Have to say the simulator part makes me lean heavily towards the pilot crashing it purposefully, from the article -
"The most widely reported piece of evidence tying Zaharie to the disappearance was a course he had charted on his home flight simulator about a month before the crash. Zaharie had a number of hobbies, including paragliding and flying model airplanes, but he also spent a lot of time at home on his computer playing flight simulator games. He sometimes uploaded videos of himself playing on his YouTube channel, where he comes off as affable and knowledgeable, if a bit socially awkward.
In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc. Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number of other intriguing details. For example, the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight. Furthermore, although initial reports indicated that the track had been intentionally saved by the user, later analysis showed that it was kept only in the system files, and certainly was not meant to be found. Was this a dry run? It seems too odd to be a coincidence."
Also discovering that black box is a misnomer is mildly humorous, these are apparently orange! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder
This is not to say MH370 was without incident, only that apparent contradiction may be unavoidable if you look closely enough at anything.
Start at https://old.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/
If you wish to skip any comments,
https://old.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/e6n80m/pl...
and use the Medium links.
This matter isn't entertainment fiction, and nobody involved is Sherlock Holmes.
Hundreds of people died. Amateurs publicly casting blame on one of the presumed dead seems unfair to the individual accused, and insensitive to the families.
Especially when it depends on bits like this:
> How these aspects of Zaharie’s life could have led him to commit an unspeakable act of mass murder is difficult to understand. But while he was said to be an affectionate and emotionally sensitive person who loved life, perhaps something dark lurked within him, something which he suppressed so thoroughly that no one else knew it was there. It is said that the people who seem happiest are sometimes also in the deepest agony, struggling against demons that they never reveal even to their closest friends.
Why not leave this real, recent tragedy to the professional investigators.
I cannot believe that a "kill everyone" switch actually exists, and if it really does this seems like a bug. Especially because not hitting the switch would also kill everyone.
For whatever reason, this doesn't seem to be widely discussed.
how exactly do these guys fund themselves? this must be a horrendously expensive enterprise and fairly infrequent at that.
I really want to believe that a single switch doesn't control whether people in the back of the plane can breather or not...
Bayesian Methods in the Search for MH370
Authors: Sam Davey , Neil Gordon , Ian Holland , Mark Rutten , Jason Williams
Is this one of these 1 in a billion chance thing or is it not as crazy as it sounds? Like even if you were intentionally trying not to leave a trace, it is so hard to plan the drift and spread of debris and get so lucky in them not being spotted.
http://jeffwise.net/2019/03/09/the-russian-passengers-aboard...
See this: https://youtu.be/Jq-d4Kl8Xh4
The article even implies the controllers themselves did not know this:
>Initially, no one noticed the sudden disappearance of the airplane. After handing the flight over to Ho Chi Minh control, the Malaysian controller looked away from his screen, and when he looked back, the plane was gone. He assumed that it had flown out of radar range and returned to his duties without a second thought.
But there was no radar range limit. There was only a transponder range limit (or more likely an edge of the screen).
>In Vietnam, controllers expected the plane to contact them, but it did not, and they couldn’t find it on radar either. Controllers in Ho Chi Minh City began trying to raise the plane on radio without success. For 18 minutes, they sent out a series of increasingly desperate calls: would MH370 please respond? Could any planes in the area contact MH370? The only answer was silence.
So even when they were actively looking for it, it was invisible to their "radar". True radar would have told them there was a plane-sized metal object in their airspace even if it refused radio contact and had no transponder...
It turns out you can make an entire plane full of people completely invisible by throwing 1 switch. Who knew?
This is amazing.
Oops
I’ve always wondered how normal this is to cross paths with other planes that closely. I’ve seen other planes way off in the distance before but never that close.
Otherwise, the article is quite interesting.
edit: satellite data needs to be bogus though, so my theory makes perfect sense
I saw a simulation that looked fairly convincing, that showed if the plane was ditched in a controlled glide from where the last ping was received, assuming that's were it ran out of fuel, then the plane would have glided out of the area that was searched. They also claimed that the damage on the flaperons and other control surfaces that washed up was fairly consistent with landing fairly level, where those control surfaces may have been ripped off but most of the rest of the plane might have been fairly intact and would have quickly sunk in mostly one piece. It seemed fairly plausible.
Didn't the plane have two power interruptions, the first of which it is known that the plane wasn't in the process of crashing at high velocity? I wonder what effort was made to compare them, possibly allowing the effects of crystal drift and Doppler to be separated?
Maybe any unexpected frequency offsets after the first power cut can be entirely attributed to the crystal warming up after the power cut? Maybe it could be assumed that the crystal behaves similarly after each power cut, as crystals are typically repeatable with temperature? In that case the characteristics of the crystal are known after the second power cut and Doppler can be determined.
I'm sure this would have been thought of, but one has to ask.
I didn't see any comments referring to this +1hr blackout of the sat unit. This happened right after the 1.19 ATC handoff.
Does anyone know if this signal could have been faked (e.g. by someone sitting in a boat in the ocean)? I assume the tx and rcv end points have some sort of private identifier.
Did the MH370 incident change anything about the communication systems used by modern aircrafts?
What if the plane was struck by a meteorite? It certainly sounds like there was some kind of incident that caused them to turn around abruptly to head back but they were disabled. It is possible they experienced an extreme rare event. Rare dpesnt mean impossible, just highly unlikely.
I don't think this "strange coincidence" should be dismissed as the reason so easily.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Airways_Flight_2...
theories that it was apparently transporting weapons to apartheid regime in a commercial airliner which caught fire over the indian ocean and consequently covered up.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
"Perhaps the most compelling reason to believe that Zaharie hijacked his own plane is its simplicity. It’s the only explanation that doesn’t rely on a series of independently improbable events: given a desire to do it, everything else falls into place as a reasonable part of the plan. In fact, from the timing of the transponder failure to the specific locations of the turns to the flight path into the Southern Indian Ocean, it would be harder to come up with a better way to make an airliner disappear. Why believe that this is a coincidence when it could well have been the goal from the very beginning? Furthermore, whoever was flying the plane had extensive systems knowledge and excellent hand-flying ability. Who else on board had those skills but Zaharie? Indeed, it’s by far the easiest answer."
https://bocpages.org/wiki/Magic_Window
> "Magic Window" is track number 23 on the Geogaddi album. The song is one minute and forty-six seconds of pure silence.
Communication devices lost contact.
The first turn can only be done by an experienced pilot.
No distress calls. Or passenger attempted cellular communication when they became within range.
Flight path matches similarly to Pilot’s in-home game simulator.
If an explosion occurred wiping out communication devices, it was only a matter of time before they crashed. The plane was on radar and tracked going south for several hours.
Due to the many turns, someone had to be in control of the plane in some capacity after the first turn.
It leaves me to two conclusions.
An alien parasite froze everyone. Made the pilot turn off communications. Made the pilot fly a flight pattern that closely resembles the one at home.
The pilot picked that specific flight as his last. Why he didn’t just nose dived immediately will be answered in the remaining hours he was on that flight. It would be inhumane to keep crew/passengers alive to witness their own demise. Thus I believe he was alive and alone heading south.
There are only a thousand reasons aircraft operators might want to know where their planes are and if there are any issues. I’m sure that the gps position and black box data could be streamed over radio and/or satellite.
>The Malaysian investigators did look into whether the cargo could have started a fire, noting that it consisted mainly of ripe mangosteen fruits along with a small number of lithium batteries. Extensive attempts by the investigators to get mangosteen juice to react with the batteries and trigger a fire were unsuccessful.
I'm sure plenty of people here have spent time wracking their brain on a hard problem and the image of a bunch of transportation investigators dousing batteries with juice in a late-night fit of desperation really gets me.