Not possible for the cockpit crew to shut off the passenger oxygen system. But climbing to 45,000 makes the passenger oxygen system highly ineffective. On ambient pressure 100% O2 at 45,000 feet, a healthy non-smoking adult probably isn’t going to remain usefully conscious more than a few minutes – less time than that if their cheap hurriedly donned mask doesn’t have a good seal.
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With current technology it should be possible to have satellites capture image data for that entire region and then have a crowd sourcing site where individual visitors are issued small sections to review for signs of the aircraft.
Guess the problem is that the image data would be owned by governments and few people want to offer crowd funding services that are not financially motivated.
I’m so glad the list includes Beijing. You know, in case we’re overlooking the obvious.
Isn’t that exactly what people (including Courtney Love) have been doing on tomnod? I did it for a bit, I found quite a lot of water.
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The co-pilot went amok. The plane is the weapon, the passengers are the crowd.
Some wikipedia:
“Amok,also spelled amuk, from the Malay, is ‘an episode of sudden mass assault against people or objects usually by a single individual following a period of brooding that has traditionally been regarded as occurring especially in Indonesian culture’”
“In a typical case of running amok, an individual (often male), having shown no previous sign of anger or any inclination to violence, will acquire a weapon (traditionally a sword or dagger, but presently any of a variety of weapons) and in a sudden frenzy, will attempt to kill or seriously injure anyone he encounters and himself. Amok typically takes place in a well populated or crowded area. Amok episodes of this kind normally end with the attacker being killed by bystanders or committing suicide”
“A widely accepted explanation links amok with male honor (amok by women is virtually unknown) Running amok would thus be both a way of escaping the world (since perpetrators were normally killed) and re-establishing one’s reputation as a man to be feared and respected. Some observers have related this explanation to Islam’s ban on suicide, which, it is suggested, drove Indonesian men to create circumstances in which others would kill them.”
What may have happened:
The co-pilot incapacitated the pilot, locked the cockpit, switched off all locator radio signals, programmed a new flight path away from civilization and said goodbye to air traffic control. The initial high altitude part caused cabin decompression, killing everyone including the co-pilot. (Oxygen masks last only for 15 minutes) MH370 continued to fly for seven hours and eventually crashed and sank somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
In this manner, the co-pilot could achieve to commit suicide in a way which ensures maximum social impact (‘honor’ - fear and respect) yet remains untraceable (‘honor’ - taboo on suicide).
That’s a lot of presumption right there. It is one thing to share a theory that the crew was responsible, what you did there is some other thing, some of which I find rather vile.
Maybe we could stop dressing our deep cultural biases up as ‘theories’ between now and when we learn what happened?
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Why is NO ONE looking in the Bermuda Triangle?
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LOL. That was the first question one of my kids asked me (and not the youngest, mind you). “Is it anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle?” And since she’s a sci-fi fan, once she learned it was on the opposite side of the globe her eyes got quite big at the possibility of some sort of energy field working from the core of the planet in both directions.
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The crash is a tragedy. In case of pilot suicide there are only victims.
I find it strange that people feel a need to pose terrorism and hijacks as a more likely cause than suicide while it is a more complicated construct without a single fact supporting that line of thought. That I find vile and culturally biased.
Possible causes, means and circumstances of suicide/murder may not be well understood when cultural dimensions are not considered:
““Why would you take 200 other people with you, a logical individual would want to know?” said Gregory “Sid” McGuirk, a professor of air traffic control at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.”’
“I’ve never seen him lose his temper”, “He was a disciplined person”
Of a list of known pilot suicides which are murder-suicide, there are Egypt Air Flight 990 (217 fatalities), LAM Mozambique Flight 470 (33 fatalities), Japan Airlines Flight 350 (24 fatalities), Royal Air Maroc Flight 630 (44 fatalities), SilkAir Flight 185 (Singapore, 104 fatalities).
Feel free to disagree that the cultural backgrounds of respective pilots score high in the dimensions of a) honor and/or collectivism and b) a taboo on mental illness and suicide, and/or highly codified ritual suicide.
Then there is a Russian pilot who stole a plane and flew into the flat of his divorcee (12 fatalities), an unmistakable and undisputed crime of passion. Same type of event, different motivation, different manifestation.
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