8 ms·

Suicide by pilot is another possibility. It's certainly happened before (SilkAir 185, EgyptAir 990, Germanwings 9525, possibly Malaysian 370)

w0utert 6y ago
Judging from the flight path and altitude data that seems extremely unlikely, it looks like the plane just fell apart and came down like a brick in an instant.
- Reason077 6y ago
  I'm not sure that alone rules anything out. If we look at the flight profile of EgyptAir 990, for example, it dropped 15,000 feet in about 30 seconds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990#/media/File:Msr990-ntsb-f1.jpeg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990#/media/Fil...
- hnarn 6y ago
  How does that make a suicidal pilot “extremely unlikely”? That’s exactly what I’d expect a plane directed downwards to look like.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    Does the airline have a two-person rule for the flight-deck and/or lockable doors though? What concerns me about the cockpit lockable doors is how obviously it would lead to tragedy (e.g. Germanwings) - I’d have hoped that the locks would open if unusual aircraft attitude changes were detected - because what’s the point of keeping the cockpit door locked if the aircraft is already erratic? Chances are something weird is going on in the flight deck and it’s in the pax’ best-interests if the cabin-crew can get in.
    - nOObie1 6y ago
      If the plane was in a steep dive, the G-forces would be pushing you toward the tail of the aircraft making it very hard to get into the cockpit.
    - amelius 6y ago
      I wonder how "walkable" a plane is after it takes a nosedive, and if the type of doors would make any difference in one's ability to reach the cockpit.
      - lolc 6y ago
        Zero-g is very disorienting to humans. But an experienced pilot could probably handle it and push themselves towards the cockpit.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        stretchcat 6y ago
        An experienced airline pilot almost certainly has zero experience moving around in zero-g. Pilots just aren't trained for moving around a freefalling airplane. There are only a handful of 'vomit comets' in existence that could provide such training, and I've never heard of airline pilots being trained in them.
        lolc 6y ago
        I didn't mean to say that pilots have zero-g training. I just assume that most pilots could handle zero-g enough to orient themselves towards the cockpit. But maybe that's optimistic.
      - FeeJai 6y ago
        As long as there is air friction complete zero-g is highly unlikely. It takes a lot of training to set the engines correctly to cause zero g by compensating exactly the air friction
        stretchcat 6y ago
        A malicious pilot could injure/incapacitate anybody who wasn't strapped into a seat with aggressive maneuvering. I expect it takes a lot of training for a 'vomit comet' pilot to not toss everybody around like ragdolls, but a suicidal pilot trying to kill everybody wouldn't be gentle about it..
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - VLM 6y ago
    What an odd time to do it, unless for some crazy reason the lat/lon location mattered. I'm just saying it takes less than a second to hit a ditch or another plane or commo tower while taxi-ing on the ground. Or suddenly do almost anything when you're 50 feet off the ground at takeoff surrounded by all sorts of interesting ground targets to hit. Drop the landing gear or flaps at the wrong speed at a low altitude. I suppose someone indecisive or having medical / drug issues could take a long time to talk themselves up to it hours into the flight. There is one situation I'd expect a crash halfway thru climbout right after takeoff and from military experience if a load is incorrectly lashed down in the cargo hold and lets say the strapdowns in the front of a tank or howitzer are installed correctly but the ones in the back snap or were incorrectly attached or the tiedowns rusted off LOL (I suppose it happens) then sliding a tank or an artillery piece thru the nose of the plane while in flight will make quite a mess. Yes I'm well aware a civie 737 is not a military C130 but the general case holds that's just about the right time in a flight profile for something in the cargo hold to start sloshing around if not strapped down correctly. Plenty of opportunity for cascading failure. Trivial to engineer a cargo system where one thing breaking loose cannot screw up weight/balance enough to crash the plane. But one thing breaks loose, slides at high speed into another thing breaking it loose, now you got two uncontrolled loads sloshing around in turbulence, repeat, repeat... I'm also well aware that a 737 is not a military transport in WWII but there was a documented problem with sabotage in WWII where enemy agents dumped water into the rotary engine oil system and the water eventually boiled about ten minutes into flight, steam popped open the oil system, the engines seized without oil, the mechanics got blamed and the agents continued their work because no evidence just water... Obviously almost certainly not the situation now, but the general idea of "it gets up to full temp a couple minutes into flight" remains valid. I wonder what happens to the airframe if an engine bearing catastrophically seizes and cold welds itself in flight. At minimum I bet the entire engine tears itself off the pylon. Worst case maybe the engine takes the wing with it even if its not supposed to. AFAIK the shroud around engines is supposed to be able to eat a turbine blade that snaps off to prevent damage to the wing, but maybe there's a freak situation of the engine disassembling itself in flight such that the shield shroud thing is blown off milliseconds before the turbine blades are shed into the wing... I'd extend my remarks based on radar data from http://www.b737.org.uk/incident_pk-clc.htm http://www.b737.org.uk/incident_pk-clc.htm This is a very low performance aircraft (In the sense of not like a F-16) and 11 seconds isn't long enough to intentionally maneuver from a