MH370 pilot upset over wife's decision to move out and in 'no state of mind to be flying' ...

The Daily Mail Online ^ | March 25, 2014 | ANDREW CHESTERTON and RICHARD SHEARS

[Uncle Chip]

'Last joyride'

The pilot of doomed flight MH370 was devastated over his wife’s decision to move out of their family home, and could have taken the plane for a ‘last joyride’ before it crashed into the southern Indian Ocean killing all 239 people on board, says a long-time friend of the pilot.

The friend, also a pilot, said Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah didn’t appear to be in the right state of mind to be flying, warning that it was ‘very possible that neither the passengers nor the other crew on-board knew what was happening until it was too late’.

‘He's one of the finest pilots around and I'm no medical expert, but with all that was happening in his life Zaharie was probably in no state of mind to be flying,’ he told the NZ Herald on the condition of anonymity.

The friend said the pilot's relationships were breaking down, with Captain Shah involved with another woman and his wife having decided to move out of their family home.

He said the pilot could have seen MH370 as an opportunity to try high-risk maneuvers he'd perfected on his beloved flight simulator.

These shocking new claims follow reports that flight MH370 climbed to between 43,000 and 45,000ft shortly after the last voice communication from the cockpit of the plane.

A source, who wished to remain anonymous, told MailOnline: 'It was tracked flying at this altitude for 23 minutes before descending. Oxygen would have run out in 12 minutes [in a depressurised cabin], rendering the passengers unconscious.'...

[zipper]

Absolutely, interesting either way. Conjecture on our part, but at least our theories are tempered with boundaries defined by our knowledge of the facts.

If he (or they, or whoever hijacked the airplane) stayed at 8k cabin pressure using 100 percent, the oxygen supply wouldn’t last long. But up at 30k (at or beyond the practical limit) the oxygen duration is much longer. At 25k the regulator would pressure-flow at 100 percent O2, and above that the partial pressure drops, and so does consumption, therefore the supply lasts longer, to a point. Whoever did it needed to keep a high cabin altitude anyway for a time to kill off everyone (or almost everyone) in the back. He could run one air conditioning pack with full hot selected in the cockpit and the outflow valve full open, to keep himself (relatively) warm without pressurizing the cabin.