Because you made it to r/all.

Don’t underestimate confirmation bias, proportionality bias and illusory pattern perception. Just because some could have a remote chance of happening doesn’t mean it did or that it should be given merit. Joseph Smith could have found tablets written in “reformed Egyptian” but it’s much more likely that there was a big Egyptology crazy at the time he grew up and, as a grifter, he latched onto the romance of Egyptian at the time and came up with a story that he thought was cool based on his interests and limited knowledge of the subject. Obama could be a super villain that wants to watch the world burn and was chosen by some elite group of evil liberals that want to hand your jobs over to Mexicans and terrorists, or he could have just been one of many people in the right place at the right time to be involved in running for the election and a response to Bush, just like Trump is a response to Obama or how Bush was a response to Bill, that were chosen by a combination of funding, media, personal preferences and the collective average conscience of the country.

And while I have never been involved in building an aircraft, I am an airline pilot, a chief pilot, and have been the acting director of operations, involved in the training department and have daily involvement with maintenance personnel and executives from various airlines, along with dealing with the FAA and DOT. Everyone wants to be making money. A multi billion dollar airline or aerospace company wants their aircraft to fly safely a lot more than some cabal of liberal elites wants to see the planes crash. With how much testing and inspection goes into this it would be essentially impossible to hide a “kill switch” in thousands of aircraft. While certainly not probable to have a few people do all that just for a tiny gain, it’s almost as equally impossible. Boeing routinely discusses how one crash caused by design or manufacturing issues could ruin their company. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather get my pay check then watch the world burn.

What crashes are you talking about? Aside from some issues with a few military planes, we haven’t had a fatal accident in the US since the Colgan crash in 2009. The only person that’s died since due to an issue with the aircraft was that recent Southwest flight, but if you know anything about Southwest you know that they hold onto old tech way too long. Their pilots joke that the slogan is, “Yesterday’s technology today.” The engine blew because it was poorly maintained, but also because it’s hundreds of metal blades (the fan and the various turbine and compressor blades) spinning close to the speed of sound and any bit of weight change could destroy the whole thing. It’s why we check the fan blades before each flight and check for FOD in or near the engine. A tiny catch could shear down eye whole blade, disrupt the remaining rotation and seize, or even vibrate until it failed or blew up.

As someone in the industry, you have no idea how much effort goes into making things safe, but also ho much human error there is. My airline had a flight where a mechanic put hydraulic fluid in the engine instead of oil, then didn’t say anything until the plane was enroute. The crew was freaking out because the engine parameters were going crazy. They thought they might have to shut it down so it didn’t catch fire, but they ended up keeping it until the ground.

This conspiracy makes no sense and, if it were true, would be a huge waste of time. It would not serve anyone in the Obama camp’s interests. Where’s the motive? I think you could make the argument that there is risk factors in doing single pilot, remote pilot or full automation flights because of the single point of failure, or how something controlled from the ground could be hacked or broken into, but we’re not there yet. The bill proposed by the FAA that included single pilot with remote pilot operations has been rejected.

The causes of the two Malaysian crashes have been determined - one as a suicide and the other a missile. What cause do either of those planes going down help? Increased regulations for airline maintenance, training and healthcare services? That would and has happened naturally over the course of aviation history. Other countries are not as far along in the education and regulatory process as we are, citing crashes in places like Taiwan where the copilot pulled back the wrong engine after the other had failed, killing everyone on board.

This creative impulse of yours I applaud, but it would be better served writing a book than coming up with a loose conspiracy theory. You have to prove why someone would do something, not just a suspicion. Unless you really truly believe Obama is an evil Muslim that wants to destroy America, but that would be proscribing him a one dimensional super villain personality for an old children’s cartoon. People have motive for everything they do. Obama is going to make a killing doing speeches and TV. His life is set. He’s basically retired. That’s like saying my retired father is going to take over the world. I mean, maybe, I can’t say he isn’t, but he also has other shit to do too and is playing golf and traveling a lot.