Malaysia Airlines Flight Vanishes

[The Annoyed Man]

Philip964: You stated "there were 3 planes lost on 9/11 alone".

My count = 4. Two into the WTC, 1 into the ground in Shanksville, PA, and 1 into the Pentagon.

Perhaps your count = only 3, since there is no clearly ID'd plane wreckage in the Pentagon? Maybe that?

SIA

I think he made an honest accidental omission. Not something to dwell on.

[philip964]

Philip964: You stated "there were 3 planes lost on 9/11 alone".

My count = 4. Two into the WTC, 1 into the ground in Shanksville, PA, and 1 into the Pentagon.

Perhaps your count = only 3, since there is no clearly ID'd plane wreckage in the Pentagon? Maybe that?

SIA

Sorry to the memories of the passengers and crew of Flight 93. I was counting buildings, not planes in my mind when I typed that.

[ELB]

I would guess that most suicidal people do not care about other people, but this generally results in them not really caring about how their death affects others. They justify it to themselves by “they’re better off without me,” but they are so focused on their own pain they cannot empathize with anyone else’s.

A suicidal sociopath, who already cares nothing for others, will think nothing of taking several hundred people with him.

That makes sense to a point, but then why go to the trouble of killing so many people? If you broaden the horizon to include other similar patterns of behavior like mass shooters, in every case the killer could've committed suicide in a more certain fashion had they chosen to kill only themselves. Zahaire would've been throw into a hellish Malaysian prison had he failed, while Paddock or the engineer in Virginia would've been thrown into prison lives that they were very poorly adapted to withstand. In all cases, suicide would've then become much harder. If the goal was, "I am in terrible pain and I want to end it all", then the machinations required to murder strangers were DIRECTLY OPPOSED to that goal even for people who didn't care at all who they had to hurt to kill themselves. The argument that their reasoning was blinded by pain doesn't hold water given the meticulous and successful planning that went into all of these attacks.

...

In Zahaire's case, I think you are grossly overstating how difficult or risky it was for him to hijack his own plane. It wasn't difficult at all for him, flying that plane was something he had already spent thousands of hours doing, in exactly the airspace he chose (meaning he knew the likely reactions of air traffic control and the Malaysian air force). Really, the only odd thing he had to due was subdue the copilot, which could have been as easy as asking him to go aft and locking the door behind him. After that he could fly it into the ground or the ocean any time he chose. In this case, he chose to fly off into the Indian ocean. Cutting off communications and killing the passengers by depressurization were not absolutely necessary for his plans, but the fact that he was able to do it just meant he had longer to fly away before crashing, since no one outside the plane was notified that something was wrong.

As for the sociopath aspect -- we don't know for sure that Zahaire was in fact a sociopath, but crashing an airliner with a couple hundred people in it is a pretty strong clue. Others had noticed changes in him prior to that flight, but either didn't want to act on them, and/or they didn't seem serious enough to act on. And if he was sociopathic, then he was also very good at masking his inner, true self and people would not have seen him coming anyway.

ETA:

The argument that their reasoning was blinded by pain doesn't hold water given the meticulous and successful planning that went into all of these attacks.

I wasn't arguing that Zahaire (or any other sociopathic mass killer) was blinded by his own pain. I was referring most suicides, which are individual and by people whose mental state has deteriorated to a complete focus on their own problems and pain - I think they lose the ability to be concerned with anyone else. I was contrasting the suicidal sociopaths with this. Sociopaths don't care about other people in the first place, so when they decide to exit in a blaze of killing they care even less about those they take with them. The whole killing spree is about themselves, drawing attention to themselves.

[The Annoyed Man]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... es/590653/

The Atlantic says people on the ground know more than they are telling.

A very interesting article.

[WTR]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... es/590653/

The Atlantic says people on the ground know more than they are telling.

A very interesting article.

My BIL is a United Captain. He says they are just keeping us in the dark.

[The Annoyed Man]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... es/590653/

The Atlantic says people on the ground know more than they are telling.

A very interesting article.

My BIL is a United Captain. He says they are just keeping us in the dark.

Do you mean the Malaysians?

[crazy2medic]

I was taught in Paramedic School that the drive to stay alive is one of not the strongest drives in the human mind, when somebody is willing to kill themselves, then killing you isn't a big deal to them!

[The Annoyed Man]

I was taught in Paramedic School that the drive to stay alive is one of not the strongest drives in the human mind, when somebody is willing to kill themselves, then killing you isn't a big deal to them!

