22 minutes is a l-o-n-g time to be in holding, and being put into holding at all is very unusual when you’re still thousands of miles from your destination airfield.
Fuel and maintenance on a 757 runs about $18,000 per flight hour so that represents an additional cost to the airline of about $6000. They don’t put airliners in holding just for giggles so there must have been a reason to get such unusual treatment by ATC. And I guarantee you the pilots are going to ask why they have to hold because they have a vested interest in getting to there destination alive, and in support of that goal they habitually monitor everything that could affect the safety of that flight — to include unexpected delays.
So if this guy is such an aviation expert, why didn’t he bother to investigate and discover the reason why ATC instructed them to hold under such unusual circumstances? Because if it happened I guarantee you there’s a record of it. That he didn’t bother to mention it tells me he isn’t that much an expert.
And besides, it’s long since settled that the plane was last known to be a couple of thousand miles off the west end of Australia because its engines kept communicating with a Rolls Royce engine maintenance satellite in geostationary orbit over the northern Indian ocean. And the last time the engines made their regular hourly check-in, the flight already was more than an hour overdue for landing at their destination. So MH370 was running on fumes but was more than two hours flight time from the nearest landfall.
The captain deliberately depressurized that plane at such an altitude that everyone onboard (except him) would have passed out in seconds and died from hypoxia in less than an hour.
Supplemental oxygen is useless at that altitude because all of the masks on the airplane are of the partial rebreather variety, and they provide too low of an oxygen mole content to sustain life at that altitude, even when sedentary. The only exceptions are the masks on the flight deck, which provided pressure breathing, same as jet fighters use, which are unpressurized but allow the pilots to fly to close to 100,000 feet (a la the SR71) and still maintain full mental function.
And he wouldn’t have attempted a ‘soft’ landing because if he’d been successful he’d have been afloat in the middle of nowhere, trapped with no one to talk to except the corpses of the hundreds of people he had just murdered. So the only logical course of action would be to fly into the water at a high airspeed and as steeply as possible, hoping that the fractured pieces of the airplane would penetrate so deeply into the water so that they would never be discovered. And if the bulk of the wreckage were never found, no one would ever be able to prove he did it.
This engineer is saying the ‘plane was put into the holding pattern long after it was lost by ATC.
But otherwise, I agree with what you say.
Wow...what a post! Thanks for that! The whole angle of flying into the sea so fast that there would be hardly any evidence never occurred to me! All I do know is that this guy was some kind of whack job regardless of the outcome. It would’ve been easier just to fly into a mountain like that other guy did!