Co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid’s record on flight safety had already been questioned before investigators started to look more closely into him and the pilot of the missing Malaysian plane, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, as well as the other crew members.

Days after the aircraft first went missing, news broke that the Fariq had invited two young female South African tourists into the cockpit during a flight in 2011.

One of the women, Jonti Roos, said she and her friend spent more than one hour in the cockpit chatting and snapping photos with Fariq and the pilot on that flight.

Fariq’s family and friends rejected his depiction as a ladies’ man and a reckless pilot, saying the 27-year-old was quite shy and dedicated to his job at Malaysia Airlines.

“He is a good person, respectful to elders and religious,” Fariq’s grandmother Halimah Abdul Rahman told media in the north-eastern state of Kelantan.

Fariq joined the carrier in 2007 and had accumulated 2,763 hours of flying experience. He had just begun flying the Boeing 777, transitioning from narrow-bodied aircraft.

The youngest son of a civil servant in Selangor, he is engaged to an Air Asia pilot and was supposedly planning their wedding, according to neighbours.

Just last month, Fariq was featured on a segment of CNN Business Traveler, when he was filmed flying a Boeing 777—200 for the first time with a senior pilot trainer from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur.

His fiancee “has remained positive about the incident and told her family to ignore the media,” a relative told the Daily Express newspaper. “She still has a glimmer of hope.”

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