I'm saying why not just lock the co-pilot out and make a dive. What's the point of the depressurizing - to be humane to the passengers?

And how long does it take for everyone to suffocate - a matter of minutes? Why all the extra flying?

If the pilot didn't value his own life and wanted to end it, what makes you think he valued the lives of the other people on the plane? It surprises you to learn mentally unstable people do mentally unstable things?

joyride

google airplanes in 2020

Insurance money.

How's that?

Maybe he didn't want the world to know he has murdered 239 people so did everything he could to make the plane disappear?

Edit: If it was pilot suicide!

Yes, I know. But if handoffs are immediate the vast majority of the time, that makes it FAR less likely to be fire/mechanical, for all of the reasons stated on the last page.

If it's something the pilots did routinely, that changes the probabilities a lot. I'm not sure if that's even possible - maybe W0X0F or someone else can help out with that question. Do some pilots just take longer with ATC handoffs than others? How often is the handoff not immediate?

The % of the time that the ATC handoff is NOT immediate makes a big difference IMO.

If it was suicide i bet any money you like the Pilot drank a few bottles of Whiskey before he committed himself.

It was mentioned earlier but life insurance policies don't pay if it's death by suicide. So if pilot did do this, it makes sense to fly to most remote area of Indian ocean.

Isn't that what happened here, though?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_So..._Bo_Rein_crash

maybe even brings passengers or attendants in for bj's. may be tough with co-pilots dead body.

Also like two weeks ago I noted hypoxia as the probable cause, which ChrisV and others shot down, for some good reasons. I don't know if I could put a percentage on what I thought the chances of inadvertent hypoxia versus planned suicide are. But for all the "you can't examine the state of mind of a guy trying to commit suicide" memes here, I noted that the exact same is true for a cabin that is slowly becoming depressurized. The pilots will start to act completely irrationally as their brain receives less oxygen.

When these guys crashed, the NTSB blamed fatigue for the pilots: 1. not checking their instruments and 2. not alerting ground control that they were losing control during landing. The effects of hypoxia would be much worse than fatigue.

Brains without oxygen are fickle. They won't operate rationally either. Accidental hypoxia due to some kind of non-obvious depressurization would explain why one pilot seemingly didn't put up a fight while the other intentionally depressurized the cabin (assuming that's what happened). Or, it doesn't explain it so much as it could potentially rule out the pilot intentionally depressurizing or crashing the plane.

Wouldn't it rather be the opposite? It would basically brand the opposition as terrorists.


Not really, here the transponder was turned off ,the plane was apparently descending to 12000 feet, flew over the malaysian mainland and eventually had to climb back to a much higher altitude to reach the location near Australia, otherwise it would have crashed much sooner because it ran out of fuel.

yup. not sure why so many people seem confused about this. you want to kill yourself but you want your family to get the life insurance, so you create an "accident". will be interesting if the bodies they exhume are all brain-dead from hypoxia, including the captain/copilot. seems pretty likely that will be the case, even assuming it was pilot suicide. that'll ensure an enduring mess.

My life insurance pays out for suicide as long as it is after 1 year of having the policy. Wouldn't have known that except I had to sign a separate form on it for some reason.

lol @ people discounting suicide theory because he wouldn't have killed 230 other people. Iirc it's happened before and even if it hasn't, people who commit suicide more often than not were in a ****ed up state, not too hard to imagine this comes with a disregard for other human life or the inability to process what killing 230 people causes from time to time.

I followed the news announcements from work during the day, from what I could gather has happened is the prime minister announced that according to new data obtained from some British company it is pretty much confirmed that the plane went down somewhere in the Indian ocean? And there have been some eyewitness accounts of what most likely are pieces of the plane?
Anything I miss? Have they shown anything that makes their statements more than just words?

Aliens.

Huh, mine does too (I just looked it up). I guess I probably knew that at some point but it seems surprising.

I wouldn't be surprised though if there is a workplace policy that might not cover suicide.

Edit: I have no idea how Malaysia works, but in a lot of places there would also be a **** ton of civil claims against a pilot that did this and I'm sure the pilot's family would end up with nothing.

Almost commonplace ? ORLY . Jokes maker

There is no way the can exhume these bodies. Violent fireball crash and two weeks in ocean can't leave much.

I think this will go down in history as a bunch of guesses. Hopefully they can at least rule out aliens and black holes.

Pretty ****ty these cameramen are getting in the faces of the families after they've just been told that all passengers are dead

Can someone breakdown what we know the plane physically did from the time it signed off with Malaysian ATC. I'm trying to understand how a plane can go up and down and turn and **** for 6-7 hours with it being on fire and everybody dead on board. Kthx.

hadn't heard before today but I guess Malaysia had a hijacking and crash that was unexplained in 1977 flight 653

If they recover the data recorder intact I think we've got a good chance of getting a pretty accurate picture of what happened in the macro sense (hijackers, suicide by one of the pilots, accident of some sort, etc.).

I don't think we'll ever know the detailed time line of what went down and why.