Posted on 03/25/2014 7:17:19 PM PDT by Uncle Chip
'Last joyride'
The pilot of doomed flight MH370 was devastated over his wife’s decision to move out of their family home, and could have taken the plane for a ‘last joyride’ before it crashed into the southern Indian Ocean killing all 239 people on board, says a long-time friend of the pilot.
The friend, also a pilot, said Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah didn’t appear to be in the right state of mind to be flying, warning that it was ‘very possible that neither the passengers nor the other crew on-board knew what was happening until it was too late’.
‘He's one of the finest pilots around and I'm no medical expert, but with all that was happening in his life Zaharie was probably in no state of mind to be flying,’ he told the NZ Herald on the condition of anonymity.
The friend said the pilot's relationships were breaking down, with Captain Shah involved with another woman and his wife having decided to move out of their family home.
He said the pilot could have seen MH370 as an opportunity to try high-risk maneuvers he'd perfected on his beloved flight simulator.
These shocking new claims follow reports that flight MH370 climbed to between 43,000 and 45,000ft shortly after the last voice communication from the cockpit of the plane.
A source, who wished to remain anonymous, told MailOnline: 'It was tracked flying at this altitude for 23 minutes before descending. Oxygen would have run out in 12 minutes [in a depressurised cabin], rendering the passengers unconscious.'...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I’m done with flying-—if I can’t drive there, i don’t go there!
Thank goodness all of our kids and grandkids are now living within an easy drive for us.
Sorry I don’t buy that the Co-Pilot would not know what was going on until it was too late unless he was dead before it started.
Strange........
Dec 9, 2013 - A Chinese man reportedly committed suicide in a crowded mall over the weekend after arguing with his girlfriend about her shopping.
March 10, 2014 A Malaysian man reportedly commited suicide in a crowded jet over the weekend after aguing with his wife about her snooping
So why fly a thousand miles before crashing it?
Working up the balls to do it
Until we know the relative location of the bodies, it’s possible the co-pilot was in the washroom or taking an in-flight nap when the pilot decided to end it all.
From the height of the plane, to the ocean, it would only take somebody a few seconds to hit the water.
It took that long to run out of fuel.
I feel the same way as you do about flying. It was never very high up on my list of things I liked to do but even so I have seen a fair portion of the world. I think I am done with it.
All this mystery and chaos the past couple weeks....and it may turn out to be a domestic.
Leni
And then we have this from CNN telling us that the plane dropped to 12,000ft as they lobby for mechanical error:
Source: Flight 370’s altitude dropped after sharp turn
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?iid=article_sidebar
It wouldn’t be the first time a pilot tried to go too high.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinnacle_Airlines_Flight_3701
The two pilots were exploring the performance limits of the empty CRJ-200 on the ferry flight. The pilots decided to test the limits of the CRJ, and join the “410 Club,” referring to pilots who pushed CRJs to their maximum approved altitude of Flight Level 410 (41,000 feet).
The accident sequence started when the pilots performed several non-standard maneuvers at 15,000 feet, including a pitch-up at 2.3g (23 m/s²) that induced a stall warning. They set the autopilot to climb at 500 ft/min to FL410. This exceeded the manufacturer’s recommended climb rate at altitudes above FL380. In the attempt to reach FL410, the plane was pulled up at over 1.2g, and the angle of attack became excessive to maintain climb rate in the thinner upper atmosphere. After reaching FL410, the plane was cruising at 150 knots (280 km/h), barely above stall speed, and had over-stressed the engines.
The anti-stall devices activated while they were at altitude, but the pilots overrode the automatic nose-down that would increase speed to prevent stall. After four overrides, both engines experienced flameout and shut down. The plane then stalled, and the pilots recovered from the stall at FL380 while still having no engines. At that altitude, there were six airports within reach for a forced landing. This led the pilots to pitch nose down in an attempt to restart the engines, which requires a dive sharp enough to attain the required 300 kt for a windmill restart to make the blades in the turbines windmill at 10% N2 (turbine rotational speed). The captain did not take the necessary steps to ensure that the first officer achieved the 300-knot or greater airspeed required for the windmill engine restart procedure and then did not demonstrate command authority by taking control of the airplane and accelerating it to at least 300 knots.
However, the turbine blades expanded contacting the honeycomb labyrinth seals allowing the metal to scrape on each other when the engine overheated with zero core rotation. When the engine is shutdown at altitude, the core begins to cool and the stator, including the static Interstage Static Seal (ISS), contracts at a faster rate than the adjacent rotating parts in both the radial and axial direction because of its faster thermal time constant. The relative rate of cooling of the stator and rotor results in an alignment of the rotating seal knife-edges aft of the normal operating groove in the static seal. If the clearances are tight enough and the relative cooling rates are right, contact can occur between the static and rotating seal elements. The resulting stiction can temporarily prevent the rotor from turning when only the force of ram air is applied to the core. Air Turbine Starter (ATS) torque has been shown adequate to overcome this restriction (NTSB Accident Information Brief Update for October 29, 2004.) Thus, when the engine cooled, the assembly did not match anymore and the blades could not rotate freely. The crew ended the descent when they had reached 230 kt but neither engine core (N2) ever indicated any rotation during the entire descent. Since they were too high for an APU start, the ram air turbine (known as an “Air Driven Generator” on Bombardier products) was deployed to power the aircraft, and the crew donned oxygen masks as the cabin slowly depressurized due to loss of pressurization air from the engines.
According to the article, it’s assumed he, along with the passengers, were dead. The plane supposedly stayed at 43,000 ft for 23 minutes. If the cabin was depressurized, the oxygen would only last so long before the passengers died. The plane could keep on flying on autopilot until it ran out of gas.
For that you get a bottle of whiskey, a carton of Marlboros and a couple of dancing girls.
Nope, nary a word of discussion around the fact these pilots were MOSLEMS, and apparently no looks into their JIHADI affiliations.
He wanted to make sure he used up all his frequent flier miles.
A couple of my grandkids have to travel 10,000 miles each year to visit the other side of the family.
Drives me nuts,but that’s the way it is.
.
It's not just the co-pilot. They also have cabin crew. Those would certainly start worrying if they don't see familiar landmarks (lights of cities below, at night,) and if the cockpit door remains locked, and even they cannot gain access (reportedly, the cabin crew can open the door, in case of fish poisoning,) and nobody enters, nobody leaves.
If all that happens and the cabin crew is alerted, I can't imagine that they have absolutely no way to communicate with the ground or, at least, send a distress signal. It only takes one button and two wires... does Boeing have that?
Another nail into the container of this idea is the theory that when husbands are upset about their wives or their families, and when they are willing to inflict violence onto someone, very rarely they choose to leave the "guilty" alone and instead kill a bunch of strangers. I would rather expect the husband to go postal on his wife. Killing the passengers makes no sense whatsoever, from any point of view.
One can say, of course, that the man was insane. But then we throw all the logic out of the window; we can also say that the airplane was swallowed by the antipode of the Bermuda Triangle and transported a few billion years back. Such a theory would be equally sound (such as a pure guess, with no facts to support it.)
FWIW
I keep coming back to no one has found so much as a seat cushion yet.
The plane has been claimed to have been everywhere but at McDonalds with Elvis.
This last bit of sudden certainty seems an attempt to make it all go away. Its still liable to show up on a runway in Pakistan or something.
If he was taking the whole plane down to make the ex suffer for breaking it off with him— he’d have made it clear to her that’s why he did it. There would have been a note or something.
It doesn’t seem to fit these facts.
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