – all passengers on board died in the incidents.
If Mr. Ahmad Shah took that plane on a different course, his objective could have been that of a very strong and expensive protest against Malaysia’s non-democratic government. A protest that would expose the political tension in the country, and that would put the Malaysian government’s resources under immense pressure – as it has in fact already done – and expose those in government as fools, incompetent, and possibly even as liars capable of deceiving the world in order to cover up their excesses. The case is still unfolding, and there is still a lot that may come to the surface.
I have just discovered that Malaysia has a government formed by the party that won less than 50% of the popular vote in the 2013 elections, while the party with 51% of the vote is in opposition. The following situation sounds familiar:
“Anwar and PR leaders have rejected the results of the just-concluded May 5 polls, which saw BN returned to power despite losing the popular vote.
Due to the uneven dispersal of votes in numerous constituencies across Malaysia, which the opposition have labelled gerrymandering, BN emerged victors with just under 48 per cent of the popular vote to PR’s 51 per cent by snapping up 133 federal seats or 60 per cent of the 222 seats contested.”
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/tyranny-cannot-suppress-opposition-support-anwar-tells-najib-government/
Besides, I have also just learned that arbitrary arrests and government interference with the justice system are rife in Malaysia. The opposition is treated with heavy handed tactics by a government that has been in power since 1957.
Remember that “Democracy is Dead” T-shirt which Mr. Ahmad Shah was shown wearing in 2013?
I see a number of undeniable facts in what happened on 8 March.
1. The plane was under capable control at least until it reached the Andaman Sea.
2. There was an attempt to hide the plane from (commercial) radar.
3. The plane cannot be found.
4. The pilot on the plane was very experienced and capable, and he was Malaysian. The pilot was politically active against the non-democratic government.
5. The plane was Malaysian, and it was taking off from the Malaysian capital. It disappeared on Malaysian waters.
Was this a message to the non-democratic Malaysian government? Look, you think you have absolute control, but I have the capability to take one of your largest planes, full of passengers heading to China (the region’s main force), and I can divert that plane and make it disappear in a way that you will not even find it.
What we may never know is whether the Malaysian government had any information or threats of such act, before or after 8 March. This is a very important part of the puzzle. But would the Malaysian government make Mr. Ahmad Shah an opposition hero if this was the case?
So, no one is suggesting that in this scenario the pilot lied back on his seat and enjoyed a trip of 5 to 6 hours heading south on the Indian Ocean while the Inmarsat received hourly pings from the plane. Even if this scenario is also plausible, because Mr. Ahmad Shah enjoyed flying the Boeing 777.
Once the plane was directed onto the radar-free Indian Ocean, the pilot could have set the plane on the correct altitude, engaged the auto pilot, and enjoyed his last cup of tea with cyanide pills.
But this is only one possible scenario.
Ciccio, you make a strong argument. However I know no one, nor can I imagine anyone, with such a will of steel to fly a aircraft for seven hours knowing that at the end of the seven hours he will be dead.
It takes a person of strong will and a very mentally sick person to do so.
I’d like to believe and do that other factors, technical in nature, were the cause of this catastrophe.
@Confused
Let me say first that the subject we are discussing here is delicate and I hate discussing it, but this is only an exercise in freedom of expression while we are faced with a mystery and as we choose our preferred explanation and discard others. And perhaps as we kill the time until that plane is found.
Besides, the pilot suicide cases I am aware of are Silkair Flight 185 (1997) and EgyptAir Flight 990 (1999). The facts – some of them disputed – became known after lengthy investigations. But if at the time there was the internet social media, we would have discussed the various hypotheses in real time.
We are only examining scenarios and hypotheses.
I am not sure about sickness, but strong will, yes.
Having said that, I hasten to add that when something becomes an obsession, it could become a sickness. Who is to say that an “aviation geek” is not verging on obsession? But let’s not pass judgement.
Let’s go back to the classic pilot suicide cases.
I cannot agree with the suggestion that pilots who commit suicide by making the plane dive during flight get a sudden urge to commit suicide a few minutes before they commit their act.
I think that they would have contemplated their act from a long time before. And how do they execute it? They leave their home, go to the airport, clear through the security, board the plane, set themselves in the cockpit, execute a take-off, fly the plane up, and then, while cruising, they press a few buttons or move some levers. Surely that execution would take at least a few hours?
I think that it is not entirely relevant whether MH370 disappeared because of pilot action, technical reasons, or acts of terrorism, in terms of losses that may have been suffered. If losses have been suffered, the cause does not change much, except the consequences and the lessons to be learnt.
But this should not preclude us from examining the possibility that the disappearance of MH370 may be related to Malaysia’s political situation, which I think is deplorable. It seems that, at least from his political activism, Mr. Ahmad Shah would have wanted us to concentrate on Malaysia’s political situation irrespective of what happened on MH370 on 8 March. And I think we have a duty to use the media to highlight this in any case, as much as I am sure that the Malaysian government will be doing what it takes to divert our attention elsewhere.
[Daphne – When people commit suicide to draw attention to a political situation, they commit suicide to draw attention to a political situation, with the emphasis on ‘draw attention’. They leave no doubt, and they broadcast their message. Also, they do not sit in a plane for seven hours waiting to die, unmolested by their co-pilot, passengers or other crew members. Also, this level of speculation is unfair and wrong. Freedom of expression is no excuse to reject common decency. I felt exactly the same way when those tragic young men who were escaping to Europe in the hope of a better life ended up torn apart for days in the media as potential terrorists.]
Ciccio, whilst I do not preclude the possibility of this incident being somehow related to the political situation in Malaysia, however remote I think this may be, the available facts do not in my opinion point in this direction.
People with suicidal tendencies think about suicide and its execution for days if not months. However once the plan is in action I doubt anyone would tolerate waiting seven hours for the end to come after commencement of their
I think you need to differentiate between the build up towards the act of suicide and the actual act of suicide. The build up may take days, months or years, the actual act rarely takes that long. I also believe that the state of mind in the build up is completely different to the one when a suicidal person decides to act upon their thoughts.
As I said earlier considering suicide as the cause without evidence to substantiate it is cruel,especially so to the surviving relatives.
I await further facts on the incident, but I pray that none of these point towards suicide.
The global media has been giving wide coverage to the possibility of a pilot role in the disappearance of MH370. I watched numerous discussions on CNN touching on this. I have also read articles digging into his family life.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour has just interviewed the Malaysian Opposition leader precisely about Mr. Ahmad Shah, his political activism, their family relationship, and the political situation in Malaysia – interview was on air at 8.00pm in Malta.
[Daphne – That smacks of an agenda, I’m afraid.]
Please allow me to clarify something in case I have not been very clear.
I have never mentioned that the pilot of MH370 had any suicidal tendencies, and I am absolutely not interested in that. I have also tried to distinguish a suicide from pursuing a cause with one’s life. I have never passed any judgements about Mr. Ahmad Shah, and if anything, I hope that I have supported his quest for democracy in Malaysia.
What I am trying to underline, perhaps without success, is what I think may be the real cause, given that Daphne had asked us what we think in an earlier blog.
A plane has disappeared. We do not know the precise cause, and we are not the investigators, but we were saying what we thought.
There could be a number of scenarios for the cause.
The involvement of the pilot could be one of them, and the media has speculated and investigated about this, especially since the Dailymail suggested it could be related to the political activism of the pilot. A number of facts have come to the fore. I personally found that theory most plausible because its facts and the other facts from 8 March are compatible.
In that scenario, the real cause has nothing to do with the pilot as such, but with the political situation in Malaysia.
Now I have repeatedly been trying to say – perhaps less clearly than I hope I will do now – that this scenario is the least one that is likely to be explored, because those in charge of the investigations – the Malaysian authorities – would have a vested interest in covering up and since they are in charge of collecting the evidence, we cannot be sure if evidence may already have been hidden or destroyed.
If the media does not investigate this scenario, who has an interest to tell the truth? If the international media does not put pressure on Malaysia about this, who will?
The Malaysian Opposition leader has just told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that the media in Malaysia is not free.
I have also discussed how I think the facts given to us so far by the media – at least the ones which the Malaysian authorities have not repeatedly contradicted – are consistent with that scenario. But it is only a scenario.