normal climbout based on radar transponder data into falling out of the sky. A F-16 could turn 40 degrees and point straight down in 11 seconds but a 737 literally can't, so essentially it went from a normal climbout to cloud of parts falling from the sky slower than the plane at cruise. The radar transponder profile looks a lot different for a plane in one piece under control pointed at the ground. Pieces of aircraft are not aerodynamic at all, which is why parts fell at 10K to 20K feet/min but the groundspeed collapsed from 300 kts to 100 kts in eleven seconds. I'm honestly not sure even a F-16 can drop from 300 kts to 100 kts in eleven seconds in a steep dive, although a random collection of torn metal falling from the sky can do that. Its interesting that if you google for the flight manual data for a 737, best maneuvering speed to handle maximal turbulence loads is just a couple knots below best climb speed, which the plane was at. So if a pilot was suicidal, he tried to pull the wings off at exactly the flight condition where the plane was strongest; no pilot is uneducated enough to make a noob error that huge. Pull up as hard as you can at cruise, sure. Wiggle the rudder as hard as humanly possible (usually due to crosswind) while landing has torn tails off planes. But try to pull the wings off when flying at manuevering speed? That's just dumb. So no the pilot almost certainly was not suicidal.
- cm2187 6y ago
  Also you wouldn't expect a single pilot to be in the cockpit at that stage of the flight.
  - e_proxus 6y ago
    What damage could a co-pilot cause even with another pilot present? A steep enough descent might not be recoverable under certain conditions?
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      Aircraft are designed to not enter those “certain conditions” by default - I understand the PF needs to override the flight-control-law to intentionally crash the plane, but I don’t think there’s a two-person-rule before that can happen. Anyway - this is why I’m glad I’m not involved in safety-engineering because supposing that setting sensible defaults that reduce accidents in 99.999% of cases would lead to horrible terrifying deaths in 0.001% of cases (e.g. one-way lockable reinforced cockpit doors) would be too much on my mind.
      - ericbarrett 6y ago
        Germanwings Flight 9525[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
        numpad0 6y ago
        That was F/O without another pilot present
      - asd4232 6y ago
        Some more modern aircraft indeed have such protections, but this was an old 737 without any such stuff. Simply pushing the control column fully forward would send the plane into a dive pretty quickly.
        6y ago
- asd4232 6y ago
  Usually when a plane "falls apart" you'll have an accident scene with larger pieces intact compared to a plane nosediving to the ground in one piece.
cambalache 6y ago
If you look at my comments you will see that I am generally against American powerful institutions and the sadly common American arrogance, but in these kind of things I am 100% behind the American mindset. How convenient that all these clearly suicide-by-pilot incidents are called "inconclusive" by the national , non-US, agency. Is saving face a price worth paying for? This does not help anybody and basically protects a person, who no matter how troubled and depressed, was in essence a mass-murderer.
- kepler1 6y ago
  BTW what do you mean by the American mindset?
  - cambalache 6y ago
    truth over feelings, appearances or face saving. Not always true, but pretty much spot on in air disasters investigations
- Denvercoder9 6y ago
  > How convenient that all these clearly suicide-by-pilot incidents are called "inconclusive" by the national , non-US, agency. The French and German agencies investigating Germanwings 9525 ruled it a suicide.
  - cambalache 6y ago
    I thought about saying "western" mindset, but I didnt want to open that can of worms
dehrmann 6y ago
The 737-Classic is more reliable than humans, so some amount of human error would be my first guess.
TeaDrunk 6y ago
I think this might be ruled out- Indonesian news sources have cited sounds of explosions as well as an eyewitness account of the plane exploding in midair. If it's pilot suicide, it's certainly unconventional.
- FabHK 6y ago
  Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Wouldn't put much stock in that for now.
clon 6y ago
Please don't. This is unsubstantiated bullshit at this point. It is a lot more likely that they fought the plane (or their own somatogravic illusion, or ..?) to the bitter end. To put pilot suicide out there, requires some supporting evidence on your part.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  I think most of speculation in this thread is mostly unsubstantiated, as we know nearly nothing. I think it’s fine that the parent points this out, at the very least should not be berated like this.
- bb88 6y ago
  Fun fact. When I flew Delta for the 4 years before the pandemic, anytime a pilot used the restroom, it was mandatory that a flight attendant take their place -- for exactly this reason. Sit in first class long enough you begin to get comfortable with common flight procedures. Keep in mind it's not that the flight attendant can pilot a plane, it's that they can unlock the door to let the other pilot back in the cockpit. While it is unlikely, it's still a possibility, and one that Delta, at least, is worried about happening.
  - Reason077 6y ago
    Yes. But there are, of course, plenty of reasons why this policy is a good idea besides the unlikely possibility of malicious/suicidal actions on the part of a pilot.
    - bb88 6y ago
      No. That's pretty much the main reason.
      - Reason077 6y ago
        No, it’s one reason but it’s far from the only reason. Medical events and incidents that cause incapacitation of a flying pilot are rare, but less rare than suicide by pilot incidents. Consider what would have happened on BA 5390, for example, if only one pilot had been in the cockpit with the cockpit door locked.

