My feeling is that the Boeing 777 then meandered out aimlessly over the ocean with its dead pilots till its fuel was exhausted.  It was a tragic accident, not a conspiracy or crime.  They turned left to come home, not to flee, steal, or murder.  It just went badly wrong.  The plane is in the ocean.  Floating debris will turn up sooner or later, and the black boxes will tell the final story.

This is the last paragraph in my American Thinker article “Malaysia370. A tragic accident and nothing more,” published in March 2014, shortly after MH370 went missing and weird conspiracy theories were still making the rounds.

I invite readers to reread it.  I took enormous abuse at the time from those who preferred space aliens, hijacking for a future flying bomb, or pilot suicide to a simple accident.

I was, of course, speculating, but using my 34-year international airline pilot experience as a guide for clues as to what was in the pilots’ minds, what their intentions were, and what might have killed them.

Let me point out that every element of the MH370 mystery has happened before and since its disappearance.

The main question is: what turned an emergency, something pilots endlessly train for, into a deadly accident?

Accidents rarely have a single cause.  There is normally a chain of events or bad decision-making that leads to the crash site.  That chain can often be broken by the pilots simply recognizing that a chain is developing.

But sometimes a step in the chain might be beyond the pilots’ ability to stop.

For example, if for whatever reason the pilots’ oxygen system was faulty or inoperative in flight, it might not be recognized until it was urgently needed, such as with heavy toxic smoke in the cockpit.  (Pilot oxygen is rarely used in normal operations.)  But then it would be too late to analyze and fix the faulty oxygen supply.  The pilots would quickly be overcome by the fumes.

Without pointing any fingers, I believe that it was a minor oversight in routine preflight checking or maintenance, such as checking the oxygen system, that might have become the deadly link in the chain.

Think it’s impossible?  As a junior relief pilot, I actually found the oxygen valve closed four hours into a flight high over the oceans.  We had over 300 passengers on that flight.

We might never know exactly what killed the MH370 pilots, but at least the space aliens have been put to rest.