Malaysian officials announced this week that radar data had proven that the missing Flight 370 “ended in the southern Indian Ocean,” as investigators pressed relatives of the pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, for information on his behavior leading up to the March 8 flight. New satellite images showed what appeared to be a large debris field of 122 objects scattered over 150 square miles about 1,550 miles southwest of Perth, Australia. Search teams were trying to track down the pieces in high winds and rough seas, but recovery and confirmation that they were part of the plane could take days or weeks. With the plane under more than three miles of ocean, the black box containing data from the flight could take months or longer to find. All 239 passengers and crew are presumed dead.
Analysis of radar “pings” picked up by satellites revealed that the Beijing-bound Boeing 777 had, in fact, headed south after changing course and flew far out over the Indian Ocean, where it presumably crashed after running out of fuel. “We don’t know why,” Malaysia Airlines chief executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said. “We don’t know how.” But Malaysian investigators told USA Today that only the pilot had the expertise to shut down its communication equipment and direct the plane on an evasive course of both high and low altitudes until it crashed.
The mystery of where the plane wound up has been solved, said The Dallas Morning News in an editorial, giving heartbroken families the certainty they need to grieve. But another mystery “continues to build.” Why did the plane’s transponder go quiet just before Flight 370 changed course? “Was the crew overcome by a suddenly depressurized cabin,” or was there a more sinister reason the plane flew into one of the emptiest parts of the world for seven straight hours?
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It looks more and more like a suicidal pilot, said Lee Moran in theNew York Daily News. A friend of Shah’s told a New Zealand newspaper this week that the pilot’s marriage was breaking up, and that his wife and three children had just moved out. The pilot was also conducting a troubled relationship with another woman, the friend said. “With all that was happening in his life,” the friend said, Shah “was probably in no state of mind to be flying.”
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