Ciccio, I can’t agree with you.
This was a man who owned a YouTube channel that posted helpful DIY videos on how to tune your house AC for best efficiency and who supported gay rights in Muslim Malaysia.
Obviously he was a man concerned with the world around him. Exactly the sort of man that wouldn’t kill 230+ people, a significant number (the flight attendants) being his immediate friends.
Malaysian is not a very large airline, and pilots/flight attendants are fleet bound. They tend to get to know each other very quickly.
Marlowe, I respect the fact that you disagree with me.
But I hope you are also ruling out terrorism. Would it not be unfair to consider 239 persons all suspect of the death of all the other passengers and crew? And if you do not rule out terrorism, then you would be suggesting that all those on the plane had no interest in the world around them, and no friends, and no Youtube channel, at least until they remain suspects.
You didn’t spend a whole post detailing how each and every one of the other 238 had sound motives for interfering unlawfully or deliberately.
I was merely observing that the captain did not appear to be (or I should perhaps say, since I am not a profiler, did not strike me) as the type.
Honestly, I’m stumped. I can find huge holes with all of the main theories going around. I do suspect that in time, we may find the cause to be something extraordinarily simple, perhaps even stupid.
There has been much talk of Occam’s razor, but much could also be said of Hanlon’s razor, which goes ‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.’
Sorry to come back to this argument, but I wish to address this comment:
“…Also, they do not sit in a plane for seven hours waiting to die, unmolested by their co-pilot, passengers or other crew members…”
If MH370 plunged into the Southern Indian Ocean at some time after 8.11am on Sunday 9 March, it probably did so because it ran out of fuel, and not because of any intervention by a pilot. Which would suggest that the plane was on auto pilot.
There is a list of possibilities.
There is not a shred of evidence to favour one possibility over another.
Pilot suicide must be at the very bottom of that list.
Every explanation is rational as long as no intelligence conspiracy is alleged. The global intelligence community never conspire unless it’s to protect us from false flags and staged events.
Clearly, the evil-doing-doers which George Bush Jnr. had warned us about have become rather more hi-tech under Obama’s proxy regime. So if it’s not yet another aborted flop the likes of which never surface to ordinary proles like you and I, we might want to consider the lone-looney-sniper theory, the one where one man performs a hundred tasks from different locations at the same time.
Sigh.
Just add your mystery plane to the list: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-20/mapping-every-vanished-plane-1948
There are so many ‘mysteries’ floating around yet you are intrigued by the odd plane that’s caught your eye.
Tfal zghar. Ma jafu xejn. Jackie magazine u hekk.
Just came across this on the BBC website. Makes a compelling read as it argues quite strongly that the Goodfellow theory is ‘very likely’ not to have happened
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-26640114
Why for example did the pilot use the flight simulator he had at home to fly practice runs, not in itself unusual, but then he made sure he deleted the files so that no-one could see immediately what he had been practicing?
[Daphne – I regularly delete all my emails and files and folders I no longer need. My ‘sent emails’ folder is completely empty. My inbox contains just the emails which are pending for reference. Does that mean I am hiding anything? No, it’s just means I have that sort of compulsion to chuck what I no longer want or need, even digitally.]
You say that people do not stand on a cliff edge for 7 hours before deciding to jump off. Well actually they do which is why many are talked down.
[Daphne – They are talked down precisely because they have only just begun to stand there. And if it takes hours to talk them down, which it never does, it means that what they want is attention and not death. The people who really want to kill themselves make sure they do it, with no hesitation and no waiting around for hours.]
Same with staring at a bottle of pills for 7 hours before swallowing them. Most people thinking about killing themselves are desperately looking for a reason not to do it and only when that reason doesn’t present itself do they bite the bullet.
[Daphne – Waiting until a plane runs out of fuel is not the same thing as picking up a bottle of pills which is there anywhere. We are talking here about a time-lag of seven hours between the original act of turning the plane off course and its eventually running out of fuel. In other words, once the plane was turned around, he would have taken it down immediately and not sat about for seven hours.]
He didn’t delete his files, the program itself deletes it’s own data registry after 30 days. Yet another thing that got lost in translation.
