MISSING PLANE: LATEST “EXPLANATION” RAISES EVEN MORE CONCERNS THAN THE LAST

by Steve Cook

The British press this morning are running the latest story that “explains” the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 370. It was, we are asked to believe, due to suicide by the pilot.

In essence, the pilot decided to kill himself and take everyone on board with him. This includes the rest of the flight crew who presumably went along with it and made no effort to stop him. We suppose it must have been some sort of mass suicide.

When all else fails, blame the pilot. After all, neither he nor the rest of his crew are around to defend their honour.

One is very, very dubious about this “explanation”, which would have it that the fate of flight MH370 was probably the most bizarre suicide in history.

But let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and assume the explanation is true. It begs many questions:

Why did the rest of the plane’s crew go along with it?

Did the pilot have any history of suicidal inclination or “depression.”? His friends and family might be able to answer that one.

If he did, how come he was allowed to fly a passenger aircraft with the lives of hundreds of people in his hands? In fact, potentially thousands because if the pilot decided to kill himself and take lots of other people with him, it is a stroke of “good fortune” that in his supposedly depraved state he nevertheless decided to crash the plane somewhere so remote no-one can find it and not into a city.

Okay so it is conceivable (just) that a man becomes so depressed that he decides to end it all. But the phenomenon of the utterly depraved mass murder/suicide tends to be the handiwork of people under the influence of psychiatric medications: antidepressants such as Prozac and so forth. The link between antidepressants and often bizarre murder/suicide is well documented and the cases are legion.

So our question is this: was the pilot on antidepressants?

We know that since about 2010 the rules on pilots taking antidepressants were relaxed despite the warnings of side effects such as “suicidal ideation, loss of impulse control, violent thoughts and depression” and so forth on the drugs’ own warning labels.

Fair enough: if you have a pilot who is depressed (whatever that means exactly) you don’t want him flying a plane. You want, ideally, to take him off and straighten him out by helping him sort out his life, locate and handle the glandular disorders, nutritional problems or other PHYSICAL ILLNESS that always underlie the phenomena that are labelled “depression”. Once he is in a better state of mind, one can allow him back on the job.

But that takes time and effort and is expensive for the airline. It is much less effort and much cheaper to simply drug him: ignore the known and well-documented risks of letting anyone on antidepressants drive a car let alone a passenger aircraft, and keep him flying. Then cross your fingers and pray that he doesn’t flip his lid or just make fatal errors of judgement as a fair percentage of people on antidepressants do.

So essentially we have a number of people on drugs flying passenger aircraft – drugs that are KNOWN to cause suicidal thoughts and so forth in a worrying number of cases. As passengers we have no way of knowing if the pilot in charge of our plane is doped up to his eyeballs or not. We have a right to be told before we fly.

So either the “pilot suicide/mass murder” conjecture is just another story circulated to hide something else by shredding a good man’s reputation or the airlines and aviation authorities have some serious explaining to do.

Steve Cook is a professional writer and copywriter

 

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