Originally Posted by
Sandeep1
Again, while those other possibilities can't be entirely eliminated, mechanical failures don't often result in planes straight nose-diving to the ground. Regardless, this is a thread for speculation since none of us here actually know what happened. My speculation, FWIW, is this was pilot suicide.
You are making an assumption that the airplane was in a near-vertical attitude for most of the descent. There is no data that shows, or even suggests, that. What he know, from the short video clip, is that it was near-vertical for the last two or three seconds of the flight. Lacking any contrary data, it is more likely that it was a transitory state as flight control input alone could not hold the airplane in that attitude for an extended period of time. The FDR data will help clear this up.
Originally Posted by
dhuey
Pardon me if I missed it, but has anyone found a reliable report that there were three pilots in the cockpit on the flight (as opposed to two in the cockpit and one in the cabin deadheading)?
Yes. The airline confirmed that there were three pilots assigned to duty in the flight deck. A Captain and two First Officers. This is very common in China. They train low-time pilots by having them observe from the jumpseat for many hundreds of hours before being promoted to a control seat.
Lots of discussion about why the senior, very high-time pilot was flying as F/O. It is common in China to use demotion as punishment for flight crews. Could be punishment for just about anything including incidents, accidents, mistakes, rule violations, crew conflicts, etc. I haven't seen anything which says why he was assigned as F/O but it is consistent with their pattern of downgrading as punishment.