MH370 experts think they’ve finally solved the mystery of the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight

[Will Collier]

mrlynn wrote:
[quote=N-OS X-tasy!]
[quote=Acer]
Wait, there's a button to depressurize the cabin?

The default state of the aircraft interior at altitude is depressurized. The pilot must actively pressurized the plane - it stands to reason he is also able to unpressurize the plane.
Wouldn't the oxygen masks come down if the plane were suddenly depressurized? Or could the pilot disable those, too? If the masks deployed, then surely a few passengers would have been able to don them before passing out.

And what about the rest of the crew? The pilot could not have depressurized the flight deck without first donning a mask himself. . .

/Mr Lynn
It's not talked about much in public, but pilot-commanded depressurization of the main cabin (without releasing the O2 masks) is a possible means of "hijacker control." The idea is to manually release the pressure valve (which every pilot has the capability to do) and knock out everybody on the other side of the door, but the catch is, they'll start to wake up again once you descend below 10,000 feet. On the other hand, if you depressurize for 6 hours at 30,000 feet, there probably isn't going to be anybody left alive (or at the very least without major brain damage) to wake up.

Regardless of whether that "feature" was used or not, what an absolute nightmare.

[Article Accelerator]

Will Collier wrote: It's not talked about much in public, but pilot-commanded depressurization of the main cabin (without releasing the O2 masks) is a possible means of "hijacker control."

Okay, that answers one possible objection to this theory but what about the co-pilot? Did the captain shoot him?

[mikebw]

Article Accelerator wrote:
[quote=Will Collier]It's not talked about much in public, but pilot-commanded depressurization of the main cabin (without releasing the O2 masks) is a possible means of "hijacker control."

Okay, that answers one possible objection to this theory but what about the co-pilot? Did the captain shoot him?
Maybe locked him out of the cockpit? Bathroom/covfefe break?

[rjmacs]

Article Accelerator wrote:
[quote=Will Collier]It's not talked about much in public, but pilot-commanded depressurization of the main cabin (without releasing the O2 masks) is a possible means of "hijacker control."

Okay, that answers one possible objection to this theory but what about the co-pilot? Did the captain shoot him?
Could have just waited until he was out of the cockpit....

[Paul F.]

Pilot: "Hey, bob, go back and take a look at the right wing for me... I'm getting a little weird flutter in the controls, it comes and goes.."

Co-pilot leaves the cockpit, door closes, and locks... Pilot depresurizes the plane. Co-pilot bangs on the door for a minute, then loses consciousness.

I'm not 100% convinced that's what went down, but it's certainly plausible.
We're not going to KNOW what happened unless we find the flight recorders.

[GGD]

Paul F. wrote:
I'm not 100% convinced that's what went down, but it's certainly plausible.
We're not going to KNOW what happened unless we find the flight recorders.

And even then it may still be a mystery, the voice recorder only captures 2 hours. There are two interesting time periods, the very end which may help determine if it ran out of fuel before crashing or was a controlled ditching, or if there are noises of someone at the controls. Or much earlier in the flight when it went off course and lost all contact. And if this was intentional it's possible that the recorders were shut off at that time.

[M A V I C]

blooz wrote:
Seems like if they don't have any other explanation, it must be a suicide by the pilot/co-pilot. That may be true, and sad, that they would want to take so many innocents down with them, but where is the proof, where is even the reasonable evidence of such a mindset?

For me, even if I was 75% sure it was suicide, I would't announce it to the world. Putting a dead man in the books as a mass murder without any proof feels so very wrong.

[MrNoBody]

The wreckage has not been found, though hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into the four-year search.

No wreckage & no real proof of what happened. So it's "let's revile the pilot, it must have been him" plan.
Reminds me of what the U.S. media did to Richard Jewell not so long ago.

[mrlynn]

MrNoBody wrote:
The wreckage has not been found, though hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into the four-year search.

No wreckage & no real proof of what happened. So it's "let's revile the pilot, it must have been him" plan.
Reminds me of what the U.S. media did to Richard Jewell not so long ago.

After the subsequent story of the German co-pilot who dove his plane full of passengers into a mountainside, the idea of lunatic suicide [Latin term meaning 'coupled with'] mass murder seem less implausible than it might have when MH370 disappeared (though there was the Egypt Air precedent years before).

Given the facts as I recall them, pilot sabotage seems to me less implausible than terrorism or equipment failure.

BTW, didn't they find a piece or two of MH370 washed up on some island a long way from any conceivable flight path? Or were those never verified?

/Mr Lynn