Jekyll2022-08-31T23:17:40+00:00opacityzero.press/feed.xmlOpacity Zero – Challenging the Unknown with CuriosityOpacity Zero is a show about challenging the unknown with curiosity. About unanswered questions, controversial answers and the need for a little bit of certainty in a world where nothing seems certain at all.Season Two — Episode II: Terrifyingly Normal2015-11-16T17:09:12+00:002015-11-16T17:09:12+00:00opacityzero.press/2015/11/16/season-ii-terrifyingly-normal<p>Research indicates that morality might be a lot more than just a set of
invented or learned rules. Knowing what is right seems to have deep
evolutionary roots and may actually be an innate part of human nature. But if
that’s true, if we are all born with a moral sense what happens then to those
of us who go against that? Join us for this episode as we try to look beyond
evil.</p>
<h2 id="listen">Listen</h2>
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<h2 id="gratitude">Gratitude</h2>
<p>Thanks to everyone who has made this amazing journey possible — family and friends, people who write amazing software like <a href="http://audacityteam.org/" target="_blank">Audacity</a> and <a href="https://btvsolo.com/" target="_blank">BTV Solo</a>, folks who provide great B2B services like <a href="http://www.libsyn.com/" target="_blank">libsyn</a>, smart and kind people who share their knowledge and experience online for others to learn, platforms for artists that allow us to share and benefit from each others talents like <a href="http://www.soundsnap.com/" target="_blank">soundsnap</a>. And last but not least my one-of-a-kind funny, beautiful, smart and patient husband, thanks for pushing me, pulling me back, and sometimes just holding me…I love you! </p>
<h2 id="transcript-links-and-notes">Transcript, Links and Notes</h2>
<p>This is Opacity Zero, a show about challenging the unknown with curiosity. I am Melanie Heymans, welcome back to episode II – Terrifyingly Normal.</p>
<p>Join me for a little thought experiment and imagine you can only rescue one of each of the following, which do you save?</p>
<ul>
<li>A child or an adult</li>
<li>A stranger or your dog</li>
<li>Your partner or a Nobel Prize Winner</li>
<li>Your entire family or the entire canine species</li>
<li>A bottle with the cure for cancer or your brother</li>
</ul>
<p>Hm, though choices or maybe not? Let’s briefly take a look at some of our picks and the possible motivations behind them. So who did you rescue, a child or an adult, and why did you decide to rescue them? Did you go for the child, cause it needs protection, it’s at the beginning of its life, it has more potential? Or would you rescue the adult cause they are contributing more to society, have more responsibility, more people that depend on them, more realized potential? </p>
<p>What about the stranger and the dog, who did you rescue and why? The stranger cause human life is worth more than that of a dog, cause you would hope that someone else would choose you over their dog too? Or would you rescue your dog cause you love your dog and if you are honest there is no reason for you to care about a person you don’t know at all.</p>
<p>And finally how about the bottle with the cure for cancer or your brother? Which did you decide to rescue? The cure for cancer cause it would save millions of lives, and you know your brother would understand? Cause the lives of many are worth more than the life of one? Or would you rescue your brother, cause he is your brother, and there are many successful treatments for cancer out there and you are sure some day someone will come up with the cure again. They did it once, right?</p>
<p>Personally, even though I could answer these questions pretty quickly in the beginning, the longer I thought about them the more complex and less straightforward they seemed to me. It was almost like there was a morally right answer and an honest answer, does that make any sense? Like with these personality tests we sometimes “ahem” have to take, like “Are you a good listener?” “What’s your conflict management style?” “Are you a power negotiator?” — with these assessments you often know which answers are the right ones but you also know that they are not necessarily describing your behavior. That’s how I started to feel the more I thought about the question of who to save, there seemed to be the right answer and the right answer for me.</p>
<p>So I was wondering, why is that, why is my first impulse to save the bottle with the cure for cancer but the second one is “but wait, what do you mean OR my brother?” and it seems that there are two evolutionary forces at play here. One is <u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&" target="_blank">my moral sense and the other one is my so called selfish gene</a></u>. While my moral sense tells me to do what is right, my selfish gene tells me to overvalue kin and clan, or in other words my own genetic code in the form of my brother. In this specific example these two forces are competing, but the winner is clear to me, I will, despite the fact that it might be considered morally wrong, rescue my brother — even though I do not even have a brother. Now I am sure that some of you agree with my choice while others don’t, and I can’t help but wonder what causes this divide, don’t we share the same moral sense? </p>
<p>Well our <u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&" target="_blank">moral sense</a></u> is actually a quite complex system, composed of an interplay between evolutionary factors, cultural and customary believes and practices, and personal lifestyle choices, making it universal and personal at the same time. How so? </p>
<p>As you might remember from episode one, morality is defined as some code of conduct agreed upon by a society or group that defines what is right and what is wrong and this code is generally accepted by and applies to all members of this group. Many of these moral agreements are shaped by the culture, believes, practices and overall lifestyle of a particular group and they might differ quite a bit from other groups. Still according to research there are <u><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&" target="_blank">five moral themes that are universal to all humans</a></u> and that re-appear in all cultures, groups and societies: </p>
<ul>
<li>The first one is <strong>Harm</strong>, as in the understanding that it is wrong to cause harm to others</li>
<li>The second one is <strong>Fairness</strong>, as in the responsibility to treat others fairly</li>
<li>The third one is <strong>Community</strong>, as in the importance of creating, fostering and protecting community</li>
<li>The fourth one is <strong>Authority</strong>, as in the respect and acceptance of legitimate authority and the last one is</li>
<li><strong>Purity</strong>, as in the value of purity and cleanliness</li>
</ul>
<p>How these themes are ranked in importance and which one is used to moralize which area of life highly depends on culture, society, groups and individual people. Still research indicates that these 5 themes have deep evolutionary roots and may be an innate part of human nature. I found that a quite interesting claim, especially in relation to our topic and decided to explore it a little further. </p>
<p>If we are all born with the moral sense that it is wrong to harm or kill another human being, what happens then to those of us that do kill? Are they not born with this moral sense or does someone or something take that sense away, like going deaf or blind?</p>
<p>One of the possible answers I found is Kant’s <u><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/#PraReaMorPriPurPraRea" target="_blank">categorical imperative</a></u>, an ethical theory that is based on the belief that there are objective ethical rules in the world and that these rules are based on reason. According to Kant every human can come to understand and agree on moral laws through autonomous reflection. For example if we would all go out an kill people who offended us, we would soon kill off our complete species, so that sounds like a bad idea. Or to make it a little more personal, if it would be morally justified to kill someone who offends you, I would most likely not be alive anymore, someone would have taken me out a long time ago. So yes I can absolutely agree that it is not okay to kill someone because they offended me. I tried to think through a few other examples and I would say generally this theory makes sense but it also heavily relies on the idea that all people are fundamentally capable of reasoning in the same manner and on the same level. And that might just not be the case. Let’s take a closer look at Kant’s theory and its relevance for our purposes by exploring how we define the capability to reason today. </p>
<p>The ability to reason <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason" target="_blank">is defined</a></u> as the capacity to consciously make sense of things, apply logic, establish and verify facts, and change or justify practices, institutions and beliefs, based on new or existing information. So far, so good.</p>
<p>Now what this definition doesn’t really tell us is what makes someone a reasonable person, as in being in accordance with reason or an unreasonable person, as in not conformable to reason. In other words, what distinguishes disagreement from faulty reasoning or the inability to reason? </p>
<p>If I believe that the needs of the individual outweigh the needs of the group and you believe that the needs of the group outweigh the needs of the individual, and based on that I decide to save my brother while you decide to save the cure for cancer is it then fair to say that either one of us isn’t capable of reasoning?</p>
<p>I guess that’s where the 5 universal moral themes come into play. For Kant’s theory to make any sense we would have to agree that we all reason over the same knowledge base or over the same moral themes like harm, fairness, community, authority and purity.</p>
<p>What does it then mean to be reasonable or unreasonable? Well in a simplified way being reasonable then means making fair and pure decisions that foster community, respect legitimate authority and don’t cause any harm, while being unreasonable means making unfair and shady decisions that disregard community, ignore authority and cause harm to others.</p>
<p>Now if we continue to assume that we all reason over the same five universal moral themes we have to conclude that those of us who are extremely unreasonable — as for example serial killers or mass murderers — aren’t reasoning in the same manner or on the same level as the rest of us. And if we define reasonable decision making as the norm — there are after all more people that don’t become serial killers than there are actual serial killers — what is the relationship between rational agency and normativity then?</p>
<p>Whenever a serial or mass murderer commits one of their horrifying crimes one question is always asked: Why? Why did this person commit such a terrifying and senseless crime? How was this person capable of such an act?</p>
<p>And generally we come up with one of two answers, evil or seriously mentally ill. We talked about the concept of evil and its inadequacy in our last episode but let’s take a closer look at the mental illness claim. What exactly is a mental illness?</p>
<p>The latest edition of the <u><a href="http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx" target="_blank">Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders</a></u> — the standard classification of mental disorders in the United States — also called the DSM-5 defines a mental disorder as a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological or developmental process underlying mental functioning. </p>
<p>Now even though the DSM-5 goes on to describe more than 400 different types of mental illness there are two specific disorder categories that are most often associated with serial and mass murderers.</p>
<p>The first category are <strong>psychotic disorders</strong>, like for example schizophrenia. These types of disorders can result in bizarre delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking or abnormal motor behavior, diminished emotional expression and avolition.</p>
<p>The second category are <strong>personality disorders</strong>, like paranoid or antisocial personality disorder — which is actually the official psychiatric term for a psychopath. These types of disorders can result in pervasive patterns of violation of the rights, wishes and feelings of others, as well as a grandiose sense of self worth, finding pleasure and gratification in committing certain crimes and a complete lack of empathy as well as a total failure to accept responsibility. </p>
<p>Now if we look at the <u><a href="http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx" target="_blank">definition of these two disorder types</a></u> our critique of Kant’s categorical imperative as in that some people might just not reason in the same manner or on the same level as most of us, begins to gain some traction. How could someone who suffers from symptoms like that reason in a sound and logical way? </p>
<p>So could that be our answer? If you are able to reason properly you won’t kill but if you experience a certain type of serious mental disorder your reasoning becomes dysfunctional and overwrites your moral sense?</p>
<p>According to the <u><a href="https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-By-the-Numbers" target="_blank">National Alliance on Mental Illness</a></u> roughly 9 percent of U.S. adults, ages 18 and older, have a personality disorder while about 1 percent suffer from psychotic disorders. This means that about 30 million of us live with a psychotic or personality disorder. Now if we put this number, 30 million, next to the FBI statistics for <u><a href="https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murder" target="_blank">serial</a></u> and <u><a href="https://leb.fbi.gov/2014/january/active-shooter-events-from-2000-to-2012" target="_blank">mass murder</a></u> for the past 15 years, which show a combined incident number of about 600, it’s easy to see that the answer is just not that simple. Certain serious mental disorders might influence your reasoning and behavior but they most definitely don’t make you a violent offender. It’s actually very important to know that a vast majority of people who suffer from mental illness are not violent, and most violent acts are committed by people who are not mentally ill.</p>
<p>So if there is no evil and no mental illness that can explain the reasoning and behaviors of serial killers and mass murderers, what can? Well, scientists and psychologists have been working for decades trying to answer that question. And while there is still no clear answer the huge amounts of data created, collected and analyzed are beginning to reveal certain distinct patterns. </p>
<p>The most important one might be the conclusion that there is no generic template or profile for extremely deviant and violent offenders like serial killers or mass murderers. They are not limited to any specific demographic group and there are no specific combinations of traits or characteristics shown to differentiate them from other violent offenders.</p>
<p>The prevailing theory seems to be that there is a delicate and complex balance between biological, social and environmental factors that can trigger serial or mass murder. Let’s take a look at some of those factors together.</p>
<p>One of the many factors attributed to serial killers or mass murderers is an unstable family background and the likely absence of infant bonding. According to several different studies serial killers often grow up with only one parent, report having a negative relationship with one or both of their parents or parental figures, and often come from families with criminal pasts or psychiatric histories. Many of them report physical and/or psychological abuse, as well as the witnessing of sexual violence or being sexually abused themselves. Again there are many people who go through horrible experiences like this that don’t become killers, so again we are talking about correlation not causality.</p>
<p>Another correlated factor seems to be loneliness and isolation from peers, especially in their childhood. Many serial killers had lonely childhoods, were bullied and harbored secret aggressive fantasies. Many of them didn’t fit in and used their time alone to develop and evolve an often violent fantasy live.</p>
<p>Another really interesting factor that seems to play a role in triggering serial or mass murder is physical trauma, particularly head injuries. Many serial killers have a record of head injuries when they were children or recent injuries before they started to kill. According to science brain injuries can cause psychopathic behavior changes and many of those diagnosed with an antisocial personality disorder show abnormal balances of chemicals linked to compulsive and violent behavior. Still a majority of people who suffer from brain injuries or antisocial personality disorder are not violent at all. So once again this is only one factor in a very delicate and complex balance. </p>
<p>And last but not least substance abuse, through the pregnant mother or through the killer him or herself, and the resulting damage could play a role as well. But in the end what makes a serial killer or mass murderer still remains a mystery to all of us. So many people experience or live with one or more of the factors we just talked about and grow up to be kind and caring people, while there are serial killers who as far as we know experienced one or even none of these circumstances but were still capable of committing the most unimaginable and horrible crimes. </p>
<p>All we know according to our current understandings is that there seems to be a complex balance between personal social conditions and biological and genetic factors, and<br />
that healthy social factors might prevent a biochemically unstable individual from committing criminal acts while a healthy biochemistry might protect a person with a highly unstable environment from becoming a killer. Extremely violent and deviant offenders might emerge when both elements are out of balance.</p>
<p>But since it’s not possible to identify all of the factors that influence why some of us develop a moral sense and follow the moral code and laws set forth by the society we live in, it similarly is not possible to identify all the factors that influence someone to choose to go against that.</p>Research indicates that morality might be a lot more than just a set of invented or learned rules. Knowing what is right seems to have deep evolutionary roots and may actually be an innate part of human nature. But if that’s true, if we are all born with a moral sense what happens then to those of us who go against that? Join us for this episode as we try to look beyond evil.Season Two — Episode I: Fear No Evil2015-10-26T17:09:12+00:002015-10-26T17:09:12+00:00opacityzero.press/2015/10/26/season-two-episode-i-fear-no-evil<p>In season two of Opacity Zero we are going to explore what drives some of us to
actions most of us can’t even begin to imagine. What makes someone a serial
killer or a mass shooter? Does anyone or anything make you something? Or are
some of us simply natural born killers? Welcome to episode I — Fear No Evil.</p>
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<h2 id="gratitude">Gratitude</h2>
<p>To <a href="#">my Family, Friends and all the Amazing People who keep downloading, listening and supporting Opacity Zero</a>, THANK YOU. To <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Vronsky">Peter Vronsky,</a> thanks for your really interesting, well researched and fearless <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Serial-Killers-Method-Madness-Monsters/dp/0425196402">book</a> — it helped me to finally tackle this topic. To <a href="http://stijnheymans.net/">my Hubby</a>, I love you. To <a href="http://www.soundsnap.com/"> all the talented artists at soundsnap</a>, thanks for creating fantastic sounds that help me turn words into emotions.</p>
<h2 id="transcript-links-and-notes">Transcript, Links and Notes</h2>
<p>This is Opacity Zero, a show about challenging the unknown with curiosity. I am Melanie Heymans and I am really excited to welcome you back to season two — Natural Born Killers.</p>
<p>If this is your first episode, well hello there and thanks so much for joining us, I really hope you are gonna enjoy the show. If you are one of Opacity Zero’s loyal fans out there, thanks for stopping by again, I missed you. </p>
<p>In season two we are going to explore what drives some of us to actions most of us can’t even begin to imagine. What makes someone a serial killer or a mass shooter? Does anyone or anything make you something? Or are some of us simply natural born killers? Here is episode one — Fear no Evil</p>
<blockquote><p>“He was a handsome, athletic, well-spoken young man. He was unfailingly polite and popular, and appeared caring and concerned to those in his proximity. He was educated, sophisticated, and well mannered, a graduate with a university degree in psychology. He had plenty of friends of different ages and romantic relationships with women. Many other women considered him their trusted friend and confidant. An elderly women he befriended described him as a “lovable rascal.” Another woman, a former police officer who would become America’s leading true-crime writer and who coincidentally knew him, described him as having “old-world gallantry.” He had worked as a suicide counselor at a phone-in crisis clinic and had been recently admitted into law school in Seattle. The state government hired him as a crime-control consultant and he even wrote a rape-prevention handbook for women. He was a hardworking volunteer for the Republican Party, an often invited dinner guest, and a popular date, and was considered by his elders as somebody worth grooming for a possible future as a state governor, perhaps even president. He was a necrophiliac who kidnapped, murdered, raped and mutilated, in that order, twenty college-age women over a period of sixteen months. At one point he kept four of their heads in his apartment. He burned the head of another in his girlfriend’s fireplace. His name was Theodore Bundy.” </p></blockquote>
<p>With this chilling introduction <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Vronsky" target="_blank">Peter Vronsky</a></u>, an investigative journalist and documentary producer, opens his book <u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Serial-Killers-Method-Madness-Monsters/dp/0425196402" target="_blank">Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters.</a></u> Over the next 383 pages <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Vronsky" target="_blank">Vronsky</a></u> guides his readers through the history of serial murder, the evolution, the different classifications and the art and science of criminal profiling. As I was reading through these captivating yet often terrifying and disturbing pages earlier this year, one question came back to me over and over again: Are people who commit acts so far beyond general human explanation and understanding evil, insane or both?</p>
<p>In order to answer that question I thought it might be helpful to get a better understanding of these two concepts starting out with evil in episode one and exploring what does evil really mean? Where does it come from? How has it evolved over the course of its existence? And is it still or has it ever been a valid concept?</p>
<p>The word evil is <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil" target="_blank">generally defined</a></u> as describing something that is profoundly immoral and malevolent. If you are like me this definition might throw you off a little cause how can we define a concept with two other concepts that are not clearly defined, as in profoundly immoral and malevolent. Well, during my research for this season I learned pretty quickly that more specific definitions of evil and the analysis of its root motives and causes vary widely amongst groups, cultures, societies and religions. One thing that most definitions seem to have in common though is that evil is not really used to simply describe something bad or wrong, it somehow goes beyond that. Think about it for a second, I am sure you can come up with something bad or wrong that you have done this week, I sure can. I ate too much sugar, I kinda almost ran a light, I told my fair share of white lies and I could go on like this for quite a while. But if you ask me about something evil that I have done last week something changes and I am not really sure I could or would want to come up with something. Do you feel similarly?</p>
<p>Evil seems to add a quite serious layer to wrongdoing, and I was wondering why that is. If we look back at the definition of evil, the concept of morality seems to play quite a role in it — remember, evil equals profoundly immoral. Now we generally define morality as some code of conduct agreed upon by a society or group that defines what is right and what is wrong and this code is generally accepted by and applies to all members of this group. It’s basically a human made system that encourages behavior that facilitates group cohesion and discourages behavior that would disrupt, endanger or maybe even destroy the group.</p>
<p>And still, being morally responsible, or doing the right thing, often requires effort. That’s simply due to the fact that many moral standards go against our evolved inclinations and require us to be altruistic. I know there are many kind and selfless people out there and I definitely don’t want to make the claim that we are all completely self-centered but if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective altruism might not always be the best strategy, so there are times when we would prefer to do the wrong thing out of self-interest, if we knew we could get away with it.</p>
<p>So going back to being profoundly immoral, is that what evil is then? Doing the wrong thing and hoping you can get away with it? Doing the wrong thing and not caring if you get away with it? Doing the wrong thing and even enjoying it? Maybe but there still seems to be a huge difference between lying or stealing and kidnapping, murdering, raping and mutilating strangers. There must be more to evil than simply breaking the morality contract. </p>
<p>Historically the concept of evil or at least its origin seems <u><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/" target="_blank">tightly related to religion and mythology</a></u> and begins thousands of years ago with an attempt to explain how pain, misery and destruction — back then often in the form of natural disasters — could exist in a world that was believed to be created and ruled by an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good higher power. </p>
<p>Early non-secular attempts tried to explain that contradiction through describing the universe as a product of an ongoing battle between good and evil forces or as evil being a lack of goodness not created by an all-good higher power. Over time humans began to personify all kinds of adverse circumstances or tragedy in order to deal with the anxiety that life and its risks and uncertainty brought about. If you think about it, that still holds very true today, coincidence, arbitrariness and ambiguity often scare us, and in order to deal with that fear we need to judge and categorize, we need a scapegoat, we need an explanation and if we lack that there is always the supernatural or the evil. A kind of funny and at the same time quite scary <u><a href="http://www.jaapl.org/content/36/1/105.full.pdf" target="_blank">tidbit that I came across in my research</a></u> is that 40% of all Americans believe in devils, demons and other superstitious concepts.</p>
<p>And then again that’s not that surprising considering that to this day within all religions pain, misery and destruction are represented by some form of supernatural force, like monsters, shadows, darkness or demons. </p>
<p>Even though one of the first purely secular theories of evil, offered by <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant" target="_blank">Immanuel Kant</a></u> in the 18th century, put the human and its will, morale and self-interest — in other words the evil that humans do — at the center of the “evil” conversation, a somewhat supernatural aspect remains even in those approaches.</p>
<p><u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt" target="_blank">Hannah Arendt</a></u>, a political theorist, for example described evil as a form of wrongdoing which cannot be captured by moral concepts and is not done for humanly understandable motives.</p>
<p>I found this definition intriguing and it reminded me of how many news reports, political statements, opinion pieces and even personal conversations use the word evil to try to describe the actions and actors behind things that seem incomprehensible to us like mass shootings, terrorist attacks and serial murders. So I started to wonder, is evil unhuman? And if it is, what is it then? </p>
<p><u><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/" target="_blank">Contemporary theories</a></u> about evil generally focus on 5 different areas: </p>
<ul>
<li>Wrongfulness</li>
<li>Harm</li>
<li>Motivation</li>
<li>Affect and</li>
<li>Responsibility</li>
</ul>
<p>The first aspect, <strong>wrongfulness</strong>, defines that for an action to be evil it must be wrong. Well, that’s another quite tricky definition because what is wrong is not universally defined or accepted. On the contrary, what might be wrong to you might be very right to me and the other way around. Still as a society we follow a moral code that just like law applies within our group and defines to a certain extend what it right and what is wrong.</p>
<p>The second aspect, <strong>harm</strong>, indicates that evil actions must be harmful and that some form of serious and excessive suffering is needed to make an action evil.</p>
<p>The third aspect, <strong>motivation</strong>, specifies that an evil action requires a certain kind of motivation — a motivation to cause significant harm or suffering or the lack of motivation not to cause it.</p>
<p>The fourth aspect, <strong>affect</strong>, describes that in order to do evil we must feel a certain way or lack certain emotions at the time of acting — like feeling hate or lacking compassion for example.</p>
<p>The fifth and final aspect of evil, <strong>responsibility</strong>, describes that someone must be morally responsible in order to perform an evil action. This is further described as acting voluntarily, intending the victims suffering and the action must lack moral justification. This fifth aspect made me think of capital punishment, stand your ground laws, or wars — even though most societies deem murder morally wrong there are obviously situations in which we voluntarily intend someone’s death and feel morally justified to kill, which in these situations makes murder morally right, right?</p>
<p>In order to get a bit of a better understanding of these possible aspects of evil — again these are theories and not scientific facts — I tried to explore a few examples. Let’s look at two of them together.</p>
<p><em>Let’s say you bump into your neighbor and they invite you over to a little get-together that night but you don’t want to go because you are not that into your neighbor so instead of saying something like “You know I really don’t know you and I have no interest in changing that anytime soon” you say something like “Oh I would love to but I already have plans tonight…and so on and so on” — is that wrong? Yeah, cause you are lying. Does it cause harm? Most likely not. Is your motivation to cause harm or suffering? No, not really (on the contrary actually). Is it emotionally okay? Well you might lack some interest or empathy here but hey it’s nowhere near hate or rage. And last but not least, yes you are acting voluntarily but you are not intending anyones suffering AND at least in some western societies I would say you don’t lack morale justification for it. So to sum it up, is your lie evil? No, not as defined by contemporary theories.</em></p>
<p><em>Now lets up the ante and say you are living in a mutually agreed upon monogamous relationship and you are cheating on your partner — is that wrong? Yes, cause you are lying and betraying someone else’s trust. Are you causing harm? Yes, maybe not right now but should your partner find out you might be causing a lot of pain. Is your motivation to cause harm? Not necessarily, but do you lack motivation to not cause harm, I would say so. Are you feeling a certain way/lacking a certain emotion that causes you to cheat on your partner? I assume so. And last but not least, are you morally responsible for your cheating? I would say so. So in that case you would more or less meet all five aspects that contemporary theories around evil discuss — does that mean that cheating on your partner is evil? Well if so, then according to several independent studies more than 70% percent of us have committed an evil action. </em></p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, I think cheating — in all its forms and variations is wrong — but I wouldn’t call it evil. So even though I can see how these 5 aspects play a role in the definition of evil they don’t really seem to do a good job defining it.</p>
<p>So can one really define evil? Even though historical and contemporary approaches to define evil give us a good understanding of where it comes from and how it has evolved I am still not sure if it is, or ever has been a valid concept, and if it makes sense to consider it when looking at extremely violent and disturbing behavior. </p>
<p>So to get a more scientific picture of evil let’s take a look at <u><a href="http://www.jaapl.org/content/36/1/105.full.pdf" target="_blank">psychology and psychiatry</a></u>. I am sure it doesn’t come as a big surprise that evil is not a scientific concept or term at all. What might be surprising though — it was for me — is that there seem to be at least two camps within the scientific community when it comes to evil — one that calls for a more scientific definition and the inclusion of the concept of evil in medical literature, diagnostics and the justice system, and one that heavily fights that and claims that evil has no place in science. </p>
<p>Even though the scientific community is not the only one disagreeing over the value and place of evil — within all groups, communities and societies there are <u><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/" target="_blank">evil-skeptics, evil-revivalists, and even moral-skeptics</a></u> who are against all moral concepts — I feel the scientific community has made some very interesting points that really spoke to me, so here are just a few.</p>
<p>As we talked about earlier, evil is a humanly created concept that has, throughout our history been used to describe experiences, incidents and behaviors that defy scientific explanation and human understanding. This makes evil a quite subjective, relative and flexible moral concept that isn’t really quantifiable or measurable with science. </p>
<p>So why would some of us want or need a scientific definition of it? <u><a href="http://www.jaapl.org/content/36/1/105.full.pdf" target="_blank">One reason might be </a></u> that for evil to have any true legal relevance it would need to be defined and standardized. We, as a society, cannot and should not call or punish someone for being or doing evil without a clear and standardized definition of it. </p>
<p>Another possible reason might be our need to put a distance between us and those who commit what we consider evil actions or those who we consider evil, especially in harsher times. Historically societies tend to stiffen and strongly enforce or reinforce conformity and moral agreements during threats or times of trouble in order to protect the group. In these times it gets increasingly important to quickly identify threats and punish the immoral — a clear definition of the immoral, no matter how fraud, has continued to make that easier for us throughout human history. If we can put a label on evil we can judge it quickly and that makes it seemingly a lot easier to protect our group. </p>
<p>If we look at who or what we call evil as a society in less threatening times we can’t help but look to the extremes — mass murder, acts of terrorism, torture, serial murder or pedophilia. And even though for every one person who is killed in a mass shooting 2000 are killed in less infamous homicides, events like Columbine, Aurora, 9/11 or Sandy Hook stick with us forever and the word evil still feels like the only explanation we have got. </p>
<p><u><a href="http://www.jaapl.org/content/36/1/105.full.pdf" target="_blank">Interestingly that might actually say more about our society than it does about the people committing these acts</a></u> or the acts themselves. Calling someone or something evil is a way of explaining or even justifying certain actions. Based on its origin and history evil clearly puts someone or something outside of the demarcation of being human and puts a hard border between us and them. Someone who is evil is perceived as being permanently beyond repair or human understanding and no effort toward trying to rehabilitate or reintegrate this person would be worth the risk. In a weird way this perspective relieves our guilt for punishment — if you think through human history we have often felt justified in committing horrible atrocities against individuals who we labeled evil. Even today, if we take capital punishment for example, wouldn’t it make it a lot harder to justify killing another human being if we believed that with medication, therapy or another approach we could fully rehabilitate and reintegrate a murderer? </p>
<p>I have been wondering about the concept of evil and its validity for many years and even though I am well aware that deviant and extremely violent behavior is still not well understood I feel that what we have discussed today has definitely made me doubt the validity or usefulness of the concept of evil, especially when it comes to people who committed acts of excessive intentional harm. It seems to me that we have been using the concept of evil mainly to describe things we don’t understand but how can we judge someone’s actions if we don’t understand their motivations? </p>
<p>“Terrifyingly normal” An exploration of biological, psychological and social forces in human acts that defy human understanding — next time on Opacity Zero.</p>In season two of Opacity Zero we are going to explore what drives some of us to actions most of us can’t even begin to imagine. What makes someone a serial killer or a mass shooter? Does anyone or anything make you something? Or are some of us simply natural born killers? Welcome to episode I — Fear No Evil.Season One — Episode IV: Means, Motive and Opportunity2015-08-24T17:09:12+00:002015-08-24T17:09:12+00:00opacityzero.press/2015/08/24/episode-iv-means-motive-and-opportunity<p>It has been almost 18 months since MH370 vanished and still most questions
about its whereabouts and what happened aboard the Boeing 777 remain
unanswered. We spent the past few weeks ruling out catastrophic failure and
human error as the most likely scenario, but what about a hijacking? Could
someone have hijacked MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew on board? Did
someone interfere with the aircraft and took it off course on purpose? Join us
this week as we explore the most likely scenario in our fourth and final
episode on the disappearance of MH370.</p>
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<h2 id="gratitude">Gratitude</h2>
<p>To my <a href="#">copy editors</a>, thanks so much for your time, skill and
honest feedback, you helped me grow and make this show better than I ever
thought it could be. To <a href="#">my Family, Friends and all you fans of
Opacity Zero</a>, thanks for your support and passion. To <a href="http://www.flashkit.com/"> Vika @ Flash Kit</a>, once again, thanks for
providing parts of the background music. To <a href="https://stijnheymans.net/">my talented, beautiful and kind husband</a>,
thanks for allowing me to find myself over and over again, I love you. </p>
<h2 id="transcript-links-and-notes">Transcript, Links and Notes</h2>
<p>This is Opacity Zero, a show about challenging the unknown with curiosity. I am Melanie Heymans – welcome back to our forth and final episode on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 . . . Means, Motive and Opportunity.</p>
<p>As this is our last episode in this series I just want to take a quick second and say thank you, thank you to my family and friends for all your support, and for still listening. Thanks to all you strangers out there for joining me over the past 6 weeks and for letting me know how much you enjoy this show, I am deeply proud and grateful that you are spending some of your time with me.</p>
<p>Now as you are about to hear the last episode in this series I just want to quickly let you know that Opacity Zero it taking a little timeout to research and prep for our upcoming series, Natural Born Killers – coming to ear buds near you in October 2015. </p>
<p>If you liked what you heard over the past 6 weeks and want to make sure not to miss our new episodes please follow us on twitter at <u><a href="https://twitter.com/opacity0press">opacity0press</a></u>, that’s opacity – 0 – press, like us on Facebook at <u><a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Opacity-Zero/858503340907496">Opacity Zero</a></u> or check out our website at <u><a href="http://opacityzero.press/">opacityzero.press</a></u> where we will announce the launch of our new series in October 2015.</p>
<p><u>Thank you, now here’s the show:</u><br />
On November 24th 1971 at 2:30pm a man in a dark suit, white collared shirt and a black necktie, carrying a black suitcase boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 305 from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington.</p>
<p>After taking a seat in the rear of the aircraft, he lit a cigarette, ordered a bourbon and soda and passed a note to Florence Schaffner, one of the flight attendants. Assuming the note contained the business traveler’s phone number Florence dropped it in her purse unopened. As the plane took off he leaned over to her and whispered: “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”</p>
<p>The only <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper">unsolved hijacking in American aviation history</a></u> starts like a good movie and finishes like a great one. About 5 hours after passing that note to Florence — and a pit stop in Seattle to allow the passengers to exit the aircraft, get some meals for the crew, and give the FBI some time to deliver four parachutes and 200,000 dollars ransom money — Dan Cooper paid his drink tab and jumped out of the flying Boeing 727 never to be seen again.</p>
<p>Unlike the case of Dan Cooper hijackings of aircraft are usually not committed for robbery or theft but to achieve political, propaganda or psychological goals.In the past 15 years <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings">17 commercial passenger flights have been hijacked</a></u> but with the exception of the four flights that were hijacked on the morning of September 11th 2001, none of them resulted in any passenger or crew fatalities. </p>
<p>As terrifying as hijackings are they generally have one thing in common, the hijackers want something but they are not willing to pay for it with their lives.</p>
<p>The most recent hijacking of a commercial passenger aircraft, <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_702">Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702</a></u>, is a good example of that. <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_702">Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702</a></u>, a scheduled international passenger flight from Addis Ababa to Rome, was hijacked by the co-pilot in the early hours of February 17th 2014. </p>
<p>Shortly after takeoff the pilot left the cockpit to use the restroom. When he came back he found the cockpit door locked by the co-pilot who had taken over the plane and began to send the international code for an aircraft hijacking to ground control. He then flew the aircraft to Geneva, in Switzerland, where he requested political asylum and an assurance that he would not be extradited to Ethiopia. When one of the engines flamed out, a few hours later, the co-pilot decided to land the aircraft at Geneva International Airport where he identified himself as the hijacker and was arrested. Fortunately none of the 202 people on board were injured.</p>
<p>Another example is <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_1476">Turkish Airlines Flight 1476</a></u>, a scheduled international passenger flight from Tirana to Istanbul which was hijacked by a passenger on October 3rd 2006. The hijacker forced his way into the cockpit when the purser briefly opened the door to ask the flight crew if they needed anything, and demanded to be flown to Rome to speak with the Pope. After the pilot transmitted the international code for an aircraft hijacking and reported the demands to air traffic control fighter jets accompanied the plane and forced it to land at Brindisi Airport where the hijacker surrendered and apologized to the crew and passengers. None of the 113 people on board the aircraft were injured.</p>
<p>It has been almost 18 months since MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, and even though <u><a href="http://jacc.gov.au/" target="_blank">new developments</a></u> over the past few weeks might eventually shine some new light on this tragedy, most questions about MH370s whereabouts and what happened aboard the Boeing 777 that night remain unanswered.</p>
<p>We have spent the past few weeks ruling out <u><a href="http://opacityzero.press/2015/07/27/episode-ii-what-are-the-odds/" target="_blank">catastrophic failure</a></u> and <u><a href="http://opacityzero.press/2015/08/10/episode-iii-errare-humanum-est/" target="_blank">human error</a></u> as the most likely scenario but what about a hijacking? Could someone have hijacked MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew on board, just like Turkish Airlines Flight 1476 or Ethiopia Airlines Flight 702?</p>
<p><u>Let’s approach this question by asking a few more:</u></p>
<ul>
<li>Who would have hijacked the aircraft?</li>
<li>Why would they have hijacked it?</li>
<li>And if it was hijacked why would there have been no distress call from the cockpit?</li>
</ul>
<p>So let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that MH370 was in fact hijacked. Who would have wanted to hijack a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board on its way from Malaysia to China? An individual, a group, an organization? Someone desperate? Someone mentally ill? Someone with a political or psychological agenda? </p>
<p><u>Well, either way, it would have to be:</u></p>
<ul>
<li>someone who didn’t want to share his demands for the past 18 months,</li>
<li>someone who didn’t want to use the aircraft as a weapon, at least not right away, and</li>
<li>someone who didn’t want to go somewhere urban or populated, cause it seems quite impossible to land a 250-ton aircraft undetected at an official airport. “Let’s quickly sneak in between that 747 and the A380”. . .that’s not going to happen.</li>
</ul>
<p>So based on <u><a href="http://opacityzero.press/2015/07/13/episode-i-on-this-day/" target="_blank">what we know about the disappearance of MH370 so far</a></u>, the hijacker would have to be someone who would know about and would be able to utilize an extremely remote location that would allow someone to land a Boeing triple 777. It would also have to be someone who has the capacity to take 239 people hostage or the cold-bloodedness to kill them, and the influence and plan to actually do something with this triple seven he just got a hold of. </p>
<p>Call me unimaginative but that sounds quite unlikely to me. No one has claimed a hijacking or any other interference with the flight, no one has made any political or other requests or demands and no one in the cockpit made a distress call to indicate a hijacking, a task that can be completed very easily and undetected by any hijacker, and was actually done in more than 80% of all hijackings in the past 15 years.</p>
<p>On top of all that, <u><a href="http://opacityzero.press/2015/07/13/episode-i-on-this-day/" target="_blank">what we know about the flight and the flight path itself</a></u> doesn’t really speak for a hijacking. Sure, the transponder, which indicates where the aircraft is to air traffic control went silent shortly after ground control lost radio contact with the plane. This could most definitely indicate a hijacking — turning off specific communication systems is one of the first things the <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks" target="_blank">hijackers on 9/11</a></u> did once they gained control of the aircraft. Still, after the transponder went silent MH370 kept on flying for hours without ever establishing any contact or resurfacing again. </p>
<p>Another factor that speaks against a hijacking scenario is that the <u><a href="http://mh370.mot.gov.my/download/FactualInformation.pdf" target="_blank">official investigation</a></u> took a long and deep look at all the passengers on board and could not come up with any links to any terror organizations or any motives that would identify any of the passengers as possible hijackers.</p>
<p>And last but not least there is the question about how a hijacker would even make it into the cockpit? Since 9/11 all commercial aircraft are equipped with <u><a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-32070528" target="_blank">reinforced cockpit doors</a></u> that are able to resist small fire arms and even grenades, and a complex system of locks and permissions in order to avoid unauthorized access to the cockpit. In addition to that every cabin crew will block the isles with their carts if the cockpit door needs to be opened for the flight crew to use the restroom or get some refreshments. </p>
<p>Unlawfully entering the cockpit of a commercial airliner has become increasingly difficult since 9/11. . .but what if the killer is already inside the cockpit? </p>
<p><u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525" target="_blank">Germanwings Flight 9525</a></u>, a scheduled international passenger flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf, crashed in the French Alps due to deliberate action by the co-pilot killing all 150 people on board on March 24th 2015.</p>
<p>Flight 9525 left Barcelona at 10am that morning and was due to arrive at Duesseldorf about 90 minutes later. Approximately half an hour after take-off the aircraft reached its cruising altitude of 38000feet. About 3 minutes later, at 10:30am, the captain of flight 9525 confirmed some instructions from the French air traffic controllers, handed control over to the co-pilot and left the cockpit to go use the restroom. </p>
<p>As soon as the captain had left the flight deck the first officer locked the cockpit door and put a target altitude of 100feet into the autopilot. As the aircraft started to descend over the French Alps, the co-pilot increased the speed leading the plane into a steep and rapid descent. </p>
<p>At 10:34am, roughly four minutes after he had left the cockpit, the captain of Flight 9525 can be heard on the cockpit voice recorder requesting re-entry to the cockpit. At the same time, air traffic control realized that the plane had began a descent without approval and tried to reach the flight crew but received no answer. </p>
<p>A minute later, at 10:35am, the co-pilot increased the aircraft’s speed to its maximum while the captain could be heard shouting and banging at the cockpit door commanding the first officer to open it. </p>
<p>5 minutes later, at 10:40am, the ground proximity warning can be heard on the cockpit voice recorder together with the last desperate attempts of the captain to gain access to the cockpit. </p>
<p>At 10:41am Flight 9525 crashed into a mountain 62 miles northwest of Nice killing everyone on board.</p>
<p>The deeply tragic story of Germanwings Flight 9525 and its passengers and crew is a rare one, but not unheard of. Over the past 20 years there have been 5 declared or suspected pilot murder-suicides on commercial passenger flights: </p>
<ul>
<li><u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Air_Maroc_Flight_630" target="_blank">Royal Air Maroc Flight 630</a></u></li>
<li><u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185" target="blank">Silk Air Flight 185</a></u></li>
<li><u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990" target="_blank">Egypt Air Flight 990</a></u></li>
<li><u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAM_Mozambique_Airlines_Flight_470" target="_blank">Mozambique Airlines Flight 470</a></u> and</li>
<li><u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525" target="_blank">Germanwings Flight 9525</a></u></li>
</ul>
<p><u>And these cases have some eerie similarities:</u></p>
<ul>
<li>In four out of five cases communication with traffic control was stopped minutes after the aircraft had reached cruising altitude, about 30 minutes into the flight</li>
<li>In three out of five cases one of the two pilots was purposefully locked out of the cockpit after a bathroom break, leaving the other pilot alone in the cockpit</li>
</ul>
<p>Did one of the pilots of MH370 deliberately take the plane off course to take his own life and kill 238 people? Based on my research and the facts that are currently known and available that’s the most likely scenario and here is why:</p>
<p>As we established in the past few weeks <u><a href="http://opacityzero.press/2015/07/27/episode-ii-what-are-the-odds/" target="_blank">catastrophic failure</a></u> and <u><a href="http://opacityzero.press/2015/08/10/episode-iii-errare-humanum-est/" target="_blank">human error</a></u> do not really make any sense, neither does a shoot down or explosive device or a hijacking scenario. What makes sense is that someone deliberately stopped communicating with air traffic control, switched off several communication services — remember the transponder and ACARS from <u><a href="http://opacityzero.press/2015/07/13/episode-i-on-this-day/" target="_blank">episode I</a></u> — and took the aircraft off course on purpose. We know based on the flight path of MH370, provided by military radar and satellite data, that someone, not something, had to be flying and maneuvering the plane for at least another hour after air traffic control lost all radar contact.</p>
<p><u>So who was at the controls of MH370 and what was their motive? Here goes the most likely scenario of the disappearance of MH370:</u><br />
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8th 2014 like planned and reached its cruising altitude of 35000 feet about 20 minutes later, at 1:01am. About 18 minutes later as MH370 was about to leave Malaysian airspace Captain Zaharie acknowledged instructions to contact Ho Chi Minh air traffic control with the final words from the cockpit of MH370. So far so good.</p>
<p>Now the next step would have been to check in with Ho Chi Minh and that should have happened within seconds of the last communication with Kuala Lumpur air traffic control. As that didn’t happen something must have gone wrong either in the 18 minutes between the two communications with air traffic control in Kuala Lumpur or in the moments following the last communication. </p>
<p>After a series of aviation accidents were caused by distracted flight crews in the late 70s and early 80s the FAA introduced the <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_Cockpit_Rule" target="_blank">sterile cockpit rule</a></u>, a regulation that requires pilots to refrain from any non-essential activities during critical phases of flight, like take-off and landing. In practice this rule means that pilots are generally solely focused on their flying duties till they reach cruising altitude, the safest part of a flight, then they have some time to relax, use the restroom, get a cup of coffee and monitor the aircraft till it is time for descent. </p>
<p>Now this rule might explain why in a majority of pilot murder-suicide cases, like <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525" target="_blank">Germanwings Flight 9525</a></u>, communication ceased and one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit shortly after the aircraft reached cruising altitude. Enforcing the <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_Cockpit_Rule" target="_blank">sterile cockpit rule</a></u> the pilots stayed highly focused on their flying duties till they reached cruising altitude at which point they relaxed and briefly stepped out of the cockpit, not knowing that they would never enter it again.</p>
<p>MH370 reached its cruising altitude at 1:01am, either at that point, or after the last communication with the ground at 1:19am, one of the pilots might have gotten up to take a restroom break, get some coffee or go for a quick chat with the cabin crew, leaving the other pilot in the cockpit by himself. As soon as the door was closed the pilot remaining in the cockpit locked it from the inside. </p>
<p>Now we know that MH370 was flying on for hours after the last communication at 1:19am – and we also know from other pilot murder-suicides that the locked out pilot would have most likely tried desperately to get back into the cockpit, so the pilot in control of the plane, knowing that he was flying on for quite a while, might have wanted to do something to incapacitate the passengers and crew in the cabin behind him. </p>
<p>The <u><a href="http://www.smartcockpit.com/docs/B777-Air_Systems.pdf" target="_blank">cabin pressurization system of the Boeing 777</a></u> allows a pilot to decompress the cabin with the push of a few buttons on the overhead panel. The pilot of MH370 might have used that feature to incapacitate the crew and passengers on board. What would a scenario like that have looked like?</p>
<p>Once he was alone in the cockpit the pilot in control of MH370 might have started to decompress the plane which would have, after reaching a critical level of cabin pressure, triggered an alarm in the cockpit and caused the automatic deployment of oxygen masks in the cabin. </p>
<p>Unfortunately these oxygen masks only provide oxygen for about 12 minutes, enough time for the pilots to descent to a safe altitude in an unplanned decompression incident, but not a lot of time to interfere with a deliberate decompression. After the passengers would have ran out of oxygen their time of useful consciousness at 35000feet would have been about 30-60 seconds, so within about 20 to 30 minutes or so, considering the portable oxygen tanks that some of the crew members might have grabbed, basically everyone in the back of the aircraft would have been unconscious.</p>
<p>Now, what about the pilot in the cockpit? We have established that someone deliberately flew the plane for quite a while after it disappeared from air traffic control so how did the pilot do it with only 12 minutes of oxygen? Well, the flight deck has its completely independent oxygen system which is capable of supplying the flight crew with at least 6,5 hours of supplemental oxygen.</p>
<p>So in our scenario the pilot most likely decompressed the cabin, put on his oxygen mask in the cockpit and was able to continue flying the aircraft for quite a while. Over the next few hours he completed the air turn back, flew back over the Malay Peninsula (a quick shout out to our hand map), took a right turn towards the small island of Pulau Perak, and some time after 2:22am took another sharp left turn toward the Southern Indian Ocean. </p>
<p>According to <u><a href="http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/2014/considerations-on-defining-the-search-area-mh370.aspx" target="_blank">Inmarsat’s data</a></u> — remember the handshakes from episode I — the aircraft most likely didn’t make any sharp turns anymore after that so we could assume That the pilot just continued flying the aircraft till it ran out of fuel or that after having maneuvered the aircraft to a quite remote area over the open sea he might have engaged the autopilot and took off his oxygen mask, becoming unconscious, and leaving the aircraft to fly on autopilot till it ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean around 8:19am.</p>
<p>Why 8:19am you ask? Remember the last satellite message the aircraft sent? It was a log-on request to SATCOM at 8:19am after having completed 5 handshakes with the ground station in the hours before, having sent the last one just 9 minutes earlier, at 8:10am. </p>
<p>Generally these handshakes are completed every hour and generally the aircraft doesn’t send a log-on request after having been logged on to the system for hours. </p>
<p><u>So here is what I assume happened:</u><br />
Sometime around 8:00am the aircraft started running low on fuel, and at a certain point the engines flamed out. Now as you might remember from <u><a href="http://opacityzero.press/2015/07/27/episode-ii-what-are-the-odds/" target="_blank">episode II</a></u>, the engines are the main supply of electrical power for the aircraft, so at this point the emergency systems, like the small turbine that would automatically be deployed outside the plane and be powered by the airflow, would kick in. So maybe somewhere in these eerie minutes, the aircraft systems lost electrical power, but got it back due to the emergency systems taking over and therefore the aircraft restarted the SATCOM link and sent another log-on request to the ground station.</p>
<p>But at this point MH370 had not only ran out of fuel, but also out of time, and sometime after 8:19am the now unpowered aircraft would have gotten too slow, entered a Stall and crashed into the ocean.</p>
<p>Now this episode is called Means, Motive and Opportunity and both the captain and the first officer of MH370 had the means and the opportunity to take the Boeing 777 off course and crash it into the Southern Indian Ocean, but what about motive, did either one of them have a motive to kill himself and 238 people on board?</p>
<p>Well, that’s the one big hole in my theory cause, no I couldn’t find an obvious motive. Not for Captain Zaharie nor for first officer Fariq. Both were passionate about flying, well respected and integrated in their communities, both had a seemingly functional social and family network, neither of them seemed to have any financial problems, no known history of drug abuse or any other psychological problems, nothing. Nothing jumps out that would give any indication of a will to die, or to kill 238 people. </p>
<p>Were there rumors about secret affairs, family problems and some possible political motives, sure, but that’s all they have been so far, rumors. I wasn’t able to confirm any of them and even if, would they be a reason to commit mass murder? And then again what would be a valid reason?</p>
<p>People that commit mass murder do not always have preexisting risk factors, current or ongoing stressors, or never had a loving family or environment. Often enough they are highly functioning members of society that manage to deceive everyone around them, even those closest to them.</p>
<p>Did I offer you the most likely scenario based on what we know about MH370? Yes. Can I offer you a motive? No. </p>
<p>But for the sake of the families and friends of everyone on board MH370 I hope that one day someone will.</p>It has been almost 18 months since MH370 vanished and still most questions about its whereabouts and what happened aboard the Boeing 777 remain unanswered. We spent the past few weeks ruling out catastrophic failure and human error as the most likely scenario, but what about a hijacking? Could someone have hijacked MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew on board? Did someone interfere with the aircraft and took it off course on purpose? Join us this week as we explore the most likely scenario in our fourth and final episode on the disappearance of MH370.Season One — Episode III: Errare Humanum Est2015-08-10T17:09:12+00:002015-08-10T17:09:12+00:00opacityzero.press/2015/08/10/episode-iii-errare-humanum-est<p>More than 50% of all aviation accidents are caused by human error. Did the
flight crew of MH370 make a skill-based mistake? Did the Boeing 777 vanish due
to a decision error in-flight? Did someone on the ground make a wrong decision
and seal the fate of MH370? Did the plane run out of fuel due to a mistake?
Join us this week as we explore human error as the possible cause of the
disappearance of MH370.</p>
<h2 id="listen">Listen</h2>
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<h2 id="gratitude">Gratitude</h2>
<p>To <a href="#">my Family, Friends and all the Amazing People who keep
downloading, listening and supporting Opacity Zero</a>, THANK YOU. To <a href="#">Karen and Maggie,</a> thanks for all your love and kindness. To <a href="https://stijnheymans.net/">my Hubby</a>, I love you. To <a href="http://www.flashkit.com/"> Vika @ Flash Kit</a>, thanks for providing
parts of the background music.</p>
<h2 id="transcript-links-and-notes">Transcript, Links and Notes</h2>
<p>This is Opacity Zero, a show about challenging the unknown with curiosity. I am Melanie Heymans, welcome back to episode three – Errare Humanum Est.</p>
<p>This stall warning sounded 75 times before <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447"><u>Air France Flight 447</u></a> crashed into the Atlantic Ocean killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew members in the early hours of June 1st 2009.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447"><u>Air France Flight 447</u></a> was a scheduled international passenger flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, which crashed almost 4 hours after takeoff due to an aerodynamic <a href="http://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Stall"><u>stall</u></a>. Simply put an aerodynamic <a href="http://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Stall"><u>stall</u></a> happens when a plane doesn’t have enough forward speed for the wings to generate sufficient lift to keep the aircraft airborne leading to a quick, sometimes uncontrolled, descend.</p>
<p>For a wing to create lift it needs a certain speed and a certain <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_attack"><u>angle of attack</u></a>, that’s the angle between the wing and the air flowing towards it. The flight crew can change the angle of attack by pointing the nose of the aircraft up or down. Each aircraft has a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_attack#Critical_angle_of_attack"><u>critical angle of attack</u></a> which describes the angle for maximum lift – for most aircraft this angle lies at around 15 – 20 degrees. Above the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_attack#Critical_angle_of_attack"><u>critical angle of attack</u></a> it gets increasingly hard for the wings to create lift and the airplane starts to stall.</p>
<p>If you have ever held your hand out of the window of a driving car you have already played with this phenomenon. If you keep your hand parallel to the ground the air presses hard against the side of it and you need quite some strength to keep it that way. As soon as you tilt your hand a bit upwards and change the angle of attack, the airflow lifts your hand up. Now if you tilt it too much, beyond the critical angle of attack, you lose the lift and your hand is pushed back and down by the airflow and by gravity.</p>
<p>In a very simplified way that’s what happened to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447"><u>Air France Flight 447</u></a> – but what or better who put the aircraft in a stall?</p>
<p>On the night of May 31st 2009 three experienced pilots were at the controls of the Airbus A330 on its journey from Rio to Paris. About 3 and half hours into the flight the captain, in a standard procedure, handed over control to one of the two co-pilots, and went to take a nap. Shortly after the aircraft flew through some turbulence and the plane’s pitot tubes, which determine air speed, iced-over. In another standard procedure, the aircraft turned off the autopilot, due to the missing speed information, and handed control over to the pilots. As the pilot in charge took over he abruptly and unnecessarily raised the nose of the aircraft, increasing it’s angle of attack, and leading it into a climb to its maximum altitude of 38000 feet. As the pilot continued to raise the nose of the aircraft the angle of attack increased rapidly towards 30 degrees, causing the wings to lose lift and the aircraft to stall. Despite all persistent and quite clear symptoms over the next few minutes, the crew never understood that they were in a stall situation and never undertook any recovery maneuvers, which lead to the crash of a perfectly flyable aircraft and the death of 228 people on board.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447"><u>Air France Flight 447</u></a> is a very tragic but by far not the only incident of a plane crash caused by human error. More than 50% of all aviation accidents are caused directly or indirectly by a human being.</p>
<p>Could human error have caused the disappearance of MH370?</p>
<p><u>Let’s start out by defining what human error means:</u><br />
Human error describes any actions or the lack thereof that fail to physically or mentally recognize, change, prevent or mitigate a certain situation. While previous definitions called this type of error “pilot error” the term has been changed to “human error” to more realistically reflect that anybody who acts in a support capacity of a flight may contribute to the error chain, not just the pilots. Still for the scope of this Podcast we will mainly focus on human error within the cockpit.</p>
<p>According to the “<a href="https://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/2000s/media/0103.pdf"><u>Human Factors Analysis and Classification System</u></a>”, which is used by official aviation and transportation organizations, <u>human errors can be divided into four different levels:</u></p>
<ul>
<li>Organizational Influences</li>
<li>Unsafe Supervision</li>
<li>Preconditions for Unsafe Acts, and</li>
<li>Unsafe Acts, further broken down into
<ul>
<li>errors, and</li>
<li>violations</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>While all four of these categories are dependent on each other and all of them are important, we are going focus on the last category, unsafe acts.</p>
<p>As mentioned before, <u>unsafe acts are broken down into two categories</u>:</p>
<ul>
<li>Errors, which describe mental or physical activities of a person that fail to achieve their intended outcome and are divided into three sub-categories:
<ul>
<li>Decision Errors</li>
<li>Skill-based errors, and</li>
<li>Perceptual errors</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>The second category of unsafe acts are violations</li>
</ul>
<p>According to a <a href="http://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/2000s/media/0524.pdf"><u>long-term analysis</u></a> of the Federal Aviation Administration, 79.2% of all aviation accidents due to human error are caused by skill-based errors, 29.7% by decision errors, 13.7 by violations and 5.7% by perceptual errors. You might have already thought to yourself, wait these numbers add up to more than 100%, and you are absolutely right. The reason for that is that many accidents are associated with multiple error categories, still nearly 61% of all accidents caused by human error begin with a skill-based error, about 19% with a decision error, 8 with a violation and 4% with a perceptual error.</p>
<p>Let’s take a look at these individual categories and explore how likely they are to have caused the disappearance of MH370.</p>
<p>Let’s start out with our biggest category, <strong><u>skill-based errors</u></strong>, which describe errors in basic flight skills that occur without much thought.</p>
<ul>
<li>If we are only looking at fatal aviation accidents the most common type of skill-based error to happen is “<em>improper maintenance of airspeed</em>”.
<p>A quite tragic example of this type of skill based error is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214"><u>Asiana Airlines Flight 214</u></a>, a scheduled transpacific passenger flight from Seoul to San Francisco, that crashed on final approach with 307 passengers and crew on board, due to inadequate monitoring of airspeed by the flight crew. During the already mismanaged initial approach the captain of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214"><u>Asiana Airlines Flight 214</u></a> selected an inappropriate autopilot mode which deactivated the automatic airspeed control. As a result the airspeed of the aircraft decreased, unnoticed by the flight crew, and the plane descended below its desired glide path. By the time the crew realized that they were flying too slow and too low it was already too late and the aircraft struck the seawall and crashed short of runway 28L at San Francisco International Airport.</p></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The second, most frequent, type of skill-based errors – again that’s errors in basic flight skills that occur without much thought – is “<em>improper control or handling of the aircraft on the ground or in the air</em>“.
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587"><u>American Airlines Flight 587</u></a>, a scheduled passenger flight from New York City to Santo Domingo crashed into Queens shortly after take-off on November 12th 2001, killing all 260 people on board and 5 people on the ground, due to improper handling of the aircraft by the first officer. On the morning of November 12th 2001, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587"><u>American Airlines Flight 587</u></a>, took-off runway 31L at John F. Kennedy International Airport in NYC, shortly after a Japan Airlines Boeing 747. About a minute after takeoff <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587"><u>American Airlines Flight 587</u></a> encountered wake turbulences from the Boeing 747 in front of it. The first officer of Flight 587 attempted to stabilize the aircraft with continuous unnecessary and excessive rudder movements which stressed and eventually snapped off the aircraft’s vertical stabilizer – remember that’s the shark fin on the tail of a plane – causing the aircraft to lose control and crash. If the first officer would have stopped making additional inputs, the aircraft would have stabilized by itself and this horrible accident would have never happened.</p></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The third most common type of skill-based human errors is “<em>the occurrence of a stall or a spin</em>” like it happened in the case of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447"><u>Air France Flight 447</u></a>.
<p>The flight crew made inappropriate control inputs, destabilized the plane, failed to follow appropriate procedure and to recognize that the aircraft had stalled, and consequently did not make any inputs that would have made it possible to recover from the stall. To err is human and in this and many other cases skill-based human error paid the ultimate price, human life.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Did the flight crew of MH370 make a flight skill mistake? Was it a skill-based error that made the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers on board disappear without a trace? Unlikely. Neither improper maintenance of airspeed, nor improper handling of the aircraft or a failed recovery from a stall make a lot of sense in the case of MH370. The simple fact that the aircraft diverted and vanished hundreds of miles from its actual flight path without ever establishing any contact with air traffic control basically rules out any scenario like the ones we just heard about. Even a skill-based error that might have incapacitated the passengers and crew doesn’t explain the huge diversion and the manual turns hours into the silent flight of MH370.</p>
<p>Let’s look on and explore our second category of human errors, <strong><u>decision errors</u></strong>.</p>
<p>Decision errors are defined as errors that represent conscious, goal-intended behavior that proves inadequate or inappropriate for the situation.</p>
<ul>
<li>The most frequent error type in this category is, “<em>in-flight planning</em>“, which refers to decision making or plan revisions performed after the aircraft has taken off.
<p>A tragic example of this type of decision error is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_Airways_International_Flight_261"><u>Thai Airways International Flight 261</u></a>, a scheduled passenger flight from Bangkok to Surat Thani. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_Airways_International_Flight_261"><u>Flight 261</u></a> crashed on its third attempt to land killing 101 of the 146 people on board. According to the official investigation the accident occurred due to the pilot’s attempt to approach the airport in lower than minimum visibility with rain. In addition to that the pilots suffered from the accumulation of stress, the final approach being their third attempt, and may have experienced spatial disorientation.</p></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The second most frequent type of decision errors is “<em>planning or decision making on the ground</em>“.
<p>The deadliest accident in aviation history, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster"><u>Tenerife airport disaster</u></a>, is a tragic example of that type of human error.The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster"><u>Tenerife airport disaster</u></a> was a fatal runway collision between KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736 at Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife on March 27th, 1977, killing 583 people.</p>
<p>For both flights, Tenerife was an unscheduled stop due to a bomb explosion at Gran Canaria Airport, their actual destination. Los Rodeos, a regional airport, had only one runway and struggled accommodating the extra traffic that was diverted to it due to the explosion. As Gran Canaria Airport reopened later that day, both flights, KLM 4805 and Pan Am 1736 got ready for takeoff. Soon after the KLM was cleared to taxi down the runway, make a 180 degree turn and get into takeoff position. A few moments later the Pan Am was instructed to follow the KLM down the same runway but to exit about halfway and use the parallel taxiway.</p>
<p>While the Pan Am made its way down the runway, the flight crew of the KLM misinterpreted several communications with Air Traffic Control as clearance to takeoff and started its takeoff roll down the runway. At the same time Pan Am’s Crew informed Air Traffic Control that they were still taxiing down the runway – due to dense fog, neither the crews nor the control tower were able to see that the planes were heading towards each other.</p>
<p>As the tower instructed the Pan Am to report back when they cleared the runway the KLM flight engineer asked “Is he not clear, that Pan American?” The captain of the KLM replied “Oh, yes” and continued with the takeoff. By the time the two crews saw each other it was already too late to aboard the takeoff – and while the Pan Am crew took a sharp left turn in an attempt to avoid the collision, the pilots of the KLM prematurely lifted the nose of the aircraft trying to take off before hitting the Pan Am.</p>
<p>At this point the KLM was within 300 feet of the other aircraft and while its nose cleared the Pan Am, the engines, lower fuselage and main landing gear struck the upper right side of it at about 160 miles per hour. After remaining airborne for a few seconds the KLM crashed into the ground 500 feet past the collision, killing all passengers and crew on board.</p></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The third most frequent type of decision based errors relates to “<em>fuel management</em>” and generally describes situations of in-flight fuel starvation.
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapag-Lloyd_Flight_3378"><u>Hapag-Lloyd Flight 3378</u></a>, an international passenger flight from Crete to Hannover, Germany with 143 passengers and 8 crew on board crash-landed in Vienna after running out of fuel on July 12th 2000.Shortly after takeoff in Crete the flight crew realized that they were not able to fully retract the landing gear. After several attempts they decided to leave the gear fully extended and continued their flight towards Germany. To account for the extra drag produced by the landing gear the flight crew recalculated the aircraft’s fuel consumption and decided to shorten the flight to Munich instead of flying to Hannover. Unfortunately the crew didn’t realize that their fuel calculations were incorrect until their fuel reserves dropped rapidly while they were still in Greek airspace. Instead of diverting to the nearest airport, which would have been 10 minutes away, the captain of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapag-Lloyd_Flight_3378"><u>Flight 3378</u></a> decided to fly on to Vienna. About 150 miles from Vienna the low fuel warning went off and the captain finally decided to declare an emergency. Both engines flamed out 14 miles from Vienna leading to a crash landing 2000 feet short of the runway.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Did MH370 vanish due to a decision error in-flight? Did someone on the ground make a wrong decision and sealed MH370s fate? Did MH370 run out of fuel? Yes, most likely someone in the cockpit of MH370 made a wrong decision, yes, someone on the ground might have sealed the fate of 239 people, including their own. And yes, MH370 most likely eventually crashed due to fuel starvation BUT no, most likely none of this happened due to human error.</p>
<p>Similar like with skill-based error, a scenario like in the cases we just heard about is highly unlikely. If MH370 would have simply run out of fuel on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing the flight crew should have declared an emergency, attempt an emergency landing, or we should at least have found evidence of an accident along the planned flight path, and not evidence of hours of flight after it diverted. The same argumentation holds for any “honest” errors during flight or on the ground, so let’s look on.</p>
<p>The third and final error category is <strong><u>perceptual errors</u></strong>, which describe situations in which sensory input is degraded. This type of error often happens when flying at night, in weather, or in other visually impoverished situations.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_China_Flight_129"><u>Air China Flight 129</u></a>, an international passenger flight from Beijing, China to Busan, South Korea crashed into a hill near Busan killing 129 of 166 people on board on April 15th 2002. After a routine 2 hour flight from Beijing the crew of Flight 129 received clearance to land in Busan in light rain and mist. The flight crew aborted its first approach due to low visibility, lost situational awareness and went below the minimum safe altitude while circling the runway and crashed into a hill.</p>
<p>Yes, MH370 was flying at night but as we talked about in episode two, the weather was good and visibility was high. If the flight crew would have lost situational awareness they wouldn’t have flown on for several hours not contacting anyone, also for perceptual errors the likelihood is very low, so let’s take a look at our last category of unsafe acts, violations.</p>
<p><strong><u>Violations</u></strong>, which describe willful disregard for the rules and regulations of safe flight, are much less common than errors.</p>
<p>A deeply tragic example of an aviation accident caused by a violation is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593"><u>Aeroflot Flight 593</u></a>, an international passenger flight from Moscow to Hong Kong that crashed into a hillside killing all 75 people on board. During the flight one of the pilots of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593"><u>Aeroflot 593</u></a> brought his children into the cockpit while he was on duty and against regulations allowed them to sit at the controls. While in the pilot’s seat one of the children switched off parts of the autopilot unnoticed. Shortly after the aircraft started banking right causing confusion in the cockpit and leading to a loss of control by the pilots. When the flight crew managed regain control the altitude of the plane was too low to recover and the aircraft crashed into the ground.</p>
<p>Now the question remains, did someone on board MH370 or on the ground willfully disregard the rules and regulations of safe flight? Yes, probably, did they do it by mistake? Probably not.</p>
<p>Acts of sabotage, next time on Opacity Zero.</p>More than 50% of all aviation accidents are caused by human error. Did the flight crew of MH370 make a skill-based mistake? Did the Boeing 777 vanish due to a decision error in-flight? Did someone on the ground make a wrong decision and seal the fate of MH370? Did the plane run out of fuel due to a mistake? Join us this week as we explore human error as the possible cause of the disappearance of MH370.Season One — Episode II: What are the odds?2015-07-27T17:09:12+00:002015-07-27T17:09:12+00:00opacityzero.press/2015/07/27/episode-ii-what-are-the-odds<p>In 2014 more than 3.3 billion people flew safely on more than 38 million
flights — impressive numbers, right? But 2014 won’t be remembered for its
millions of safe flights but for the one flight that disappeared with 239
people on board. Join us for this episode as we explore catastrophic failure as
the possible cause of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.</p>
<h2 id="listen">Listen</h2>
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<h2 id="gratitude">Gratitude</h2>
<p>To <a href="#">my Family, Friends and all the Wonderful People I Don’t Know but who downloaded the first episode</a>, thanks for your support, excitement and feedback. I felt quite self-conscious after publishing the first episode, kinda like an idiot, and now Opacity Zero has some real fans out there…you are unbelievable…THANK YOU </p>
<p>To <a href="https://stijnheymans.net/">my Hubby</a>, you are a Topaxel 🙂</p>
<p>To <a href="http://www.flashkit.com/"> Adam Goh @ Flash Kit</a>, thanks for providing parts of the background music</p>
<h2 id="transcript-links-and-notes">Transcript, Links and Notes</h2>
<p>This is Opacity Zero, a show about challenging the unknown with curiosity. I am Melanie Heymans and I am really excited that you are back for episode II. . . What are the odds?</p>
<p>38, 73, 12, 641. . .these are the numbers that sum up <u><a href="http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2015-03-09-01.aspx">commercial aviation safety for 2014</a></u>:</p>
<ul>
<li>38 million flights</li>
<li>73 accidents</li>
<li>12 of those fatal</li>
<li>killing a total of 641 people</li>
</ul>
<p>Over the past 20 years aviation accidents have become a rare occurrence. Thanks to major advances in technology and training the fatal aircraft accident rate has been reduced from 0.6 accidents per million flights to 0.2, while the hull loss accident rate — which is accidents in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economical repair — has been cut in half from 1 accident per million flights to 0.5.</p>
<p>In 2014 more than 3.3 billion people flew safely on more than 38 million flights. The odds of being killed in a single airline flight are 1 in 4.7 million – compared to 1 in 220 of writing a New York Times Bestseller, or 1 in 563 of catching a ball at a major league baseball game, the odds are definitely in your favor. And yes, you should totally write that book.</p>
<p>Even though these numbers are impressive 2014 won’t be remembered for 38 million safe flights, but for two extraordinary and deeply tragic events – the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by anti-aircraft weaponry and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.</p>
<p><a href="http://opacityzero.press/episode-i-on-this-day/"><u>We know the story of MH370:</u></a> A Boeing 777 with 239 passengers and crew on board departs Kuala Lumpur, in the early hours of March 8th 2014, headed for Beijing. About 40 minutes into the flight the plane goes silent and disappears from civilian air traffic control radars. Military radar and satellites track the aircraft flying on for a few more hours before it disappears completely sometime between 8:19 and 9:15am.</p>
<p>In the absence of answers, in the 16 months since then, speculation about what happened on board MH370 has been vigorous – from an accident to a secret landing to pilot suicide, it has all been discussed by amateurs and professionals alike.</p>
