What Do You Think Took Down the China Eastern Flight?

Ahh memories. 

When I was 14 years old my friend Anna brought a boy over to our house in Ohio. He was a little older than me, and seemed like a nice guy. I have no idea where Anna dredged him up from. He was clearly intelligent and ambitious.

Some of the girls had this theory that my lack of interest in the opposite sex was because I was a lesbian. I just refused to admit it. At 14 I was definitely old enough in my circle to be getting it on. Some of the girls joked that if I found the right partner I could be making serious bank. Guys were all into that girl girl action now!

Anna had a different theory that night. I seemed really smart, you see, always using these big words in conversations. Well this guy used big words too and seemed really smart. So that was the ticket. Smart plus smart equals well, why don't you two just hook up already?

I looked at the boy and he looked at me, as Anna explained her crackpot theory. I'd just been introduced to him 10 minutes before so maybe it was a bit rushed to me. Anywho me and that guy didn't hook up that night, or at any point in the future. He did become a long term friend of the family, though. 

By high school that guy was taking a bunch of vocational programs in aircraft mechanics. Then he started logging flight hours in smaller planes to get his certification. He took me on one short flight between Toledo and Findlay, Ohio, because he had to kill the time anyways. It was interesting and remains the only time I've been on a little plane.

He worked his way up to higher and higher certifications and became a commercial pilot. He became the youngest captain in Emirates Air history and moved his family to Dubai. So he's certified to fly well, definitely a 737 not MAX like the China Eastern flight that went down a few days ago, killing all 132 on board. Maybe I take an interest in airplane crashes because I've been on a lot of commercial airplanes and I've been on China Eastern specifically. This flight looked like it just dropped straight down out of the sky. 

According to Travel Weekly, the flight still had power going down. That rules out a catastrophic mechanical failure. Even if, say both engines just stalled out the plane would still have a lot of momentum from its flight speed before, so it wouldn't just drop out of the sky. Supposedly there was no distress call. A few have suggested that a missile took it down but the flight was supposedly intact until it crashed.

Flight Crash Investigation

My pilot friend's first thought was suicide. I asked if it was even mechanically possible for a pilot to make this manuever in a commercial airplane, but he hasn't gotten back to me on that yet. In this case the pilot would have to incapacitate the co pilot and then, hellbent on killing himself and all 131 other people onboard, just dropped the controllers straight down. It sounds really hard to do, but I don't fly planes.

A few have suggested that this could have been a vaccident. There have been more crashes of smaller planes with only one pilot, who might have stroked out or had a heart attack mid air. But commercial flights have two pilots and some longer international ones have three. So my assumption is that it's statistically implausible that both pilots had medical emergencies at the same time mid flight, leaving no one at the controls. At any rate there'd be distress calls and the momentum wouldn't support a straight 90 degree drop as it would have had a slower arc down. China is being mum on air traffic control communications.

So that makes it likely that something specifically caused the flight to do this. A few on Zerohedge have suggested that the plane could have been hacked, perhaps to send a message to China to not cozy up with the Russian Bear too much. It's entirely possible that Boeing built some top secret backdoor into their planes. I saw a video this morning showing Chinese citizens tearing down 5G towers and wondered if 5G could have done this, perhaps by causing some stability control to go wonky. It's possible perhaps.

We live in strange times...