> Forensic examinations of Zaharie’s simulator by the FBI revealed that he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370—a flight north around Indonesia followed by a long run to the south, ending in fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean. Malaysian investigators dismissed this flight profile as merely one of several hundred that the simulator had recorded. That is true, as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone.
This seems as close to a smoking gun as we're ever likely to get.
When I was hearing that first reported it was much fuzzier and they only recovered small portions of the data for the flight which makes me much less certain of the 'he simulated the exact flight' theory.
Edit: Found a source for my memory, it's from Lemino's pretty great video: [0] "the data recovered consists of 7 coordinates ... however it's not clear if the coordinates originate from the same flight session."
The part about how it was "only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight" makes it sound like at some point they found evidence that the co-ordinates which supposedly made up his simulation of the exact flight couldn't have actually come from the same simulated flight - and took this as more proof that it was in fact evidence of him rehearsing for it.
The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche, and it doesn't offer any support for any competing theories. But it does pose one question I haven't seen addressed. Why, if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into the middle of nowhere, didn't he turn right instead of left?
His route took him through populated airspace for no apparent reason. If numerous authorities in multiple countries hadn't been asleep at the switch, there would have been no mystery at all about what happened.
I find the counterargument unpersuasive. The situation is:
1) Someone flew the plane south
2) The senior pilot had the ability to do so
3) His marriage had failed and he was possibly depressed, which is a possible reason.
4) Nobody else had the ability to do so with the possible exception of the junior pilot, who seemingly had much less reason.
This countergument, such as it is, seems to be that we don't have a lot of data to support point 3 above, which is quite true, and indeed, one of the main points of the article: That the official report did not dig into point 3 in detail, and in fact seems to have omitted some key details.
But what of it? At most this is an argument that we shouldn't rule out the junior pilot, but no evidence is advanced, however weak to suggest he was to blame. And the author does themselves no favours with trivial logic errors like this:
> this flap could only be activated for takeoff or landing by command of the pilot. It could not be independently moved by the autopilot. After several weeks of detailed scrutiny, investigators concluded that the flap had not been deployed, and therefore the jet had plunged into the ocean once its fuel was exhausted without any human intervention. Langewiesche, suggesting the opposite...
If the flap had been deployed, we would know that the pilot was alive at the end. Since it had not been deployed, we don't know if the pilot was alive at the end. Langewiesche explicity gets this right; Irving gets backwards.
If you can't even construct an internally consistent argument, your attempt to debunk others will come across as lacking.
> The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche
I would say it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the simulator Langewiesche relies on and his complete omission of the fact that the Malaysian government absolutely wanted to blame Zahierie, a fanatical supporter of the opposition party, but the evidence was pretty thin.
< if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into the middle of nowhere, didn't he turn right instead of left?
Which begs the bigger question of why not just fly the plane straight down into the ocean? The problem with the crazy suicide pilot theory has always been that it's become basically unfalsifiable. Plane went left? Suicide pilot wanted to go left. Plane turned right? Suicide pilot wanted to turn right. Plane turned left again? Suicide pilot must have had his reasons.
That the crash was intentional is basically the only plausible explanation given the information at hand though, and given nothing was heard on the radios, the most likely explanation is one of the pilots. If it had been an accident, it would make a lot more sense to have crashed much sooner or otherwise have been more like Helios Airways Flight 522. (In that flight, a technician had set the pressurisation system to manual to do a test and forgot to reset it, and then the pilots didn't properly check the switch on any of the three checks they were meant to do. As they ascended, they became confused by the various alarms that went off and didn't put on their masks. Falling unconscious the plan continued on its autopilot heading towards its destination.)
Given MH370 making multiple turns over a long period, and transponder and other electrical systems probably having been manually switched off, it's the most likely explanation. We may never know for sure though.
I personally don't find it that plausible. Is it the least implausible explanation? Maybe.
> If it had been an accident, it would make a lot more sense to have crashed much sooner or otherwise have been more like Helios Airways Flight 522.
This is just hand waving, we can just as easily say "if it was a pilot suicide it would have been like the known pilot suicide crashes". The fact is that there are all sorts of mechanical events many of which bear zero resemblance to the most common or best known ones.
> Given MH370 making multiple turns over a long period, and transponder and other electrical systems probably having been manually switched off, it's the most likely explanation. We may never know for sure though.
This is circular reasoning. There's no shortage of other reasons the plane could make multiple turns. There are plenty of reasons the transponder stops working. Both could happen due to a mechanical event.
> I would say it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the simulator Langewiesche relies on.
