Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: A pilot suicide mission?

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: The missing aircraft is now prompting theories that the aircraft was hijacked or the crew chose to change course. Could Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 be similar to SilkAir Flight 185, a pilot suicide tragedy in 1997?

The history of SilkAir Flight 185 now hangs ominously over the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

On Dec. 19, 1997, SilkAir Flight 185 took off from Indonesia, bound for Singapore. There were 97 passengers and seven crew on board as the flight lifted off at 3:37 p.m. local time.

Thirty-five minutes later, the aircraft mysteriously and suddenly dove vertically into Musi River in Sumatra. All on board perished.

The Indonesian government investigation said the cause of the crash was "inconclusive."

But the US National Transportation Safety Board, which worked jointly with the Indonesian team, concluded that the pilot committed suicide. In a letter to the Indonesian safety committee, the NTSB wrote:

The examination of all of the factual evidence is consistent with the conclusions that: 1) no airplane-related mechanical malfunctions or failures caused or contributed to the accident, and 2) the accident can be explained by intentional pilot action. Specifically, a) the accident airplane’s flight profile is consistent with sustained manual nose-down flight control inputs; b) the evidence suggests that the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was intentionally disconnected; c) recovery of the airplane was possible but not attempted; and d) it is more likely that the nose-down flight control inputs were made by the captain than by the first officer.

There are a number of parallels that are now being drawn in online aviation forums between the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the SilkAir 185 tragedy.

The only new information in the last 24 hours is that military radar tracks the aircraft making an abrupt change of course and flying for an hour and 10 minutes west over the Malaysia peninsula and into the Strait of Malacca. At that last known position, presumably when the military radar lost contact, the aircraft was at 29,500 feet, according to Malaysia's Air Force chief Rodzali Daud.

Why no radio communication? Why not transponder signal? Why no contact at all with the ground as the plane continued at just a few thousand feet below cruising altitude for more than an hour?

Most aviation professionals suggest that a flight crew member would know how to turn off or disable radio, transponder, and the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), the on-board systems monitoring equipment that transmits information back to the airline.

"Hijacking or a pilot going rogue would explain the transponder and ACARS not transmitting. If this is what actually happened, I fear the CVR and FDR would have been turned off also, thus giving the authorities very little chance of knowing what actually happened," writes "garpd," an aviation graphics designer in the UK on Airliners.net.

The Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Flight Data Recorder (FDR) could be turned off by tripping a circuit breaker. In the SilkAir investigation, the pilot was suspected of manually tripping the circuit breaker on the CVR and then, the FDR, thus eliminating any recording of events during the final minutes of that flight.

Malaysian authorities say they are now doing deeper background checks on passengers and crew.

"Maybe somebody on the flight has bought a huge sum of insurance, who wants family to gain from it or somebody who has owed somebody so much money, you know, we are looking at all possibilities," Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar told a news conference Monday. "We are looking very closely at the video footage taken at the KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport), we are studying the behavioral pattern of all the passengers."

Again, there's the echo of SilkAir Flight 185.

Capt. Tsu Way Ming, the pilot of SilkAir 185 reportedly had $1 million in security trading losses 10 days before his last flight. He bought a life insurance policy the week before his last flight, according to Macarthur Job, who wrote about the incident for Flight Safety Australia in 2008.

But if the Malaysia Airlines flight was a planned suicide, why did whomever was at the controls turn the aircraft west and fly for at least another hour?

If it was a hijacking, then based on the original flight plan and fuel, the search area could be much larger – as large as 3,000 miles in diameter - or all the way to India or deep into China.

In the unusually long absence of information about the location of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, speculation continues. And the search by authorities is turning inward – toward examining more closely the crew and passengers – for clues to the cause of the flight's disappearance.

[Editor's note: The original post incorrectly stated the year of the SilkAir Flight 185 crash.]

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: A pilot suicide mission?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2014/0311/Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-370-A-pilot-suicide-mission
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe