MALAYSIAN PLANE UPDATE: FRIEND SAYS PILOT SUFFERED FROM DEPRESSION AND WAS IN NO STATE OF MIND TO BE FLYING (1940 hits)
From GlobalResearch.com Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370's pilot was devastated over his wife's decision to move out and could have taken the plane on a "last joyride," according to a long-term friend.
The unnamed pal, also a pilot, revealed Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was seriously "rattled" by his family problems and shouldn't even have been at the controls of the Boeing 777.
"He's one of the finest pilots, around and I'm no medical expert, but with all that was happening in his life Zaharie was probably in no state of mind to be flying," he told the NZ Herald.
The friend said his upset associate — who was also having problems with another woman he was seeing — may have decided to take the jet to a part of the world he'd never flown in.
It would have been his chance, he added, to "do things in a plane he had previously been able to do only on a simulator."
He speculated that Zaharie may have deliberately set the plane on its fatal course.
Investigators already think he switched off tracking equipment and then flown the aircraft to 43,000 feet to knock everyone out.
Then it flew on auto-pilot toward the southern Indian Ocean where it is believed to have crashed, killing all 239 people on board. Satellite images captured 122 objects in the Indian Ocean that might be from the missing plane, it was revealed Wednesday. "It is very possible that neither the passengers nor the other crew on-board knew what was happening until it was too late," the friend added. Dismissing early suggestions that Zaharie was a terrorist, he said his fellow pilot — who had 18,365 hours of flying experience — was "a fanatic for the three Fs — food, family and flying."
Meanwhile, searchers from across the globe continue to focus their attention on the southern Indian Ocean in a desperate attempt to find Flight 370.
A French satellite scanning the Indian Ocean for remnants of a missing jetliner found a possible plane debris field containing 122 objects, a top Malaysian official said Wednesday, calling it "the most credible lead that we have."
Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the objects were more than ,550 miles southwest of Australia, in the area where a desperate, multinational hunt has been going on since other satellites detected possible jet debris.
Clouds obscured the latest satellite images, but dozens of objects could be seen in the gaps, ranging in length from one yard to 25 yards. Hishammuddin said some of them "appeared to be bright, possibly indicating solid materials."
The images were taken Sunday and relayed by French-based Airbus Defense and Space, a division of Europe's Airbus Group; its businesses include the operation of satellites and satellite communications.
