"Black box" in the sense that you are describing is an unrelated term.
> Wikipedia values accuracy, but it requires verifiability. Wikipedia does not try to impose "the truth" on its readers, and does not ask that they trust something just because they read it in Wikipedia. We empower our readers. We don't ask for their blind trust.
You see a lot more cases of people quoting Wikipedia on a topic than talking about Wikipedia's trustworthiness because it adds a second dimension. It's [Wikipedia, Topic] vs. [Wikipedia].
I might look up 100 different things on Wikipedia. The fact that Wikipedia has all sorts of flaws is something I only needed to learn once.
The orange box is the cockpit voice recorder.
First, successfully ditching an aircraft at sea is the ultimate test of piloting skills, and possibly one difficult to resist for the ego of a seasoned captain on his final flight.
Second, it seems out of character for a meticulous pilot to just let the aircraft slip out of his control and crash haphazardly at the very end of a carefully-plotted sequence of murderous steps.
Third, a ditching would better obfuscate the final resting place of the aircraft compared to an uncontrolled dive, as it would result in fewer scattered debris floating away.
Just some fun speculation on what's written in the original article, not like we'll ever know for sure.
I know I did a lot of poor flying….
Navigation is also a big part of the job. if you assumed you had to turn off parts of your nav equipment to avoid detection, then visual reference (ie flying the path to visually memorise/familirise yourself with wayppoints) would be something you'd certainly do - and a flightsim would be perfect for this.
I mean I'd still like to try out the new MS Flight Simulator because it's impressive technology.
I'd be curious which parts of the flight path those clips represented. Were they at important navigational landmarks? Were they nice vistas, places he wanted to see before a suicidal plunge? If they were only a few seconds each, that might indicate that he was checking those points for intentional reasons, rather than for fun.
A related suggestion to be aware of is that the plane was shot down by the US or US-friendly forces, as several of the flight simulations were reportedly the pilot landing at Diego Garcia, a relatively secret US air base in the Indian Ocean. The theory continues that the US purposely got the search parties to focus on a different search area first while they cleaned up the debris
You'd be very wrong. There are hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) classified missions going on all the time involving large amount of people. And aside for the exceedingly rare whistleblower, all of them are kept secret for decades or more until they get declassified (sometimes never).
(Not trying to give any credibility to the previous comment, just commenting on how effectively governments keep classified secrets.)
Not many of them involve murdering an entire planeload of civilians.
You of course don't know that, not having access to compartmentalized top secret material.
If you did, you couldn't post here (or anywhere) about it.
The US has vast intelligence and military resources, but resources can't create operational miracles. Disappearing a civilian airplane and keeping it disappeared would be such a miracle.
In the insanely improbable event that the intercept accidentally shot down the unidentified aircraft before realizing it was a civilian airliner, then it would have been pilot error for not following rules of engagement or, possibly, a flight controller or flight commander error. There's zero reason for the U.S. government to turn an individual mistake into a huge incident by trying to cover it up. Also, there are many examples of the U.S. military making such mistakes and NOT trying to cover it up.
Including shooting down an airliner. No coverup.
Carrier group is even less likely to shoot down airliner. In middle of ocean or crowded area like South China Sea, carrier group probably doesn't have its defenses on alert. It has fighters that can intercept and visually identify aircraft. In the middle of ocean, there is plenty of time to react. There isn't the hair trigger in middle of war zone that led to Iran Air Flight 655.
Have to say the simulator part makes me lean heavily towards the pilot crashing it purposefully, from the article -
"The most widely reported piece of evidence tying Zaharie to the disappearance was a course he had charted on his home flight simulator about a month before the crash. Zaharie had a number of hobbies, including paragliding and flying model airplanes, but he also spent a lot of time at home on his computer playing flight simulator games. He sometimes uploaded videos of himself playing on his YouTube channel, where he comes off as affable and knowledgeable, if a bit socially awkward.
In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc. Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number of other intriguing details. For example, the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight. Furthermore, although initial reports indicated that the track had been intentionally saved by the user, later analysis showed that it was kept only in the system files, and certainly was not meant to be found. Was this a dry run? It seems too odd to be a coincidence."
Also discovering that black box is a misnomer is mildly humorous, these are apparently orange! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder