"Experts said flying a Boeing 777 in such a way would be dangerous, stressing the airframe and possibly causing those on board to be air sick and suffer from spatial disorientation."
This truly meets the definition of incredible. How could you be that good, but then end up crashing the plane? If you are that good, then you are not going to crash that plane.
However, flying a mile high is only slightly different from flying 6 miles high in terms of stress experienced or skill required.
The pilot had a fancy flight simulator at home.
Now, there are plenty of legitimate reasons that a pilot would have a simulator at home, so we can't pin too much to this discovery. Lots of pilots buy small planes after they retire because they still love flying and he might have built this simulator because it was fun. Other articles describe him as a hardware geek and mention his YouTube videos demonstrating his homebrew simulator consoles. Still, it seems suspicious to me, especially in context of the recent revelation that the transponder and tracking systems were disabled prior to MH370 signing off with Malaysian ATC.
Four days ago, I thought that a Central Asian hijacking scenario was next to impossible. Today, I'm not so sure.
Total cost should be less than 1000 bucks.
If one picks a random similar flight, what's the probability of having people flying with fake IDs/of having a pilot who runs a flight simulator at home?