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The latest on the disappearance of Flight MH370 — 14 Comments

  1. I’d say the 2d one identifies the weaknesses in Langewieche’s thesis.

    I found Langewieche’s attitude repulsive, especially the repeated insults directed at Malaysia. Few 3d world countries in the post-war period have been as accomplished as Malaysia, and he paints it as some sort of worthless kleptocracy. It isn’t. The older I guess, the more I loathe journalists.

  2. Hunter S Thompson would have a field day with this stuff.
    I blame this on bad disco, and weather.
    Works for Cleveland.

  3. Cappy first of Mahathir was not Prime Minister at the time.

    It was another guy named Najib. The same guy who last year lost a General Election to Mahathir.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/opinion/malaysia-election-mahathir-mohamad.html

    https://time.com/5272113/mahathir-mohamad-defeats-najib-razak-malaysia-2018-election/

    Get your facts straight.

    Arguably it was Najib and the ruling party’s bungling of the MH370 affair that lead directly to their fall from power. To many Malaysians it was the straw that broke the camels back.

    Art Deco I’m more inclined towards the Daily Beast article than the Atlantic article due to how it read. For one thing at least the Irving cites the actual investors reports while Langewieche’s doesn’t. On top of Langewieche’s tone about my country doesn’t help me like the guy more. At least Irving doesn’t go into blaming an entire nation, just the ruling government at the time.

    Also Langewieche said he talked to a friend of the flights captain and then said he cannot name him because the guy is afraid of repercussions. That’s so much like left wing new’s constant citing of anonymous sources in Trump’s white house to emphasize their lie.

  4. I assume Langewieche invented the conversation with the ‘friend’ out of whole cloth.

  5. So everything the Atlantic claims to be “known” is just speculation. It may be speculation with decent reasoning behind it, but it’s just speculation.

  6. Richard Quest? You mean there’s a crystal meth and butt plug angle to this story too?

  7. Wm. Langewieche is a highly respected writer on aviation technology, politics, and crash investigations, and his article some years ago (also in the Atlantic Monthly, IIRC) on the brand new Egypt Air plane that the pilot intentionally —not a shadow of a doubt otherwise— drove into the Long Island Sound just minutes after takeoff, while chanting Islamic prayers (as recorded on the speedily-recovered black box) was superb. (Apparently that flight had on-board a number of very senior Egyptian military officers en route back home who had been closely cooperating with and were being trained by the US military, which no doubt greatly displeased the jihadi Muslim Brotherhood factions).

    Where Langewieche misses the boat very significantly here, is that there was most likely an major political dynamic at work beyond the MH370 pilot apparently having personal and psychological issues, and which if true would go far towards explaining why the Malaysian apparatchiki are still putting the kabosh on this investigation.

    Here are the details, which may be readily corroborated in whole or in part:

    Dr. Mahathir had been mentoring a golden boy protegé and likely successor named Anwar Ibrahim, who was something of a populist Islamist intellectual. In due course, he and Mahathir had a major falling out, and somehow Anwar was indicted and duly convicted of sodomy/criminal homosexuality; denied future political rights; and jailed in harsh conditions.

    Anwar subsequently appealed the conviction, and had a retrial, of which the outcome was that his original conviction for sodomy was upheld by the court and he was packed off again to prison.

    The MH370 pilot was apparently quite an Anwar supporter and he was evidently in the courtroom gallery for the failed retrial, which in fact occurred only a day or two before the MH370 catastrophe.

    Since then, following the collapse of the phenomenally corrupt and incompetent Nazik Rajab regime, somehow Mahathir and Anwar reconciled, and when he ran again, as a nonagenarian (!) for the top position —a four year term— the arrangement was that Mahathir would serve only the first two years, and the second two years of his term would be filled by Anwar Ibrahim, no less!

    This required, of course, springing Anwar from jail, and formally pardoning/reversing his two sodomy convictions. The peculiar political situation of Malaysia is that there is an inherited Sultanate, of which the incumbent is nominally the country’s highest legal official. And in an act that had no precedent whatever in post-colonial Malaysia, the Sultan stepped forth and issued his full Royal Pardon of Anwar.

    So far Anwar hasn’t moved into position for the second two years of Mahathir’s term. But I believe the arrangement is still on track.

    I have several times posted online this body of speculative and generally fact-checkable material, but nobody seemed to have yet picked up the ball on it.

    I suspect that whatever marital and depressive problems the MH370 pilot may have had, he was likely rabid with rage over the evident framing, railroading, and mis-treatment of Anwar, and devised an elaborate scheme —worked out in great detail on his very high end home flight simulation hardware and software— to successfully disappear the aircraft and create thereby maximum embarrassment and humiliation for both the national flag carrier airline —which may have been de-nationalized after the phenomenally stupid loss of a second new Boeing plane with 300 aboard, by MH7 flying nonchalantly over the Ukrainian rebellion war zone, around which most other airlines had prudently re-routed— and the Malaysian government itself at the highest levels.

    But the pilot was apparently unaware that even after manually shutting down all the navigational pingers and air traffic control indicators, the engines themselves continued to routinely provide coded positional, performance, and operational data to their manufacturer — I believe GE in this case— through the Inmarsat commercial satellite communication system.

  8. Alan Potkin, thanks very much.

    Langewieche’s extended investigative article (in “The Atlantic”) on the EgyptAir suicide crash was indeed masterful.

    Whether Zaharie’s decision to crash the plane he was piloting was due to personal problems or political issues is impossible to ascertain with any certainty. The question is whether it is a combination of both personal and political that triggered him to murder innocent people. The political motivation that you describe seems very likely to have contributed and may have pushed him over the edge.

    It is likely, but I’m not sure there is any way of knowing this absolutely.

    A huge question mark in your post, for me, is the final paragraph: If the engine manufacturer DID KNOW (via the Inmarsat system) the precise flight path of the pilot-hijacked plane, then why was there so much speculation and uncertainty—and resulting expensive searching and exploration—regarding the plane’s flight path after it disappeared?

    Or more precisely, if the Malaysian government was given this information and then proceeded to stonewall for political reasons (as I understood from your post), then why wasn’t this information also provided to other—international—agencies?

    That is, it doesn’t seem possible—or at least sensible—that a government should have sole discretion over how to handle information of this kind.

  9. Thanks for the kind words, Mr. Meislin… The nature of the dataset provided by the engines to GE via Inmarsat had the peculiar quality of being potentially correct but 180º in directional error. I don’t quite understand what that was all about, but it took quite some time to piece together the most probable course of the plane, and the problem seems to be that while it’s predicted final position may be more or less correct, the water depth in which the fragmentary wreckage evidently lies is something like -14,000 ft. This outcome was almost certainly intentional on the pilot’s part.

  10. Barry Meislin,

    The maintenance transmissions did not include position data nor any engine data for the most part, since some aircraft subsystems were shut down for a large part of the flight. The transmissions were only attempts to establish programmed automated communication. Position was roughly calculated based on the timing and frequency shifts of the messages received by the satellite.

    Each single transmission established a circle of possible positions on the face of the earth (or really at aircraft altitude), similar to the way GPS calculates position. This is the arc mentioned in the Atlantic article. Other data allowed reasonable estimates of which of those points was likely to be correct.

    These positions allowed an approximate interpolation of the flight path. The degree of precision is low, but enough to determine the plane flew over the Indian Ocean, not to Vietnam or Africa or wherever.

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