<p>But which theories hold up and which don’t? Which ones are likely and which ones are easy to dispel? To find some answers let’s quickly shift our focus from what we don’t know to something we know – why do planes crash in general:</p>
<p><u>More than 60% of all aircraft accidents fall into one of three categories:</u></p>
<ul>
<li>The first one is called “<a href="http://asndata.aviation-safety.net/industry-reports/Airbus-Commercial-Aviation-Accidents-1958-2013.pdf"><u>Loss of Control in Flight</u></a>” and accounts for 27% of all aircraft accidents. It is defined as a situation in which an aircraft enters a state outside of its designed capabilities regarding speed, altitude or load and therefore becomes uncontrollable.</li>
<li>The second category is “<a href="http://asndata.aviation-safety.net/industry-reports/Airbus-Commercial-Aviation-Accidents-1958-2013.pdf"><u>Controlled Flight into terrain</u></a>” which accounts for 22% of all aircraft accidents and is defined as a collision with terrain, water, or an obstacle without indication of loss of control, in other words when a perfectly functioning aircraft is flown into the ground, an obstacle or water under complete control of the pilot.</li>
<li>The third category is “<a href="http://asndata.aviation-safety.net/industry-reports/Airbus-Commercial-Aviation-Accidents-1958-2013.pdf"><u>Runway Excursions</u></a>” which accounts for 11% of all aircraft accidents and is defined as a situation in which an aircraft veers off or overruns the runway.</li>
</ul>
<p>Now these three categories tell us the different types of aviation accidents but they don’t tell us a lot about the cause. What causes a plane to reach its design limits, veer off a runway or collide with terrain?</p>
<p>If you are thinking “<a href="http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm"><u>human error</u></a>” you are on the right track – more than half of all fatal aviation accidents in the past 50 years have been directly or indirectly caused by pilot error, followed by 20% caused by <a href="http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm"><u>catastrophic failure</u></a>, 12% by <a href="http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm"><u>weather</u></a>, and 8% by <a href="http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm"><u>sabotage</u></a>.</p>
<p>Human error is a broad and quite complex concept and we will spend episode three diving deep into it but for today’s episode we are going to explore catastrophic failure as the possible cause of the disappearance of MH370.</p>
<p><u>Let’s start out by taking a look at what exactly catastrophic failure is:</u><br />
Catastrophic failure describes all events that affect one or more critical aircraft structures or systems making it difficult or impossible for the crew to safely fly or land the aircraft.</p>
<p>Today’s aircraft are built extremely well, checked regularly and maintained according to strict guidelines and maintenance schedules. All critical systems on modern airplanes have several backup systems or procedures so it generally takes multiple malfunctions of redundant systems to create a potentially catastrophic failure.</p>
<p><u>Still there are certain parts and systems within an aircraft that are more susceptible to failure than others and we generally distinguish between two types of catastrophic failure:</u></p>
<ul>
<li>The first one is Structural or Mechanical Failure and</li>
<li>The second one is Electrical failure</li>
</ul>
<p>Let’s take a closer look at these two categories.</p>
<p><u>Structural or mechanical failure describes any failure that involves:</u></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airframe"><u>the airframe</u></a>, which includes the fuselage, the doors, the tail and the wings OR</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_surfaces"><u>the flight surfaces</u></a>, which include:
<ul>
<li>the flaps – those are these movable parts on the back of the wings that you can see extending and retracting at take-off and landing,</li>
<li>the horizontal stabilizer – that’s the two small horizontal surfaces that you can see on the tail of an aircraft,</li>
<li>the elevators – those are the movable parts on the horizontal stabilizers which control if the nose of the airplane points up or down and,</li>
<li> the rudder, which is the movable part of the vertical surface on the tail, the one that sticks out like a shark fin and</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercarriage"><u>the undercarriage</u></a> – which is the gear, the brakes, the tires and the wheels.</li>
</ul>
<p>Structural failure generally occurs when one of these components or structures is no longer able to withstand the stress imposed on it during operation. <u>This lack of stress tolerance can be caused by:</u></p>
<ul>
<li>design errors,</li>
<li>metallic corrosion,</li>
<li>structural fatigue,</li>
<li>overload,</li>
<li>sabotage, or</li>
<li>maintenance errors.</li>
</ul>
<p>One of the most tragic aviation accidents caused by structural failure was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123"><u>Japan Airlines Flight 123</u></a> the deadliest single-aircraft accident in history. On August 12th 1985 Japan Airlines Flight 123, a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Tokyo to Osaka, suffered an explosive decompression 12 minutes after take-off and crashed into two mountain ridges 32 minutes later, killing all 15 crew members and 505 of the 509 passengers on board.</p>
<p>The explosive decompression was caused by a faulty repair of the rear pressure bulkhead — an airtight bulkhead located between the cabin and the tail of the aircraft, responsible for maintaining cabin pressure — 7 years earlier. The incorrect repair reduced the bulkheads resistance to metal fatigue drastically and when the bulkhead finally gave way it ruptured the lines of all four hydraulic systems and ejected the vertical stabilizer leaving the pilots with the desperate and impossible task of flying an uncontrollable aircraft.</p>
<p>But it’s not only structural damage that can lead to a catastrophic scenario like the one Flight 123 experienced, a serious electrical problem can constitute a high-risk scenario as well.</p>
<p>Electrical failure is extremely unlikely in modern aircraft due to many redundancies but unlikely doesn’t mean impossible – who would have thought that a 250-ton Boeing 777 with 239 people on board could just vanish.</p>
<p><u>Electrical systems on an aircraft can be broken down into several basic elements:</u></p>
<ul>
<li>The primary source of electrical power within an aircraft is typically engine-driven <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternator"><u>alternators</u></a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_generator"><u>generators</u></a> – modern aircraft are equipped with at least three of these generators of equivalent capacity, one of which will be powered by an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_power_unit"><u>Auxiliary Power Unit</u></a>, which can be started and operated during flight to allow for backup power in case one or both of the main generators fail.</li>
<li>In addition to these primary sources there are other methods of generating power such as hydraulically powered generators or small <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_air_turbine"><u>turbines</u></a> and the ultimate backup of power from at least one main battery. In case of failure of multiple main generators the hydraulic emergency generator or turbine will automatically be activated. Only if these emergency generators would fail too and the main battery would be depleted an aircraft would become electrically unpowered.</li>
</ul>
<p>All of these systems and backups are responsible to provide electrical power to essential flight instruments and controls like the navigation instruments, the communication equipment and the electrical components of the aircraft like the flaps, the landing gear, the fuel pump and other motors and subsystems.</p>
<p><u>Electrical failure to these systems can generally be caused by one of four reasons:</u></p>
<ul>
<li>Generator failure</li>
<li>Component failure</li>
<li>Bus failure – a bus is a metallic strip or bar that conducts electricity within an electrical device, or</li>
<li>An electrical system fire</li>
</ul>
<p>Fatal aviation accidents due to electrical failure are extremely rare, in most cases the pilots complete a challenging but uneventful landing with no injuries to passengers and crew.</p>
<p>An impressive example of a complete electrical failure was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236"><u>Air Transat Flight 236</u></a>, a transatlantic flight from Toronto to Lisbon with 293 passengers and 13 crew on board. On August 24th 2001 the Airbus A330 operating the flight suffered a complete power loss more than 4 hours into the flight in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.</p>
<p>Both engines flamed out due to improper maintenance and even though the ram air turbine was deployed automatically to provide power for critical sensors and instruments the aircraft lost its main hydraulic power which operates the flaps, alternate brakes and spoilers. 30 grueling minutes after the power loss the pilots completed a successful emergency landing in the Azores saving all 306 people on board.</p>
<p>Could something similar have happened to MH370? Did catastrophic electrical or structural failure strike the aircraft?</p>
<p><u>Let’s quickly recall some <a href="http://opacityzero.press/episode-i-on-this-day/">key facts</a> about the flight before we take a closer look at these questions:</u><br />
MH370 departed Kuala Lumpur at 12:41am on March 8th 2014. After 40 minutes of routine flight and standard communication with the ground the flight crew failed to check in with Vietnamese air traffic control and the aircraft suddenly disappeared from civilian radar screens. Military radar continued to track the plane as it deviated from its planned flight route making a sharp 180 degree left turn flying back over the Malay Peninsula. About 30 minutes later military radar showed MH370 flying over the Island of Penang and turning right into the Strait of Malacca. Even though military radar contact was lost shortly after, we know, due to satellite handshakes, that the plane was flying on for another 6 hours before it vanished.</p>
<p>Now keeping these details in mind how does catastrophic structural failure fit into the picture?</p>
<p>As we already talked about a little earlier, structural failure describes any failure that involves the airframe, the flight surfaces or the undercarriage of an aircraft. <u>What kind of scenarios could cause catastrophic damage to those parts?</u></p>
<ul>
<li>Major reasons for catastrophic structural failure are collisions with other aircraft, birds or other foreign Objects (like debris on the runway for example) – on the ground or in-flight<br />
Looking at what we know about MH370, a mid-air collision with another aircraft is highly unlikely, so is a bird strike or a collision with another object. In all of these cases we would either find evidence of an accident along the planned flight route (if the aircraft would have disintegrated in flight due to the collision), or the pilots should have had enough time to contact the ground to declare an emergency, especially as the aircraft stayed airborne for several more hours, which in itself discredits any mid-air collision theories.</li>
<li>Another major cause for catastrophic structural failure could be a cargo overload, shift or fire.<br />
The <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1151153-mh370-cargo-manifest-and-airway-bill.html"><u>cargo manifest of MH370</u></a> shows that the aircraft carried 31517 pounds of cargo – passenger luggage, books, fruits, documents, electronic parts, and Lithium Ion batteries.<br />
<u>Cargo can become a thread for the structural integrity of a plane in several ways:</u>
<ul>
<li>The first one would be an overload – according to the <a href="http://mh370.mot.gov.my/download/FactualInformation.pdf"><u>final loadsheet</u></a> the take-off weight of MH370 was well within limits on March 8th 2014.</li>
<li>The second issue could be a shift of cargo or of the center of gravity of the aircraft outside the maximum horizontal and vertical limits. According to the <a href="http://mh370.mot.gov.my/download/FactualInformation.pdf"><u>official investigation report</u></a> all documents, calculations, and logs show that the weight and balance of the aircraft were well within the assigned limits and that all cargo was stored and secured safely and according to guidelines.</li>
<li>The last and most discussed safety issue that cargo can cause is a cargo fire. <a href="http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/cargo/dgr/Pages/lithium-batteries.aspx"><u>Lithium Ion Batteries have been a safety concern in aviation</u></a> for many years and it wouldn’t be the first cargo fire or even fatal plane crash these potentially dangerous goods would have caused. MH370 carried 487 pounds of Lithium Ion batteries from Motorola Solution Penang. <br />
They were assembled, packed and placed on wooden pallets on March 7th 2014. The shipment was physically inspected by Malaysia Airlines Cargo personnel, sealed and loaded in the rear of the aircraft, next to the mangosteens and the cabin crew bags. The batteries were not regulated as dangerous goods because the packaging adhered to the guidelines set by the International Civil Aviation Organization.<br />
Both the forward and rear cargo compartments of the Boeing 777 have smoke detectors that analyze the air for smoke particles and warn the pilots in the cockpit if smoke is detected. The cargo compartment has an extinguishing system comprised of five fire extinguisher bottles which can be discharged directly from the cockpit with the push of a button.<br />
The International Air Transport Association estimates that more than one billion lithium ion batteries are transported by air as mail, cargo, or in passenger or crew baggage each year. Very stringent international requirements apply to the manufacturing, testing and transport of Lithium Ion Batteries and providing these standards are complied with, the batteries and their transport are very safe.<br />
According to the <a href="http://mh370.mot.gov.my/download/FactualInformation.pdf"><u>official investigation report</u></a>, Malaysia Airlines completed 99 shipments of Lithium Ion Batteries from January to March 2014 on its flights from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Lithium Ion Batteries on MH370 were packaged, sealed and stored according to international safety guidelines and regulations, and there were no obvious reasons that the 487 pounds of batteries in the cargo hold of MH370 would have started a fire.</p>
<p>Let’s still for the sake of the argument assume that something happened that caused the Lithium Ion Batteries to explode or start a fire. </p>
<p>In case of a heavy an explosion and a mid-air break-up of the aircraft we should again have found some sign of an accident along the flight route. In case the batteries started a fire, the pilots should have been warned by the smoke detection system and might have engaged the fire extinguishers. Maybe the deviation from the flight path and the turnaround they completed was an emergency maneuver? Plausible, right?<br />
But why didn’t they contact ground control to inform them of what was going on and request an emergency landing?<br />
In case of an emergency all pilots follow a specific axiom “ANC – Aviate, Navigate, Communicate”. This phrase is used as a guide and a reminder for the pilots during an emergency situation that they should maintain control of the airplane first, know where they are and where they are going second, and let someone know what is going on, what they need, and what they plan to do third.<br />
Now let’s assume a cargo fire started, the pilots were informed, engaged the fire extinguishers and turned the plane around – aviate first.<br />
Next they would have had to find the nearest airport where they can complete an emergency landing – commercial pilots are trained to know the nearest airports along the routes they fly so in case of an emergency they don’t have to spend time finding the nearest airport – that would be our navigate portion of ANC.<br />
Now last but not least would be the “Communicate” part, the part where the pilots would inform Air traffic control about what’s going on aboard and what their plans are – like an emergency landing at the nearest airport. </p>
<p>Even if Aviate and Navigate happened aboard MH370, communicate never did. Now you might say maybe the fire was really catastrophic and wiped out all communication devices – remember the radar signals disappeared and no verbal communication was ever established with MH370 after 1:21am.<br />