w0utert 6y ago

Judging from the flight path and altitude data that seems extremely unlikely, it looks like the plane just fell apart and came down like a brick in an instant.

Reason077 6y ago
I'm not sure that alone rules anything out. If we look at the flight profile of EgyptAir 990, for example, it dropped 15,000 feet in about 30 seconds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990#/media/File:Msr990-ntsb-f1.jpeg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990#/media/Fil...
hnarn 6y ago
How does that make a suicidal pilot “extremely unlikely”? That’s exactly what I’d expect a plane directed downwards to look like.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Does the airline have a two-person rule for the flight-deck and/or lockable doors though? What concerns me about the cockpit lockable doors is how obviously it would lead to tragedy (e.g. Germanwings) - I’d have hoped that the locks would open if unusual aircraft attitude changes were detected - because what’s the point of keeping the cockpit door locked if the aircraft is already erratic? Chances are something weird is going on in the flight deck and it’s in the pax’ best-interests if the cabin-crew can get in.
  - nOObie1 6y ago
    If the plane was in a steep dive, the G-forces would be pushing you toward the tail of the aircraft making it very hard to get into the cockpit.
  - amelius 6y ago
    I wonder how "walkable" a plane is after it takes a nosedive, and if the type of doors would make any difference in one's ability to reach the cockpit.
    - lolc 6y ago
      Zero-g is very disorienting to humans. But an experienced pilot could probably handle it and push themselves towards the cockpit.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - stretchcat 6y ago
        An experienced airline pilot almost certainly has zero experience moving around in zero-g. Pilots just aren't trained for moving around a freefalling airplane. There are only a handful of 'vomit comets' in existence that could provide such training, and I've never heard of airline pilots being trained in them.
        lolc 6y ago
        I didn't mean to say that pilots have zero-g training. I just assume that most pilots could handle zero-g enough to orient themselves towards the cockpit. But maybe that's optimistic.
    - FeeJai 6y ago
      As long as there is air friction complete zero-g is highly unlikely. It takes a lot of training to set the engines correctly to cause zero g by compensating exactly the air friction
      - stretchcat 6y ago
        A malicious pilot could injure/incapacitate anybody who wasn't strapped into a seat with aggressive maneuvering. I expect it takes a lot of training for a 'vomit comet' pilot to not toss everybody around like ragdolls, but a suicidal pilot trying to kill everybody wouldn't be gentle about it..
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- VLM 6y ago
  What an odd time to do it, unless for some crazy reason the lat/lon location mattered. I'm just saying it takes less than a second to hit a ditch or another plane or commo tower while taxi-ing on the ground. Or suddenly do almost anything when you're 50 feet off the ground at takeoff surrounded by all sorts of interesting ground targets to hit. Drop the landing gear or flaps at the wrong speed at a low altitude. I suppose someone indecisive or having medical / drug issues could take a long time to talk themselves up to it hours into the flight. There is one situation I'd expect a crash halfway thru climbout right after takeoff and from military experience if a load is incorrectly lashed down in the cargo hold and lets say the strapdowns in the front of a tank or howitzer are installed correctly but the ones in the back snap or were incorrectly attached or the tiedowns rusted off LOL (I suppose it happens) then sliding a tank or an artillery piece thru the nose of the plane while in flight will make quite a mess. Yes I'm well aware a civie 737 is not a military C130 but the general case holds that's just about the right time in a flight profile for something in the cargo hold to start sloshing around if not strapped down correctly. Plenty of opportunity for cascading failure. Trivial to engineer a cargo system where one thing breaking loose cannot screw up weight/balance enough to crash the plane. But one thing breaks loose, slides at high speed into another thing breaking it loose, now you got two uncontrolled loads sloshing around in turbulence, repeat, repeat... I'm also well aware that a 737 is not a military transport in WWII but there was a documented problem with sabotage in WWII where enemy agents dumped water into the rotary engine oil system and the water eventually boiled about ten minutes into flight, steam popped open the oil system, the engines seized without oil, the mechanics got blamed and the agents continued their work because no evidence just water... Obviously almost certainly not the situation now, but the general idea of "it gets up to full temp a couple minutes into flight" remains valid. I wonder what happens to the airframe if an engine bearing catastrophically seizes and cold welds itself in flight. At minimum I bet the entire engine tears itself off the pylon. Worst case maybe the engine takes the wing with it even if its not supposed to. AFAIK the shroud around engines is supposed to be able to eat a turbine blade that snaps off to prevent damage to the wing, but maybe there's a freak situation of the engine disassembling itself in flight such that the shield shroud thing is blown off milliseconds before the turbine blades are shed into the wing... I'd extend my remarks based on radar data from http://www.b737.org.uk/incident_pk-clc.htm http://www.b737.org.uk/incident_pk-clc.htm This is a very low performance aircraft (In the sense of not like a F-16) and 11 seconds isn't long enough to intentionally maneuver from a normal climbout based on radar transponder data into falling out of the sky. A F-16 could turn 40 degrees and point straight down in 11 seconds but a 737 literally can't, so essentially it went from a normal climbout to cloud of parts falling from the sky slower than the plane at cruise. The radar transponder profile looks a lot different for a plane in one piece under control pointed at the ground. Pieces of aircraft are not aerodynamic at all, which is why parts fell at 10K to 20K feet/min but the groundspeed collapsed from 300 kts to 100 kts in eleven seconds. I'm honestly not sure even a F-16 can drop from 300 kts to 100 kts in eleven seconds in a steep dive, although a random collection of torn metal falling from the sky can do that. Its interesting that if you google for the flight manual data for a 737, best maneuvering speed to handle maximal turbulence loads is just a couple knots below best climb speed, which the plane was at. So if a pilot was suicidal, he tried to pull the wings off at exactly the flight condition where the plane was strongest; no pilot is uneducated enough to make a noob error that huge. Pull up as hard as you can at cruise, sure. Wiggle the rudder as hard as humanly possible (usually due to crosswind) while landing has torn tails off planes. But try to pull the wings off when flying at manuevering speed? That's just dumb. So no the pilot almost certainly was not suicidal.
cm2187 6y ago
Also you wouldn't expect a single pilot to be in the cockpit at that stage of the flight.
- e_proxus 6y ago
  What damage could a co-pilot cause even with another pilot present? A steep enough descent might not be recoverable under certain conditions?
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    Aircraft are designed to not enter those “certain conditions” by default - I understand the PF needs to override the flight-control-law to intentionally crash the plane, but I don’t think there’s a two-person-rule before that can happen. Anyway - this is why I’m glad I’m not involved in safety-engineering because supposing that setting sensible defaults that reduce accidents in 99.999% of cases would lead to horrible terrifying deaths in 0.001% of cases (e.g. one-way lockable reinforced cockpit doors) would be too much on my mind.
    - ericbarrett 6y ago
      Germanwings Flight 9525[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
      - numpad0 6y ago
        That was F/O without another pilot present
    - asd4232 6y ago
      Some more modern aircraft indeed have such protections, but this was an old 737 without any such stuff. Simply pushing the control column fully forward would send the plane into a dive pretty quickly.
      - 6y ago
asd4232 6y ago
Usually when a plane "falls apart" you'll have an accident scene with larger pieces intact compared to a plane nosediving to the ground in one piece.