My former employer and long time friend, who owned the business that brought me along to Texas when it moved here, took his own life 18 months after we got here. He wasn’t homicidal, and he made no effort to place other people in danger. In my experience, most suicides do not. They just go off somewhere where nobody can stop them, and they kill themselves. So I think that the willingness (or desire, as the case may be) to take other people out with you, is an exception rather than the rule; and it must necessarily include some other profoundly disturbed psychiatric state.

My friend was bipolar, and had fought the disease since high school. He was a successful, married father and business owner. He lost his fight with his disease at age 45, so he fought the good fight for 30 years. He (wrongly) felt that others in his life would be better off and happier without him, which turns out to be a common delusion among suicides. The murderous ones are after something else—fame/notoriety, glory, making a statement, etc.

My point is that the MH370 pilot was one of the murderous ones—not your average suicide.

[crazy2medic]

I was taught in Paramedic School that the drive to stay alive is one of not the strongest drives in the human mind, when somebody is willing to kill themselves, then killing you isn't a big deal to them!

My former employer and long time friend, who owned the business that brought me along to Texas when it moved here, took his own life 18 months after we got here. He wasn’t homicidal, and he made no effort to place other people in danger. In my experience, most suicides do not. They just go off somewhere where nobody can stop them, and they kill themselves. So I think that the willingness (or desire, as the case may be) to take other people out with you, is an exception rather than the rule; and it must necessarily include some other profoundly disturbed psychiatric state.

My friend was bipolar, and had fought the disease since high school. He was a successful, married father and business owner. He lost his fight with his disease at age 45, so he fought the good fight for 30 years. He (wrongly) felt that others in his life would be better off and happier without him, which turns out to be a common delusion among suicides. The murderous ones are after something else—fame/notoriety, glory, making a statement, etc.

My point is that the MH370 pilot was one of the murderous ones—not your average suicide.

I do understand where your coming from, I have taken my fair share to the psychic ward, but because first responders can get any number of mental patient with an unknown background, it's certainly better to be OVERLY cautious than to be too relaxed with somebody that wants to go to the next world and take you along on the journey!

[MaduroBU]

Maybe the act really was that easy for him. But all of those people? They didn't harm him- he wouldn't have recognized any if them had he seen them even during the flight. I interact with suicidal people on a very regular basis and they are uniformly either fixated upon themselves and their troubles or deeply sorry. Homicidal ideation is not something that I encounter with any frequency. I have never met a patient who would just off a plan full of strangers, and I have met some bad folks. I worked in the TDC hospital for a long time. The offenders by and large weren't monsters, at least not the sort that would do something like this.

[WTR]

Maybe the act really was that easy for him. But all of those people? They didn't harm him- he wouldn't have recognized any if them had he seen them even during the flight. I interact with suicidal people on a very regular basis and they are uniformly either fixated upon themselves and their troubles or deeply sorry. Homicidal ideation is not something that I encounter with any frequency. I have never met a patient who would just off a plan full of strangers, and I have met some bad folks. I worked in the TDC hospital for a long time. The offenders by and large weren't monsters, at least not the sort that would do something like this.

There was a case where the Co-Pilot intentionally locked the Captain out of the cockpit when the Capt. stepped out for a RR break. The Co-Pilot then set the autopilot to fly into the ground., and refused to open the cockpit door even as people pounded on the door.......So it has happened. I believe it was a Luftansa flight.

[Beiruty]

The only mystery is that why the pilot let plane fly for hours south, instead of a steep dive and instant death.
Why he had the interest of not finding the airplane in the first place. His reputation? Was he protecting someone's eligibility for life insurance?

[threoh8]

The only mystery is that why the pilot let plane fly for hours south, instead of a steep dive and instant death.
Why he had the interest of not finding the airplane in the first place. His reputation? Was he protecting someone's eligibility for life insurance?

Perhaps so that we would still be talking about him years later.

[The Annoyed Man]

The only mystery is that why the pilot let plane fly for hours south, instead of a steep dive and instant death.
Why he had the interest of not finding the airplane in the first place. His reputation? Was he protecting someone's eligibility for life insurance?

Perhaps so that we would still be talking about him years later.

FWIW, I think it was because the cockpit was the last place where he still felt somewhat in control of his life. It was a cocoon for him. So after literally putting everyone else on the aircraft to sleep before asphyxiating them (read the above linked Atlantic article), he drew that moment out as long as he could, knowing what lay at the end of that moment.

[philip964]

Mysterious 200 lb load added after takeoff.

https://news.yahoo.com/investigators-di ... 40654.html