Within weeks after the disappearance of MH370, many theories had been proposed, but one in particular had come to the fore: that one of the pilots had seized control of the plane and flown it on a prolonged and sophisticated murder-suicide mission into the southern Indian Ocean. While there have been a handful of known cases where pilots have flown their own plane into the ground, no one had ever before carried out a sophisticated, complicated, and aggressive plan to abscond with an airplane only to spend seven hours patiently waiting to die. But there seemed no other way to easily explain the sequence of events that emerged from the Inmarsat data. What would such a person be like, psychologically? What kind of traces would they leave behind in their social media, in their personal photographs and work records, and in the memories of those who knew them? In today’s episode we turn our attention to Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid and take stock of the evidence.
As in every episode, our attempt is to get across the gist of a broad range of evidence concerning a particular aspect of the MH370 mystery, rather than to provide an encyclopedic account. So there’s always going to be a lot that we leave out. If listeners or viewers think that there are important points we’ve overlooked, we welcome your input. In response to this episode (more specifically, to the teaser we put out yesterday) Victor Iannello (@RadiantPhysics) drew our attention via Twitter to a 2016 story in The Australian that he felt deserved mention. That story is behind a paywell but he helpfull included a link to a Reddit thread that included the full text. An excerpt:
The pilot of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 had grown close to a married woman and her three children, one of whom has severe cerebral palsy, in the months before his disappearance and the two had messaged each other about a “personal matter” two days before the ill-fated flight on March 8, 2014.
The friendship, which quickly developed to a level where Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was playing an almost fatherly role to the children, had cooled in the weeks leading up to the accident at his instigation, the woman has told The Australian. But Fatima Pardi would not reveal the subject of their last WhatsApp discussion before the flight.
“That last conversation was just between me and him. I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
She added that Captain Zaharie had not seemed stressed.
“I’m afraid what I say will be misunderstood,” she said. “It was a personal matter, a private issue.”
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