The pilot and co-pilot of missing flight MH370 continue to be the focus of investigators and the subject of speculation, three weeks after the Boeing 777-200ER disappeared.
But to friends and family, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid are just two ordinary men who sang at karaoke sessions and dabbled with the guitar respectively, reports the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
The report quoted a former Boeing 777 pilot and Zaharie's colleague of 30 years at the airline, known only as Nik Huzlan, as describing the pilot as someone who "wasn't bad and he wasn't outstanding. That's what you look for in a pilot."
Born in Penang in 1961, Zaharie enjoyed a relatively comfortable childhood, said the WSJ.
Friends remember him as an above-average science student who enjoyed football games and tinkering with a motorcycle.
When he was around 16, Zaharie fell for his neighbour, Faizah Khanum Mustafa Khan, whom he later married.
Zaharie went to mosque regularly but he was not excessively religious, Abdul Rahman Bistaman, 64, a friend and former neighbour told WSJ.
When he was about 18, Zaharie was one of just 12 in his batch of 5,000 applicants who was accepted to flight school, said Nik Huzlan.
At the time, Malaysia didn't have a flight school, so Zaharie headed to the Philippines for training, where he met Nik Huzlan.
"We were a poorer version of Tom Cruise," Nik Huzlan said, referring to the 1986 movie "Top Gun."
Both men joined Malaysia Airlines in 1981 after graduation.
Nik Huzlan eventually became chief pilot, a job that involved handling disciplinary problems. However, he said Zaharie, like most pilots, were never a cause for concern.
"Zaharie is the ideal pilot, an invisible pilot," he told WSJ.
There has been intense media speculation on Zaharie after it was revealed that investigators had found a flight simulator in his home and were examining it for clues.
FBI director James Comey had said on Wednesday that he expected his agents to finish their examination of files from the simulator "within a day or two".
Zaharie's youngest son denied allegations that his father had hijacked the plane and crashed it into the Indian Ocean.
Ahmad Seth, 26, told the New Straits Times that he was aware of the speculation surrounding his father and the plane's disappearance.
"I've read everything online. But I've ignored all the speculation. I know my father better," he was quoted as saying.
"We may not be as close as he travels so much. But I understand him."
Zaharie's political affiliations have also come under scrutiny and he was said to have joined PKR in January 2013.
He was said to have been upset when opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim was convicted of sodomy by the court the day before he was due to fly.
R. Sivarasa, a PKR lawmaker representing Subang, remembered singing karaoke together with Zaharie at a political event in March last year.
"The singing was pretty bad, but he was a fun guy," the WSJ report quoted Sivarasa as saying.
As for Fariq, flight 370's co-pilot, who was born in 1987 as the first of five children, he had excelled at studies, enjoyed sports, played the guitar, and showed a flair for drawing and aviation, classmates told WSJ.
In 2005, at 18, he applied to Malaysia Airlines and signed up for flight school. Two years later, he joined Malaysia Airlines as a cadet pilot.
Fariq first learned to fly the Boeing 737 – the smallest aircraft in Malaysia Airlines' fleet – then rewarded himself with a black Audi A4 after he was promoted to fly the Airbus A330, colleague and neighbours told WSJ.
Neighbours also said that Fariq, who lived with his parents in a modest two-storey house in Shah Alam, was friendly and well-mannered but seldom socialised with them.
Three days after MH370 vanished, WSJ and other media reported that in December 2011, Fariq and a colleague had invited two female passengers into the cockpit for the duration of a flight.
Following the media reports, Malaysia Airlines had said it was "shocked" by the allegations, adding that it hadn't completed an investigation into Fariq's past conduct.
In the months before his final flight, Fariq was transitioning to the Boeing 777, completing five flights under supervision.
On one of them, from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur, CNN reporter Richard Quest had stood in the cockpit to observe Fariq guide the aircraft in what his supervisor described as a "textbook landing".
Flight MH370 was his first as a full-fledged Boeing 777 co-pilot, reported WSJ. Investigations into the missing aircraft have focused on Zaharie and Fariq, among other leads, after it was revealed that the plane had made a turn back from its scheduled course to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur and that the aircraft's communication system had been deliberately switched off. TMI
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