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Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 hijacked, official says
- Thread starter Fred Zed
- Start date
Nope. None of them was "clearly" a suicide. Evidence was pretty weak and inconclusive in both cases, and even more so for the Egyptair crash.
The Egypt Air 990 crash seems about as obvious as any circumstantial case can be.
"The cockpit voice recorder recorded the Captain excusing himself to go to the lavatory, followed thirty seconds later by the First Officer saying in Arabic "I rely on God." The autopilot was then disengaged, the First Officer again said "I rely on God." Three seconds later, the throttles for both engines were reduced to idle, and both elevators were moved three degrees nose down. The First Officer repeated "I rely on God" seven more times before the Captain suddenly reentered the cockpit and repeatedly asked "What's happening, what's happening?" The flight data recorder reflected that the elevators then moved into a split condition, with the left elevator up and the right elevator down, a condition which is consistent with the two control columns being subjected to at least 50 pounds of opposing force. Both engines were then shut down by moving the start levers from run to cutoff. The Captain asked, "What is this? What is this? Did you shut the engines?" The First Officer did not respond. The Captain repeatedly stated, "Pull with me" but the FDR data indicated that the elevator surfaces remained in a split condition until the FDR and CVR stopped recording. There were no other aircraft in the area. There was no indication that an explosion occurred on board. The engines operated normally for the entire flight until they were shut down."
No we don't have videotape, but that certainly sounds deliberate and suicidal to me.
http://www.webcitation.org/5zlFg31jj
I was once on a riverboat with 60 southern baptist preachers, and I hear more "Praise the Lord"s and "God Willing" than I could count. No suicides on the boat.
exactly the point. All the lousy "evidence" for suicide in that case was the copilot saying he relies on god, something the average egyptian says about 100 times a day
Did 25 of them storm the bridge take over the helm and attempt to ram a passing ship while while the other 35 ran to the engine room took it over and messed with the power plant?
Sex Hungary, it is the circumstances and manner in which the common expressions are used which make all the difference.
So what proof do you have about the circumstances and manner of Batouti's saying? This is the typical western racism and ignorance of other cultures. I remember quite clearly how even during the early days of the investigation the NTSB already tried to stick it to the pilot and centered their evidence on the whole rely on god thing. Quite frankly, you know you don't have a case when your biggest piece of evidence, your exhibit A, is a quote that almost every Egyptian says several times a day.
You have a audio recording on the audio recording someone says "Jesus Christ" or "Damn it" do you believe that with nothing other than the tape you might be able to tell me what was going on when these common expressions among certain people in North America were said from the tone of voice used and what else was on the tape? I'm pretty sure that you could, now I add some physical evidence and I'll bet you could now be quite impressive.
No I can't. And no court of law would ever convict someone of murder because he screamed "jesus christ" in a certain tone. And what physical evidence is there to prove it was suicide?
CNN Breaking News : Two planes leave to investigate !
OMG......seriously ! Send Cooper with a boat and hat in middle of ocean that might be more interesting.
OMG......seriously ! Send Cooper with a boat and hat in middle of ocean that might be more interesting.
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**Sophie**
I thought about that, but then why would a suicide pilot fly around the Indian ocean, and then ditch his plane around Antarctica. It makes no sense.
This is a really strange mystery
Confirmed to 100% acceptance? Never. But you rarely get people to agree on anything to 100% anyway. But there have been several cases where it was officially listed as the cause.
The problem with transmitting sound and data in real-time is the bandwidth. Satellites don't have great bandwidth unless you have a really big transmitter, and then you're stuck with the problem of cramming not only all the data from one flight, but from ALL of the flights. It would be heavy (which is a problem in aviation, weight is very important), it would be EXTREMELY expensive both to install and maintain aircraft equipment and satellites, and the trade off would be minimal. As you have it now, a lot of data already is transmitted both ways. But the real value in black boxes is the actual conversations that were made that aren't transmitted anywhere and data on every control input and button that was pushed. In the majority of cases, a lot of information can be gleaned from the data already received. For example, with Air France 447 investigators had plenty of information that suggested a stall and a pitot blockage. Enough that they probably could've ruled that as the cause. Except that aircrew are trained, since day 1 of flight school, to recognize and recover from a stall. So the hypothesis needed more information to explain what the air crew was doing that prevented them from recovering. The black boxes confirmed that the aircrew recognized a stall and attempted to initiate the proper recovery, but an inexperienced pilot at the controls cancelled it out and no one on the flight deck knew that he had done so until much later. The black boxes gave insight that explained not only WHAT happened, but WHY it happened.
Black boxes don't really exist to assign cause. In the vast majority of cases, the cause can already be deduced with existing data systems. Black boxes help figure out how to avoid it in future, or what the aircrew did to prevent recovery. For the general public, this mystery is a game and their interest will be gone once the plane is located and a cause is assigned. Even if that doesn't involve data from a black box. But to those of us in the industry, we want the black box data to analyze, scrutinize and study. We want to make our aircraft safer places, we want to be more competent and professional at our jobs, so we want every shred of detail so we can learn from every incident and hopefully avoid it happening to us.
