How not to Think about Probability: Malaysia plane edition

[cthulu2016]

Massive search for Malaysia plane yields no evidence; experts speculate on pilot suicide

... In a vacuum of evidence about what went wrong aboard the flight, speculation turned to the possibility of pilot suicide, an extraordinarily rare occurrence.

...There have been two cases in recent years in which a pilot or crew member is believed to have intentionally caused a plane to crash: the disaster involving SilkAir Flight 185, which spiraled into the ground in Indonesia in 1997, killing 97 passengers and seven crew members; and the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, which plunged into the Atlantic south of Nantucket in 1999, killing 217 people.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/debris-may-be-from-mssing-malaysia-airlines-flight/2014/03/10/2669f16a-a822-11e3-b61e-8051b8b52d06_story.html

A passenger jet with 100, 200 people crashing and killing everyone aboard is a rare occurrence. The great majority of planes arrive at their destination without killing any passengers.

When, however, a passenger jet dives into the ocean with no distress signal it is not extraordinarily rare that the pilot did it intentionally... it has happened twice in recent years.

It is extraordinarily rare to have a flipped coin come up heads twenty times in a row. In cases where it has already come up 19 times in a row, however, the odds of making it to 20 are exactly 50-50.

Total loss of a jet from birds flying into the engines is extraordinarily rare among all flights, since the great majority of flights don't crash at all, but not really all that uncommon among the very small population of large jets that fall right out of the sky shortly after take-off.

What is really rare is for a plane to fly into the ocean without any hint of distress. And when something that atypical happens, the explanation of the very atypical event is almost always going to be atypical.

I have no idea what happened to the plane. Pilot suicide is one of many possibilities, each of which is unusual. If the wings just fell off, or terrorists blew it up those would be as unusual as pilot suicide... things that happen from time to time.

[Bay Boy]

1. Pilot suicide makes more sense than.....

...a hijacking, it would seem to me. A hijacking would involve getting past the cockpit door and it would seem in the time it would take to do that the pilots would have made a radio report of it happening.

[HeartlandDem]

2. Hijacking.

Given the fact that no debris has been found anywhere, I'm thinking it was a hijacking. The first thing the 911 hijackers did was disable the transponders so the plane couldn't be tracked. It wouldn't surprise me if the plane was flown somewhere else and landed on a predesignated runway for terrorist purposes. Time will tell.

[jakeXT]

4. So they found a door and they lost it ?

On Sunday, a Vietnamese plane spotted a rectangular object that was thought to be one of the plane's doors, but ships could not locate it. On Monday, a Singaporean search plane spotted a yellow object 140 kilometres southwest of Tho Chu island, but it turned out to be sea trash

Late Sunday, Vietnamese authorities said one of their aircraft had spotted a rectangular object that could have been an inner door from the plane. By Monday, ships and planes could not locate the object. Meanwhile, sightings of what had resembled a piece of the plane’s tail turned out to be logs tied together, Malaysian authorities said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/debris-may-be-from-mssing-malaysia-airlines-flight/2014/03/10/2669f16a-a822-11e3-b61e-8051b8b52d06_story.html

[seveneyes]

3. Maybe another allah ackbar nosedive into the ocean

That might cause the entire plane to submerge and remain hidden. I know water is more dense than the mostly air the WTC planes ran into, but they just disappeared into buildings, and then disintegrated. They will find the pieces of this airplane eventually.

[HeartlandDem]

5. Wall Street Journal reporting...

Missing Flight's Co-Pilot in Past Entertained Guests in Cockpit

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304250204579432801672868982-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMTExNDEyWj

just great.

[ecstatic]

6. Wow. Goofing off in the cockpit

After reading that article, I think there's a good chance this happened again. Maybe the co pilot got into a fight (physical confrontation) with the veteran pilot over this and they destroyed the controls.

[complain jane]

7. As awful as this whole story is

I just lol'd. Sorry.