Sat next to a retired airline mechanic at lunch who told me about the 2014 Malaysia flight that still bothers him

I was eating alone at a diner off I-35 last Tuesday and this older guy sat down next to me. We got talking and he mentioned he worked on 777s for 30 years. When I asked about the flight that disappeared, he got real quiet. He said the pings from the sat system showed it flew for seven more hours after going off radar. He told me the plane didn't just crash. It kept flying on a programmed route. That stuck with me. He said no way a pilot does that unless something else was going on. I feel like a lot of official reports gloss over the timeline. Anyone here ever dig deeper into the flight plan data that came out in the first month?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivan8225d ago

Man, that mechanic probably knew more than he let on. My uncle was a cargo pilot for FedEx and he told me once that those 777s have a weird fail-safe where they can basically fly themselves on a pre-loaded route if the crew is incapacitated. He said it's called something like "return to field" but it's more complex than that. I remember reading through some of the sat data logs from those first few weeks and the altitude changes didn't match any normal evasive maneuver or pilot error pattern. It was like someone was deliberately testing the plane's endurance at different levels. Whole thing still gives me chills when I think about it too long.

bell.taylor25d ago

The "return to field" thing sounds familiar, my buddy who works in avionics told me about a similar system on some business jets that kicked in automatically when the pilots missed a check-in. I found that watching the public satellite data and tracking the fuel stops helped me piece together a rough timeline, it made the whole thing feel a lot less mysterious.