Well that’s pretty unlikely, most communication systems have several backup systems that are powered and connected through completely independent sources, so for all these systems to fail at the same time would be quite a coincidence. And second, if a cargo fire would have been so catastrophic to wipe out all means of communication, maybe even incapacitate the passengers and crew, it wouldn’t leave the plane in a state where it would be able to fly on for six more hours.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>In addition to collisions and cargo hazards severe turbulence could cause structural damage to an aircraft causing a potentially catastrophic scenario.<br />
The <a href="http://mh370.mot.gov.my/download/FactualInformation.pdf"><u>meteorological aerodrome report</u></a> issued at 12, 1, and 2am on March 8th 2014 did not report any significant weather phenomena for the flight route of MH370. Also the <a href="http://mh370.mot.gov.my/download/FactualInformation.pdf"><u>Significant Weather Chart</u></a> issued by the World Area Forecast Center expected no significant adverse weather phenomena along the whole planned flight route for MH370 that day, so catastrophic structural failure caused by severe turbulence is not really a viable theory.</li>
<li>Another major reason for catastrophic structural failure are maintenance errors like substandard practices, wrong installation of parts or faulty repairs of previous damage.<br />
The triple seven that operated MH370 in the early hours of March 8th, 2014, was delivered to Malaysia Airlines in early 2002. Since then the aircraft had completed more than 53000 hours of flight and outside the general maintenance schedule experienced only one major repair – its right wing tip was damaged during taxi in August 2012 and was repaired shortly after by the Boeing Aircraft On Ground Team. The last maintenance check of the plane was carried out on February 23rd 2014 – just 12 days earlier in accordance with the Boeing maintenance schedule. From what we know there are no obvious indications that MH370 suffered structural failure due to a maintenance error but even if, a scenario like this encounters the same inconsistencies as others we already talked about. If the aircraft would have disintegrated in flight due to improper maintenance we should have found evidence of an accident along its planned flight path. And if it didn’t disintegrate but suffered substantial damage the pilots should have followed Aviate, Navigate, Communicate and if that wasn’t possible the plane would most likely not have been in a state where it could fly on for 6 more hours.</li>
<li>As our last structural failure scenario let’s take a look at pressurization failure and explosive devices.<br />
In order to get a better understanding of aircraft pressurization and its potential risks let’s take a quick look at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure"><u>atmospheric pressure</u></a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure"><u>Atmospheric pressure</u></a> is the pressure exerted by the weight of air in the atmosphere of the Earth. This pressure decreases smoothly from the Earth’s surface to the top of the mesosphere – approximately 31 miles above the Earth’s surface. In other words as altitude increases, atmospheric pressure decreases smoothly.</p>
<p>As atmospheric pressure decreases the partial pressure of oxygen decreases as well. The human body requires a certain partial pressure of oxygen to be able to provide enough oxygen for the brain and function efficiently , so when the pressure drops, the body responds with altitude acclimatization till a certain height. Above 26000 feet no human body can acclimatize anymore which can lead to acute mountain sickness and eventually to death due to insufficient oxygen. </p>
<p>As the cruising altitude of most commercial aircraft lies way beyond 26000 feet it is vital for the passengers and the crew to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_pressurization"><u>pressurize the cabin</u></a> and create a safe and comfortable environment at high altitudes. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_pressurization"><u>Cabin pressurization</u></a> is achieved through an airtight fuselage designed to be pressurized with conditioned, compressed air. </p>
<p>The pressure inside the cabin is programmed to rise gradually from the airport of origin to around a maximum of 8000 feet and then reduce gently during descent till it reaches the air pressure of the destination airport.</p>
<p>So what happens if the pressurization system of an aircraft fails? Well, an alarm would sound in the cockpit and the oxygen masks, providing oxygen for the passengers would automatically drop from the cabin ceiling. </p>
<p>In addition to the automatically deployed masks the cabin crew has access to oxygen bottles that allow them to move around the aircraft and assist passengers. The flight crew has their own oxygen masks and oxygen system that would deploy automatically as well. </p>
<p>Now after the alarm sounds and the passengers and crew put on their oxygen masks the flight crew needs to immediately initiate an emergency descent to 8000 feet – or the closest to that while maintaining terrain clearance – where passengers and crew can breathe without supplemental oxygen. If the passengers and crew are deprived of adequate oxygen supply for too long, they will lose consciousness and eventually die from oxygen starvation.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Is that what could have happened to MH370? A pressurization failure that knocked out everyone on board and kept the plane flying till it ran out of fuel?</p>
<p>On August 14th 2005 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522"><u>Helios Airways Flight 522</u></a> from Cyprus to Athens with 115 passengers and 6 crew on board crashed into a mountain north of Varnavas after running out of fuel. </p>
<p>A lack of oxygen, caused by a failure to reset the pressurization system from manual to auto after a pressurization leak check earlier that day, incapacitated the passengers and crew, leading to the aircraft’s eventual crash. Unfortunately the flight crew misinterpreted warning lights and sounds issued by the aircraft system and even though the passenger oxygen masks were deployed and the pilot and the first officer were in contact with the Helios operations center they did not realize that they experienced a pressurization issue until it was too late. After the last contact with the flight crew at 9:20am the plane flew on on autopilot for almost three hours before it crashed due to fuel starvation.</p>
<p>Could a similar scenario be possible for MH370?</p>
<p>Pressurization failure can happen from a sudden loss of airframe integrity, like an explosive decompression, due to a fire or an explosive device on board – as with earlier scenarios, that’s highly unlikely in the case of MH370 as we haven’t found any indications of an accident along the planned flight route and the plane flew on for hours after it deviated from its course.</p>
<p>Another scenario, like the one Flight 522 experienced, where the cabin pressure drops slowly and possibly undetected seems plausible at first.</p>
<p>What speaks against it is that MH370 took at least three turns that could not have been completed by the autopilot. In the case of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522"><u>Helios Airways Flight 522</u></a>, the autopilot was engaged all the time and flew straight to Athens where it circled in a holding pattern till it ran out of fuel. MH370 deviated from its flight plan shortly after passing over IGARI around 1:21am by making a 180 degree turn back towards the Malay Peninsula, this maneuver must have been completed by someone on board the aircraft. The second turn, remember at the base of your pinkie, happened about 40 minutes later, again this turn could not have been completed without human input.</p>
<p>Now the third turn, a sharp left turn, must have happened sometime after 2:22am. We don’t know when or where it happened but according to Inmarsat, who analyzed the handshake pings, the plane ended up flying south, so it must have taken another turn with human intervention.</p>
<p>Looking at what we know, catastrophic structural failure did not cause the disappearance of MH370. </p>
<p>So let’s move on and take a look at electrical failure.</p>
<p>Depending on the severity of electrical failure the consequences could be various ranging from isolated system malfunctions and navigational problems to failures having negative effects on the aircraft’s handling and performance. <u>What kind of events could cause a catastrophic scenario?</u></p>
<ul>
<li>One of the major reasons for electrical failure is an in-Flight fire either caused by the electrical system or causing electrical failure itself. Generally circuit breakers prevent faulty electrical components from overheating and causing a fire.
<p>In the case of a fire, the first priority of the flight crew is to land which, in the case of MH370 could explain the sharp left turn shortly after IGARI – but there was no call to the ground. Again, pilots follow the “Aviate, Navigate, Communicate” axiom so they might not have the time to send a distress call, still in that case it would be highly unlikely that the plane flew on for 6 more hours after that.</p></li>
<li>Another major reason for electrical failure could be an engine failure. In the worst case engine failure and failure of all backup systems could lead to a complete loss of power.
<p>Now for a long time I thought a complete loss of power would send an aircraft falling out of the sky like a stone but that’s not the case. Most aircraft are equipped with navigation instruments which can still be used in case of a complete loss of power and while all communication systems might be lost or highly limited it is possible to control and land a plane after a complete power failure. But also this scenario brings us back to the following conclusion:</p></li>
</ul>
<p>For all communication to suddenly cease without a distress signal usually indicates a catastrophic failure of the aircraft, not allowing time for the crew to communicate with the ground. But in case of such a catastrophic failure the aircraft DOES NOT fly on for several hours making multiple controlled turns.</p>
<p>Catastrophic failure is not what made MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew on board disappear. More than 50% of all aviation accidents are caused by human error – did a human cause the greatest aviation mystery of all time?</p>
<p>Next time on Opacity Zero.</p>
</li></ul>In 2014 more than 3.3 billion people flew safely on more than 38 million flights — impressive numbers, right? But 2014 won’t be remembered for its millions of safe flights but for the one flight that disappeared with 239 people on board. Join us for this episode as we explore catastrophic failure as the possible cause of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.Season One — Episode I: On this Day2015-07-13T17:09:12+00:002015-07-13T17:09:12+00:00opacityzero.press/2015/07/13/episode-i-on-this-day<p>On March 8th 2014 a Boeing 777 with 239 passengers and crew on board disappears
over the South China Sea without a trace. 16 months later, despite the most
extensive search in aviation history, no sign of MH370 and the fate of its 239
passengers has been found.</p>
<h2 id="listen">Listen</h2>
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<h2 id="gratitude">Gratitude</h2>
<p>To <a href="http://stijnheymans.net/">my Hubby</a>, thanks for pushing, loving and challenging me…you still remind me that nothing else matters. To <a href="#">Karen and Lauren</a>, my wonderful friends and fantastic editors on this first episode – thanks for your love, time and support…without you this first episode would be even worse ;). To <a href="https://btvsolo.com/solo">BTV Solo</a>, thanks for being such an awesome software and allowing me (a non-musician under-the-shower-singer) to create my own jingle – yes the jingle that you hear in the beginning of the episode is made by yours truly. <a href="http://www.soundsnap.com/">Soundsnap</a>, thanks for providing all these great sound fragments that I was looking for, and to <a href="http://www.flashkit.com/">Vika @ Flash Kit</a>, thanks for providing the great background music, it’s a really catchy loop.</p>
<h2 id="transcript-links-and-notes">Transcript, Links and Notes</h2>
<p>This is Opacity Zero, a show about challenging the unknown with curiosity. I am Melanie Heymans and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to today’s episode about a quite unusual day.</p>
<p>On this day in 1817 the New York Stock Exchange was founded.<br />
On this day in 1887 the telescopic fishing rod was patented.<br />
On this day in 1985 the IRS reported that more than four hundred thousand Americans are millionaires.</p>
<p>On this day in 2014 a Boeing 777 with 239 passengers and crew on board disappeared over the South China Sea without a trace – the day is…March 8th.</p>
<p>If you look up at any given time, day or night, there are between 8000 and 13,000 planes, carrying more than 300,000, in the skies above you. Every day more than 100,000 flights depart from airports all over the world which leads to a stunning number of more than 36 million flights a year.</p>
<p>Now keeping these numbers in mind, how many times have you heard that one of these millions of flights has disappeared without a trace in let’s say the past 10 years? Well, if you have heard about every single one of them it would be exactly 4. <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/aviation/11456181/Mapped-One-year-on-from-MH370-all-the-planes-which-have-disappeared-since-1948.html" target="_blank"><u>4 aircraft disappeared without a trace</u></a> in the past 10 years – one was a cargo flight from the Ivory Coast to Namibia, another one an aerial survey aircraft in Guyana, the third one was stolen from an airport in Angola, and the last one was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a scheduled international passenger flight from <a href="http://www.klia.com.my/index.php?m=airport" target="_blank"><u>Kuala Lumpur International Airport</u></a> to <a href="http://en.bcia.com.cn/" target="_blank"><u>Beijing Captial Airport</u></a> in China.</p>
<p>While you might not have heard about the first three vanished aircraft chances are pretty good that one way or another you have heard about the disappearance of MH370. At first neither authorities nor the media called it a disappearance – in their <a href="https://www.facebook.com/my.malaysiaairlines/posts/514299315349933" target="_blank"><u>first statement</u></a>, on the morning of March 8th 2014, Malaysia Airlines simply stated that Air Traffic Control had lost contact with MH370 a few hours earlier, and that they were focusing all their resources on locating the plane as soon as possible.</p>
<p>The first headlines followed suit “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-says-plane-with-over-200-aboard-is-missing.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><u>Malaysia Airlines loses contact with Jet Carrying over 200</u></a>” headlined the New York Times, “<a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304554004579425881625707674" target="_blank"><u>Malaysia Airlines Jet goes missing with 239 on board</u></a>” reported the Wall Street Journal, “Missing Flight MH370” scrolled over the news ticker at the BBC.</p>
<p>Hours, days and weeks passed by, and despite a massive international search no sign of MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew on board was found. Slowly the headlines changed from “rescue” to “recovery”, “missing” turned into “probably crashed” while “hope” turned into “anger and despair”. How could a Boeing triple seven, operated by a prestigious FAA-certified airline, with a stellar safety record, and flown by one of its most experienced pilots disappear without a trace? How could a routine red-eye flight turn into the greatest aviation mystery of all time?</p>
<p>On the evening of March 7th 2014 MH370 is scheduled to depart Kuala Lumpur International Airport shortly past midnight, at 12:35am. The aircraft, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777#777-200"><u>Boeing triple seven two hundred</u></a> has arrived earlier that day, shortly after 3pm, from Beijing Capital Airport and is now waiting at the gate for the crew and passengers of MH370 to board.</p>
<p>The US-made widebody aircraft is remarkably safe to fly – as of March 8th 2014 its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777#Incidents_and_accidents"><u>safety record</u></a> shows 11 aviation accidents resulting in 3 fatalities. Since the delivery of the first Boeing 777 in 1995 its safety statistics have continuously placed it in the top 5 safest aircraft of all time.</p>
