It’s too large to be previewed.
Er… to be clear talking about the .gif.
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Doesn’t seem like a strange style of reporting to me. You write for an American audience, you hang your narrative on an American character. I don’t see how that drips with privilege.
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It’s mentioned in the article.
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Ah. I missed it.
And, sometimes, the pilot doesn’t even have to “do” anything. He can “not do” something, and just forget to check the appropriate switch. Helios 522 was essentially an “accidental” version of Malaysia MH370:
But if you watch Air Crash Investigations, there’s disturbingly not a few “suicide by pilot” episodes.
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Agreed. Confetti is what the article said but the implication seems to be if any wreckage is ever found at depth it might be heavier parts spread out over a wide area.
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The pilot/perpetrator Zaharie had a crazy flight simulator setup:
That doesn’t seem a very comprehensive counterpoint; the author suggests that “sad and lonely” was the only evidence presented, dismisses the flight sim route offhandedly 20 paragraphs in, and I didn’t see anything about the climb to 45k that would have asphyxiated the passengers. The latter two things are the real smoking guns, surely, not the supposed depression.
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Mmmm - for simulator hobbyist, doesn’t look that crazy, really.
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There are two black boxes on every plane. They record information, they don’t transmit it. They do have beepers that emit a signal - for a short time - til the batteries run out - but not from a great depth of water. Also the debris field may be quite wide. Wherever it is.
FTFY…
I’m not saying that the pilot is innocent, nor am I disregarding the significant findings of fact in the article. I learned quite a bit about the investigations into that flight that I hadn’t heard before, and I think that was at least part of the point of the article.
I used the term “dripping with privilege” because he describes Gibson, for example, as “forgoing any chance of a sustained career” due to his dedication to his “mission” to visit every country. It’s hard to imagine the author foregoing the word “unemployed” for a non-white or non-male person. He’s always a well-meaning and effective amateur, not a busybody throwing his money at a problem uninvited and possibly distorting the real results.
I’m also not saying that I don’t understand why the author might want to inflate the role of a colorful but likable character, especially an American. So the author provides tons of detail about Gibson, including about his childhood. But none of the details provided about Gibson provide any context to the conclusions of the article. Was there no information about the American(s) on the flight? Had their families asked the author not to feature them? The author noted that all the passengers had been investigated and eliminated from suspicion. Nothing from that investigation could have given the article a more human face?
The flight simulator set-up is not given very much context, other than that a flight plan similar to this one had appeared in the logs. Out of how many? How recently? How common is it for commercial pilots to have similar rigs at home, and does that depend on the availability of quality flight simulators in their country of operation?
There’s little or no detail or context about why we assume that he killed the passengers via asphixiation, only that such a conclusion has become widely agreed-upon. Zaharie’s only apparent motive appears to be depression and a messy break-up with his spouse. The vast majority of people who experience depression and/or messy divorces don’t become mass-murderers, so suggesting them as motive for mass-murder is not particularly compelling. If suicide-by-pilot is actually a thing that happens more than like once per decade (or even as much as that), then commercial airline pilots would be DRASTICALLY over-represented among the population of mass murderers, and there should be an immediate investigation as to the physiological effects of being flight crew.
Taken together, this is an example of two related logical fallacies; basically if I describe A in enough verifiable detail, then you can trust my conclusion about B (a combination of Misleading Vividness and Red Herring).
Of course, the Fallacy Fallacy also holds; just because his argument is flawed or badly presented doesn’t mean his conclusion isn’t true.
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