Irving's claim in this regard is a non-sequitur: the fact that the flight's early stages, after the departure from the planned route, did not follow the simulated track, is beside the point.
There is another non-sequitur in Irving's argument about the flap deployment: while deployment would indicate that there was someone flying the airplane at the time of the crash, its non-deployment tells us nothing. And to claim that Langewiesche is wrong because this flap was not literally "shredded into confetti" is just silly.
Meanwhile, Irving ignores the satellite evidence that the turn to the south was performed at a higher rate of turn than the automated systems can achieve.
Irving also misrepresents the purpose of parts of Langewiesche's story. There is no evidence that Zahierie waited for the first officer to leave the cockpit for a break (or, as Langewiesche actually suggested, told him to go back and check something), but all Langewiesche is doing here is showing that there is a plausible explanation for how Zahierie could take control of the airplane. Similarly, the depressurization theory is merely a plausible explanation for how Zahierie could subdue the passengers, who, in this post-9/11 world, would surely try to break into the cockpit once they became aware of what had happened.
As to why Zahierie would initially turn west, there is at least the point that it is the direction in which last contact with radar is achieved as soon as possible (other than cutting across Sumatra, which might attract too much attention from the Indonesian defense forces).
It is unfortunate that the Malaysian government attempted to blame Zahierie for the crash when there was no particular evidence that he was responsible, but that does not mean that he was not. I agree with Irving that, putting the simulation aside, the evidence for him being suicidal is very weak (and for him being homicidal, there is none), but I think Langewiesche makes a reasonable case for it being the least implausible explanation that fits the physical evidence.
Especially given the Malaysian government's smear tactics and general incompetence, I would like to know more about the simulation's provenance, and whether it could have been faked (even though the Malaysian government dismissed it as irrelevant, which seems to be an odd claim from an entity allegedly trying to blame Zahierie.) I also wonder if there is any evidence of other simulations of flights that end up in the open ocean.
> I would like to know more about the simulation's provenance ... I also wonder if there is any evidence of other simulations of flights that end up in the open ocean.
I'll second this. What little info we have seen can sound damning, at least as it's usually presented, but by all acounts there were over a hundred (hundreds?) of routes from the simultor, let's see them all and maybe the idea that one went into the southern indian ocean isn't actually so wild when you see a hundred plus of routes going everwhere from malaysia.
I was actually thinking of something rather different, but you have a point: if there were a lot of routes going nowhere, this one would not seem unusual... except for the fact that Zaharie apparently repeatedly came back to it, advancing it in steps to the point of fuel exhaustion. That seems very significant to me, assuming it is not a forgery or a misinterpretation of the data.
I was thinking that there might be evidence that Zaharie considered what Irving claims (mistakenly, I believe) was the only plausible course if Zaharie wanted to disappear: eastwards across the South China Sea.
What I read somewhere was that part of his flight took him in a sightseeing curve around the place where he was born, as if he was saying goodbye. The article says he "banked around the island of Penang", and other articles say he was born in Penang. It was dark at the time, though, I suppose.
I wonder what he was expecting to happen. The article gives the impression that he can't reasonably have expected to get to the southern Indian Ocean without being intercepted. So, if he'd planned to fly in that direction, was he expecting to be followed there by military aircraft? On the other hand, if he was expecting to be intercepted, why bother with all the trickery to remain undetected, seeing as they couldn't have stopped him anyway? We'll never know, I suppose.
> His route took him through populated airspace for no apparent reason. If numerous authorities in multiple countries hadn't been asleep at the switch, there would have been no mystery at all about what happened.
We might know what happened in that case... but what, exactly, do you think they could have done to change the outcome?
Say that he was "caught", jets were dispatched, and MH370 was intercepted. There's absolutely nothing that they could have done to change how the flight ends.
Only so far, no fighter planes are going to be able to match the range of a 777, without a prepared dedicated fleet of in-flight refueling, and in that region only really japan practices in-flight refueling - Indonesia has since (last year) expressed interest in buying some tankers, but still not committed to it.
"Subtracting the fuel" is a bit weird. I think even with the fuel filed until the planned destination it would have not made it nowhere on that flight path.
Also we have the last ping + some rough estimate of additional flight time (but minutes of uncertainty are already enough to have hundreds of kms of search radius)
Although I am quite familiar with Roanoke, VA. I didn't get that at first, thanks for pointing it out. I thought you were making some kind of redneck joke.
Incidentally it is 343 miles from Roanoke VA to Roanoke Island, NC.
This seems as close to a smoking gun as we're ever likely to get.