<p>The triple seven scheduled to complete the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the early hours of March 8th, 2014, was delivered to Malaysia Airlines in early 2002. With 12 service years the aircraft falls right into the average age range of the worldwide air transport jet fleet. The last maintenance check for the aircraft was carried out on February 23rd 2014 – just 12 days earlier. Sometime in the hours between 3pm and midnight of March 7th 2014, maintenance engineers of Malaysia Airlines also conduct a routine stay-over check. During that check the engineers complete a few service requests and replenish the crew oxygen system due to a decay in pressure.</p>
<p>While maintenance, cleaning, and engineering crews are getting the aircraft ready for its next departure, <a href="http://www.malaysiaairlines.com/content/dam/malaysia-airlines/mas/PDF/MH370/Malaysia%20Airlines%20Flight%20MH%20370%20Passenger%20Manifest_Nationality@10Apr.pdf"><u>passengers and crew</u></a> start checking in at Kuala Lumpur airport. The Captain of MH370, Zaharie Bin Ahmad Shah signs in for duty at 10:50pm that night, roughly 25 minutes before the First Officer, Fariq Bin Abdul Hamid. Both pilots are recorded shortly after by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeaM5ag_3uY"><u>video surveillance</u></a> walking through a brief security check together.</p>
<p>Captain Zaharie joined Malaysia Airlines as a cadet pilot in 1981. In the 33 years since then he has accumulated more than 18000 flight hours. I did the math to get a bit of a better feeling for what that really means and 18000 hours of flight are the equivalent of flying a plane for 2 and a half years straight…non-stop…24-hours a day. And he spent almost half of this time, half of these 2 and a half years, flying the type of plane he is flying in the early hours of March 8th, the Boeing seven-seven-seven. So it comes as no surprise that Captain Zaharie’s family, friends and peers describe him as a highly experienced pilot who is deeply passionate about flying and loves to share his passion with others. In fact Captain Zaharie is an instructor and examiner on the Boeing triple seven fleet as well as an authorized examiner for the Department of Civil Aviation in Malaysia.</p>
<p>MH370’s First Officer, Fariq Bin Abdul Hamid, joined Malaysia Airlines as a cadet pilot in 2007. In the 7 years since then he has accumulated about 2800 hours of Flight – that’s the equivalent of almost 4 months of continuous flying. First Officer Fariq, who was only recently promoted to the Boeing 777 fleet has clocked a little over 39 flight hours on this type. . . MH370 is to be his final training flight.</p>
<p>Along with Captain Zaharie and First Officer Fariq the 10 members of the cabin crew – each with 13 to 35 years of experience – are making their way toward the aircraft.</p>
<p>After the 12 crew members reach the plane the cabin crew starts preparing for the soon to arrive passengers while the ground crew is loading the aircraft’s cargo and the flight crew begins their pre-flight checks. Captain Zaharie orders 108000 pounds of fuel, more than enough to take the triple seven and its passengers 2830 miles north east to Beijing Capital Airport. The 5 and a half hour flight will require about 82000 pounds of fuel, which leaves the aircraft with a reserve of about 26000 pounds or 2 hours of additional flying time in case of a diversion or delay upon landing.</p>
<p>Around midnight the <a href="http://www.malaysiaairlines.com/content/dam/malaysia-airlines/mas/PDF/MH370/Malaysia%20Airlines%20Flight%20MH%20370%20Passenger%20Manifest_Nationality@10Apr.pdf"><u>passengers of MH370</u></a> are asked to start boarding.</p>
<p>As the passengers step into the aircraft and get settled Captain Zaharie and First Officer Fariq are getting ready for push back from the gate. At 12:25am the First Officer contacts Airway Clearance Delivery to confirm details of the flight plan and request clearance to Beijing. MH370 is cleared and radio communication is handed over to Lumpur Ground Control at 12:26am.</p>
<p>After all 227 passengers are seated with their seat belts fastened, their on-board luggage safely stowed away in the overhead bins above them or under their seat, the doors of the aircraft closed and cross checked, First Officer Fariq requests push and start from Ground Control – Lumpur Ground approves the request and MH370 pushes back at 12:27am.</p>
<p>At 12:32am First Officer Fariq requests and is cleared to taxi to runway 32R. At 12:40am MH370 is cleared for take-off and about a minute later, at 12:41am MH370 takes off into the night skies of Kuala Lumpur.</p>
<p>On board the climbing triple seven are 239 people – <a href="http://www.malaysiaairlines.com/content/dam/malaysia-airlines/mas/PDF/MH370/Malaysia%20Airlines%20Flight%20MH%20370%20Passenger%20Manifest_Nationality@10Apr.pdf"><u>12 crew and 227 passengers from 14 different nations</u></a>. Amongst them are business and leisure travelers alike, artists, salespeople and engineers, newlyweds, children, grandparents, couples, single travelers, families and friends, and two asylum seekers traveling with stolen passports.</p>
<p>In the underbelly of the aircraft are <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1151153-mh370-cargo-manifest-and-airway-bill.html"><u>31517 pounds of cargo</u></a> – passenger luggage, books, mangosteens – yeah I had to look that one up too, it’s the fruit of a tropical evergreen tree – documents, electric parts – and five and a half thousand pounds in Lithium Ion batteries and walkie talkie accessories.</p>
<p>Shortly after take-off, at 12:42am, MH370 is cleared to climb to flight level 180 – which indicates 18000 feet – by Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control, and instructed to fly directly to <a href="http://opennav.com/waypoint/SG/IGARI"><u>waypoint IGARI</u></a> – waypoints are geographic locations used to help pilots navigate along established air corridors.</p>
<p>As MH370 is approaching the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese Airspace, Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control contacts its Vietnamese equivalent Ho Chi Minh Air Traffic Control at 12:43am to communicate the expected time of arrival of MH370 at <a href="http://opennav.com/waypoint/SG/IGARI"><u>IGARI</u></a> as 1:22am.</p>
<p>At 12:46am MH370 is cleared to climb to flight level 250 – yes that’s 25 thousand feet – and four minutes later to flight level 350, its cruising altitude. At 01:01am Captain Zaharie reports that MH370 is maintaining Flight level 350.</p>
<p>About 6 minutes later, at 01:07am, the Aircraft Communication and Reporting System <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Communications_Addressing_and_Reporting_System"><u>ACARS</u></a> – which manages flight plan and maintenance data between the aircraft and the Malaysian Airlines Operations Center – sends its first routine position report to the ground indicating that the aircraft is flying smoothly at 35000feet. This system is programmed to send updates every 30 minutes however this message is the only ACARS report MH370 will send that night.</p>
<p>Shortly after the ACARS message is transmitted Captain Zaharie again reports that MH370 is maintaining Flight Level 350.</p>
<p>At 1:19am, as MH370 is leaving Malaysian Airspace, Kuala Lumpur instructs MH370 to contact Ho Chi Minh on radio frequency 120.9MHz. Captain Zaharie acknowledges these instructions with the final words from the cockpit of MH370: “Goodnight Malaysian Three Seven Zero.”</p>
<p>About a minute later, at 1:20am, MH370 passes over <a href="http://opennav.com/waypoint/SG/IGARI"><u>waypoint IGARI</u></a> before its radar label, identifying the aircraft and indicating its actual and assigned altitude, suddenly disappears from the radar screen at both Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh Air Traffic Control. Exactly 37 seconds later MH370s radar position symbol disappears from the radar screens as well – at 1:21am on March 8th 2014 Air Traffic Control has lost all radar contact with MH370.</p>
<p>What happens next — and why — is by no means uncontroversial, but let’s take a look at what we know based on the official investigation:</p>
<p>After the last radar returns disappear from civilian radars Malaysian Military Radar, which uses different systems, continues to track MH370 as it starts to <a href="http://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.1729320!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg"><u>deviate from its planned flight route</u></a>. Now let’s keep in mind that military radar information isn’t available to air traffic controllers at the time of the incident, and won’t be published for weeks after, so they don’t know that Air Defense radar systems show MH370 turning right but almost immediately making a sharp left turn to a south westerly direction. MH370 is now <a href="http://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.1729320!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg"><u>flying back towards the Malay Peninsula</u></a>.</p>
<p>If you would like a visual of the current flight path of MH370, and are not driving or operating any machinery, take your right hand and hold it up right in front of you – palm facing towards you, fingers spread apart. Now imagine that the plane took off at the lower left corner of your hand – where the outside of your palm meets your wrist, that’s Kuala Lumpur right there. From there it flies in a pretty much straight line towards the base of your index finger also known as <a href="http://opennav.com/waypoint/SG/IGARI"><u>waypoint IGARI</u></a>. On any other day MH370 would now continue to fly straight on, all the way up to the tip of your index finger, where it would land in Beijing. But not on March 8th 2014, instead of flying straight on after passing over <a href="http://opennav.com/waypoint/SG/IGARI"><u>IGARI</u></a> MH370 deviates from its original flight plan, makes a slight right turn at first, but then turns 180 degrees to the left and starts to fly in a straight line towards the base of your pinkie or the Island of Penang.</p>
<p>Over the next 18 minutes MH370 <a href="http://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.1729320!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg"><u>is heading southwest</u></a> – towards the base of your pinkie – at fluctuating ground speed between 568 and 608 miles per hour and altitudes between thirty one and thirty three thousand feet. During this time Ho Chi Minh Air Traffic Control, which MH370 was expected to check in with at <a href="http://opennav.com/waypoint/SG/IGARI"><u>waypoint IGARI</u></a>, is trying to reach the aircraft but after several failed attempts reaches out to Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control to see if they are in contact with the aircraft. Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic control reports that they haven’t heard from the plane since it signed off with “Good night Malaysian 370” 20 minutes earlier. Based on Ho Chi Minh’s inquiry Kuala Lumpur tries to contact MH370 at 1:41am but does not receive any response.</p>
<p>Between 1:41am and 1:50am Air Traffic control in Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh contact each other several times to exchange information about when and where they had last radar and/or radio contact with MH370. During these conversations Ho Chi Minh reports that even though they maintained radar contact with MH370 till 1:21am – when the radar blip disappeared – no verbal contact was ever established with the aircraft.</p>
<p>While the two Air Traffic Controllers are trying to locate MH370 with the help of nearby aircrafts, the Malaysian Airlines Operation Center, and the Air Traffic Control Centers of nearby sectors, they are unaware that the Malaysian air defense radar systems at Butterworth airbase capture MH370 flying slightly <a href="http://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.1729320!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg"><u>south of the Island of Penang</u></a> – in our hand map the base of our pinkies – at 1:52am.</p>
<p>About 10 minutes later, at 2:02am, the same radar shows MH370 <a href="http://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.1729320!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg"><u>heading towards Pulau Perak</u></a>, a small island in the Straits of Malacca. On our hand map the plane is now flying from the base of your pinkie towards the tip of it. Remember, it’s original destination was Beijing, at the tip of your index finger. At 2:22am MH370 is observed heading towards <a href="http://opennav.com/waypoint/MY/MEKAR"><u>waypoint MEKAR</u></a>, over the Andaman Sea, but disappears abruptly, at the tip of your pinkie, when leaving the range of Malaysian Military radar about 230 miles northwest of the Island of Penang.</p>
<p>Now this is where it gets really tricky because at this point all radio communication and radar information about MH370 is lost. With no verbal or visual contact, no distress signal and after flying for over an hour since the last contact no one knows what’s going on aboard the aircraft.</p>
<p>After all radio and radar communication is lost there is only one communication system left on the Boeing triple seven – satellite communication or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satcom_(satellite)"><u>SATCOM</u></a>. As the name indicates this is acommunication system that utilizes satellites to transmit information between an aircraft and a ground station. The system installed on this aircraft uses the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmarsat"><u>Inmarsat</u></a> Classic Aero System and provides several voice and data channels for text and audio communication, ACARS data transmissions and In-Flight entertainment equipment connectivity. You can imagine <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satcom_(satellite)"><u>SATCOM</u></a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmarsat"><u>Inmarsat</u></a> a bit like your cell phone and your network provider – they just provide the infrastructure for you to make calls, surf the web and send emails and texts, they are generally not actively using your phone, you are.</p>
<p>When the system was powered on, earlier that night, while MH370 was still on the ground, it sent a Log-on request to the Ground station to initiate the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satcom_(satellite)"><u>SATCOM</u></a> Service – similar to your phone logging on to the network once you switch it on. Once service is initiated the Ground station will automatically send ping message to the aircraft, if it has not heard from it for an hour, using its unique identifier, to inquire if the aircraft is still logged on to the network. If the aircraft receives its unique identifier it returns a short message indicating that it is still logged on. This message exchange is called “handshake.”</p>
<p>After 2:22am MH370 and the Inmarsat Ground Station, in Perth Australia, complete 7 of these handshakes over the next 6 hours. The first one, at 2:25am, only three minutes after MH370 disappears from military radar over the Andaman sea, is another Log-on request initiated by the aircraft. Remember, the aircraft already logged on to the system earlier that night while it was still on the ground. The following 5 handshakes, at 3:31, 4:41, 5:41, 6:41, and 8:10am are all automatically initiated by the ground station and are each answered by the aircraft. The last handshake at 8:19am is another log-on request, initiated by the aircraft. When the ground station sends its next ping message at 9:15am MH370 fails to respond.</p>
<p>On this day – July 13th 2015 – after 16 months of the most extensive, intensive and expensive air, sea and underwater search in aviation history no sign of MH370 and the fate of its 239 passengers has been found. Many different theories have been published since the disappearance of MH370, some are possible, others are implausible, a few are flat out crazy (not to say that crazy doesn’t happen), ours will be the one that is most likely – based on what we know, about this flight, its passengers and crew, aviation and how the world works in general. So join us over the next few weeks as we explore catastrophic failure, human error, and acts of sabotage as the possible cause of the disappearance of MH370, leading us all the way to what most likely made a Boeing triple seven and its 239 passengers disappear on March 8th 2014.</p>On March 8th 2014 a Boeing 777 with 239 passengers and crew on board disappears over the South China Sea without a trace. 16 months later, despite the most extensive search in aviation history, no sign of MH370 and the fate of its 239 passengers has been found.