It's like the public's desire to see transponders that can't be turned off. Sure, it might help avoid situations like this, but if you study ALL incidents, not just the major ones like this, you realize that's not a great idea and brings too many hazards to the table.
First off, accident investigations, as much as the public would them to be, are largely non-punitive. The objective is to learn from these things and make flying safer moving forward. So what a court of law would require to come to a conclusion is irrelevant. As for physical evidence...
Batouti relieved the crew far earlier than was customary. That's suspicious in and of itself.
Then, the captain leaves and Batouti is left in the cockpit by himself. 30 seconds later is when he first utters that he relies in God. For no reason, out of the blue. Is it a common expression? Absolutely. Is it suspicious to say it for absolutely no reason? A little. He might be praying to himself, totally plausible. That in and of itself is not enough to come to a conclusion. I completely agree. However, when within a minute of uttering the phrase, again for no reason, you disable the autopilot, retard the throttles to idle and apply forward pressure to initiate a dive, all while repeating the phrase, it's pretty damning. Then the captain enters and asks what's going on, and let's think about what happens here.
Imagine you're flying an airplane and, according to Egypt Air, a mechanical problem exists that has caused you to take the drastic and unexplained actions that Batouti took so far, when the captain asks you, "What's going on?" You tell him. "Thank God you're back Frank! The damned thing just nosed-over and the controls don't seem to be responding. Help me pull out of this fucking dive!!!!!" Is that what Batouti did? No. He didn't say a word. So the captain asks again, and again, and again... And Batouti is silent.
So the captain sits down, and decides to help pull out of the dive. And what happens? The elevators go split, which requires a LOT of force being applied in opposing directions. Batouti wasn't "trying to pull out" and failing, he was actively pushing forward on the control column. Hard. The FDR tells us this, as does the split elevator condition. Next thing we know, the start levers are set to cut-off essentially guaranteeing that even if the they manage to pull out of the dive, the best they can do is glide to "ocean", which is almost certain death anyway. Now at this point there's 2 people in the cockpit. Could've been either one. Except that we know Batouti has been doing things seemingly without reason, and we have the captain asking, "What is this? Did you shut off the engines?" Again, did Batouti explain his actions? Nope, he sat silently. And for as long as the FDR recorded data, he never once pulled back on his control column, instead constantly fought against the captain's input to recover.
I would accept control system failure of some kind if we had Batouti saying a single word to the captain about how he's trying, or he's helping, or explaining any of his actions. Forget the race thing. If this had been John Smith reciting the lord's prayer as he disconnects the autopilot for no reason, idles the engines for no reason, pushed the plane into a dive for no reason, ignores his captain asking what's going on or what he's doing or why he's doing things, keeps fighting to maintain this attitude of hurtling towards the ocean while the captain attempts otherwise, would you really be saying, "Hey man, people recite the lord's prayer all the time, is that all you got? Hardly damning."
It's not the words that matter, it's the context of the words combined with his actions. If the FDR were to show sudden G-loading or abrupt change in pitch before his first uttering "I rely on God", justifying turning off the autopilot and at least hinting that there was a problem, followed by him attempting to actually work with his captain to determine what the problem was and solve it, even if the controls were split, I'd believe that maybe it wasn't intentional. But there is literally no rational explanation from the viewpoint of flight crew that explain Batouti's actions. None. Words claiming to rely on God or no. There was no reason to disable autopilot. No reason to cut-off the engines. No reason to initiate a dive...
Everything he did was contrary to what would keep the aircraft in flight. Now to be fair, the NTSB didn't officially call it suicide, they simply said the cause was Batouti's deliberate actions which he undertook for "unknown reasons". But if you deliberately crash an airplane into the ocean (the most dangerous thing to crash into) at 80% the speed of sound, it's pretty obvious you had no intention of walking away. And if you can come up with a term for killing yourself on purpose other than suicide, I'm all ears.
Losing airplanes isn't particularly common so there was never really a rush for it. And they sort of do already do that. Every 30 minutes. Kind of. ADS-B will do it much more regularly as well. You're talking about "Why don't they design technology X" about a technology that's already designed and being implemented. It's just that it's being designed and implemented for different reasons. Within 3 years it will be mandatory on large commercial airliners like the 777 in Europe, and mandatory in the US by 2020. Canada is already using it extensively for northern route flights that fly over the tundra where radar is hard to install and maintain (or impossible).
The argument presented is to cover up that it's suicide so his family still gets a payout. ok fine, I suppose that's an explanation. But a guy who has empathy and cares about his family isn't likely to ruin lives of the families of 239 other people, is he? Possible, I suppose. But I dunno. It doesn't feel right to me.