Yet another spoke in the wheel of this theory, the captain was only added to the flight at the last minute as a replacement. So much for premeditation.
Your sources, please.
Why are we insisting on a scenario where the pilot would have stood there waiting for 7 hours before committing suicide?
There were 3 pilots in the cockpit: 2 Malaysian pilots and an auto-pilot.
A possible plunge into the Southern Indian Ocean in the area currently under search would have occurred when the plane ran out of fuel, not when a human pilot may have decided to make a nose-dive. By that time, the plane could have travelled for hours on auto-pilot.
A suicide of the person in control could have taken place earlier, after manouvring the plane to the Indian Ocean, beyond the Andaman Sea.
[Daphne – Well, the news that the pilot was a last-minute replacement for somebody else who couldn’t fly kind of blows that suicide theory out of the water, doesn’t it. It’s not as though he would have got into the cockpit, having replaced somebody else on that flight, and thought, hmmm, I think I’ll just wait an hour, turn this plane around, and let it fly until it runs out of fuel, because today I really feel like killing myself and murdering 238 people. Sorry, ciccio.]
Actually, I have to swallow my words and concede this one to Ciccio. As I was googling for the reference, it turned out the story had been discounted; http://www.therakyatpost.com/news/2014/03/16/mh370-was-there-a-last-minute-pilot-switch/
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/mas-official-denies-pilot-swap-in-mh370-roster
I have been following this news item closely, and have sought to obtain my facts from the reliable, leading news sources such as CNN and BBC. Because of the location of the event, I used also other reliable Asia-Pacific sources, such as Singapore’s The Straits Times, The Malaysian Times (even if this seems to be pro-government), and the Australian newspapers.
I would never use Facebook as a source, which was the source for The Rakyat Post about that last minute pilot change. The sources I was following never even reported this claim.
Today I read somewhere that a woman travelling back from her Mecca trip claimed to have seen a plane in the waters next to the Andaman Islands, but who is going to take that claim seriously? And then the Indians have already checked the Andaman Islands.
And I am not yet convinced about the 30 days auto deletion of the flight simulator data. The main news channels did not report that.
Having said all this, it is clear that if there was deliberate action, which is what the Malaysian authorities have been claiming for some time now without contradicting themselves, then this had been very thoroughly planned.
I do not believe for a minute that Mr Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the opposition in Malaysia, was involved in this case. However, I do suppose that his court hearing on 7 March was scheduled days, weeks or perhaps even months before, and the date of the hearing was probably public knowledge.
Incidentally, Marlowe’s link to The Malay Mail Online report of 17 March says that the pilots had been assigned to flight MH370 “a month in advance.” How strange, really: Mr. Ahmad Shah was assigned to the flight of 8 March on or around 7 February, deleted the data files on 3 February, and probably knew that Mr. Ibrahim would have his sentence on 7 March. Just a coincidence?
BBC was reporting today that it is believed that the flight down the Indian Ocean was on auto-pilot.
There is another important fact that has not as yet been spelled out by the media.
If one were to examine closely the flight path soon after the plane turned West towards the Strait of Malacca, and subsequently the location where the flight last appeared on Malaysian military radar at 2.15am – at that point the flight appeared to be going north towards the Andaman and Nicobar Islands – one cannot help but notice that, if the plane will be traced in the Indian Ocean (I am convinced it will), then the plane was deliberately avoiding flying over Indonesian territory. The flight path is such that it goes round the Indonesian island of Sumatra – without ever flying over it – and eventually it would have turned south into the Indian Ocean, that vast body of deep water.
This in my opinion strengthens the theory that whoever was deliberately in control of the plane wanted to avoid the plan being foiled.
I have no doubt that Indonesia would have sought to identify the plane while it was flying over its territory.
There is no way a plane can fly in a straight line from Kuala Lumpur towards the Indian Ocean without flying over Indonesia. If flight MH370 ended in the Indian Ocean where Australian specialists are now searching, then its flight path is a remarkable feat of stealthy flying.
I read once that people who commit suicide do not take other people with them.
Did you read about Silkair Flight 185 (1997) and EgyptAir Flight 990 (1999)?