MH370: What happened onboard?

As the new Ocean Infinity search gets into full swing the question of how MH370, with 239 passengers and crew aboard, apparently ended its flight off the coast of Western Australia is being debated again. There is industry-wide agreement that there must have been human input because the plane made at least four major course changes, something a Boeing 777 simply cannot do by itself. Read: Searchers could know where the plane is within a week. For every argument to the contrary, there is a simple explanation that brings the focus back to a human input.

Some suggest a fire knocked out the communications but there must have been over 200 mobile phones on board and when the plane flew over Malaysia they could have been used to alert authorities. For the very reason that they were not used most suggests that whoever perpetrated this tragedy also put everyone to sleep by de-pressurizing the plane. Within 30 minutes everyone - except the perpetrator - would have suffered hypoxia. If everyone on-board had suffered hypoxia as has been suggested then the plane would have continued on to Beijing and then further north until the fuel ran out. It would have flown its programmed course. One Boeing 777 Check and Training Captain put it simply. “Given the facts as we know them, that MH370 ended its flight in the Southern Indian Ocean, “human input was essential.” “It is impossible for the Boeing 777 to fly this course by itself,” said the check captain. “It required a pilot or someone with knowledge of the 777 flight systems.” Some say the plane was taken over remotely but communications knocked out but that still leaves the mobile phones available. Some suggest that the Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah made a controlled descent and landing on the sea but that has been dismissed because the debris evidence points to a spiral dive with no engine power. But that does not absolve the captain from an alleged suicide flight because he also was likely overcome by hypoxia after his cockpit oxygen was exhausted. The motives for that alleged action are hotly debated. But what remains a sobering fact is the captain practiced almost this very flight a few weeks earlier on his home simulator program and that was referenced in the final report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. Claims that there were no signs of suicidal tendencies are dismissed by experts in the field. In an article in Harvard Health Dr. Michael Miller, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School said: “many people who commit suicide do so without letting on they are thinking about it or planning it.” But could it have been someone who stowed away beneath the floor in the plane’s equipment bay which houses most of the plane’s computers? Finding the actual cause of the crash may prove very difficult as the cockpit voice recorder is on a two-hour loop and the part the investigators will want to hear when the plane first turned would have been wiped. The flight data recorder, however, will reveal details of every system. Searches will want to see who is in the cockpit - the captain or someone else.