cambalache 6y ago

If you look at my comments you will see that I am generally against American powerful institutions and the sadly common American arrogance, but in these kind of things I am 100% behind the American mindset. How convenient that all these clearly suicide-by-pilot incidents are called "inconclusive" by the national , non-US, agency. Is saving face a price worth paying for? This does not help anybody and basically protects a person, who no matter how troubled and depressed, was in essence a mass-murderer.

kepler1 6y ago
BTW what do you mean by the American mindset?
- cambalache 6y ago
  truth over feelings, appearances or face saving. Not always true, but pretty much spot on in air disasters investigations
Denvercoder9 6y ago
> How convenient that all these clearly suicide-by-pilot incidents are called "inconclusive" by the national , non-US, agency. The French and German agencies investigating Germanwings 9525 ruled it a suicide.
- cambalache 6y ago
  I thought about saying "western" mindset, but I didnt want to open that can of worms

dehrmann 6y ago

The 737-Classic is more reliable than humans, so some amount of human error would be my first guess.

TeaDrunk 6y ago

I think this might be ruled out- Indonesian news sources have cited sounds of explosions as well as an eyewitness account of the plane exploding in midair. If it's pilot suicide, it's certainly unconventional.

FabHK 6y ago
Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Wouldn't put much stock in that for now.

clon 6y ago

Please don't. This is unsubstantiated bullshit at this point. It is a lot more likely that they fought the plane (or their own somatogravic illusion, or ..?) to the bitter end. To put pilot suicide out there, requires some supporting evidence on your part.

stingraycharles 6y ago
I think most of speculation in this thread is mostly unsubstantiated, as we know nearly nothing. I think it’s fine that the parent points this out, at the very least should not be berated like this.
bb88 6y ago
Fun fact. When I flew Delta for the 4 years before the pandemic, anytime a pilot used the restroom, it was mandatory that a flight attendant take their place -- for exactly this reason. Sit in first class long enough you begin to get comfortable with common flight procedures. Keep in mind it's not that the flight attendant can pilot a plane, it's that they can unlock the door to let the other pilot back in the cockpit. While it is unlikely, it's still a possibility, and one that Delta, at least, is worried about happening.
- Reason077 6y ago
  Yes. But there are, of course, plenty of reasons why this policy is a good idea besides the unlikely possibility of malicious/suicidal actions on the part of a pilot.
  - bb88 6y ago
    No. That's pretty much the main reason.
    - Reason077 6y ago
      No, it’s one reason but it’s far from the only reason. Medical events and incidents that cause incapacitation of a flying pilot are rare, but less rare than suicide by pilot incidents. Consider what would have happened on BA 5390, for example, if only one pilot had been in the cockpit with the cockpit door locked.