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20 Freescale Semiconductor Employees On Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight
NeverVotedBush writes with news reported by CNN that a passenger manifest for the flight that went missing on its way from Malaysia to China indicates that "Twenty of the passengers aboard the flight work with Freescale Semiconductor, a company based in Austin, Texas. The company said that 12 of the employees are from Malaysia and eight are from China," and writes "Apparently, at least two passengers used stolen passports to board."
The plane was carrying a cargo of 400 million dollars in Bitcoin. nuff said.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I watched a documentary about Flight 447 (the Airbus flight that was lost off Brazil) and they mentioned that modern planes send tons of position and other data per flight. Seems the current system is called ACARS.
Anyway, from a probability perspective it seems highly unlikely that a plane would disappear from radar precisely at the time that a data transponder stopped sending position fixes, unless, you know, the plane crashed right there.
I mean, the media makes it sound like the search radius is "flight speed * remaining potential flight time at current fuel burn rate".
Now don't get me wrong, that's not to say that the loss of these people is any less bad, but I have to wonder if we're overestimating the importance of the fact that there were Freescale employees on the flight.
Rawr
Except of course you are conflating "fear of or the risk of terrorism are overstated" with "there is no such thing as terrorism." I could get shot by some nut in public tomorrow, but I'm not going to structure my life or society around the fear of that possibility.
I think it was the second Flying High! (Airplane) movie where an old lady gets grilled while dudes with guns walk through the scanners.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
No, that is not what everyone on slashdot are saying.
What we are saying is:
So, to falsify the common slashdot knowledge, you'd have to show all of the following:
and..
Assuming 1 is true and the rest is false, pre-9/11 airport security was all it was supposed to take to prevent this plane from going down.
Shachar
Freescale Semiconductor did not write that blurb about the stolen passports and the way it is displayed here makes it seem that there is a connection between the passports and the company's employees.
Granted, it has been a while since I worked for the part of Motorola that became Freescale, but I am fairly certain there were rules against the maximum number of employees that could take any one flight. I think it was 2 for executives and 6 or 8 for regular employees. Situations like this, rare as they are, was the reason. I wonder if Freescale still has those rules and ignored them, or didn't copy them over. Any current employees have insight?
I hope the families receive meaningful information as to what and why this happened, and don't have to spend a year or longer wondering (at least for the what, why usually takes a lot longer with airline crashes).
The 777 is one of the safest commercial planes in the aviation history, with only one accident with fatalities prior to this. Having just flown on a 777 (Cathay Pacific) out of Kuala Lumpur less than 30 days ago, however, I will say that their airport security was very lax. When I set off the metal detector and was wanded, the security person stopped at the first thing that might have set it off (I had left a metal-bodied pen in my shirt pocket) and didn't go on to find I also forgot to take out my cell phone and earphones from a different pocket (cargo pants). That was just for entry to the main concourse, though. To actually get on the plane, Cathay Pacific required a secondary screening that was much more rigorous from what I observed of how they dealt with other people (I remembered to put away my pen and phone that time). Malaysia Air did not do a secondary screening for a domestic flight when I boarded in Sandakan a few days earlier, but the concourse screening was also more intensive.
Reason why it would be a bomb is that the plane disappeared from radar without sending message to controllers. Thus the breakup of the plane is so quick that pilots couldnt send message. Only thing that can cause quick breakup of whole plane is a bomb or missile. And bomb is more likely.
Also they think there is two unknown persons on board with false passports. Maybe they never boarded the plane or left too early, and werent in the plane when it crashed. False passports sounds exactly like what is needed to get bomb on board.
As there is no American aboard that plane, move along, there is nothing to see here ...
Not so. There were three Americans in the group of 239 that died on that flight.
The premise of your comment is ignorant.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
... from a probability perspective it seems highly unlikely that a plane would disappear from radar precisely at the time that a data transponder stopped sending position fixes, unless, you know, the plane crashed right there ...
You are talking from a perspective of a Western folk who has no idea what is going on in other parts of the world.
The airplane belongs to the Malaysian Airline System (MAS). The plane took off from the KLIA airport, again, of Malaysia. That radar which did the tracking (actually there were 4 radars doing the tracking) were all operated by ... Malaysians.
Furthermore, the pilot and first officer of that plane were from Malaysia.
Everything points to the same thing - Malaysia - a country whereby RACE means everything.
That pilot is a Malay. The first officer is also a Malay. Both of them graduated from MARA college, a college which has produced the kind of graduates that the private sectors of Malaysia do not want to hire.
The reason is simple:
Graduates from the MARA college (now promoted to become a "university") are all from the Malay race (you need to be a Malay before you can enroll into that college, btw) - which essentially means ... MARA takes in people who are NOT qualified to go to college any where else, and award them college degrees even if they can't do anything right.
In such context - your "probability perspective" will never work as the whole thing is so skewed out of whack.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In Indonesia as well as in Malaysia I myself have carried out "experiments" when I board a plane.
I put plastic bottles (some time one, some time more than one) and filled them up with liquids, and then put them into my luggage and also carry on luggage.
They let me pass. No problem.
And as I have mentioned in another comment - I have seen with my own eyes that the airport security officers let people (supposedly female) who cover up their face to pass the security checkpoint (without having to reveal their true face) and board the planes (all the while with their face covered).
That is why I say, in Malaysia and in several other Asian countries, it will be very easy for any terrorist to board the plane.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Hold on a sec we don't know if they're dead yet. I mean they could have been abducted by aliens you know.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
But while this is newsworthy, hoping that the discourse will evolve into a meritorious discussion of the technologies in use during such flights, the tech and techniques intended to prevent this specific kind of situation, and/or interesting details about the methods/tech used to aid in the resulting search seems a bit optimistic.
As far as the article goes, there's a lot to be suspicious of...it's certainly not normal to have this happen with everything that goes into making, controlling, and tracking those planes. Still, mistakes and failures occur. I am interested to know what they eventually find.
No, alien abductions only seem to happen to the most stupid people you ever meet. There were way too many smart people on the plane to have the alien encounter (cause aliens are scared of smart people).
OK Try IBM. Worked for them in the 90's, some of us got flown out from the UK to a recognition event in San Diego. There must have been 30 of us on the same flight. They tried to get the other 20 making up the same party on the same flight but it was full.
OK Try IBM. Worked for them in the 90's [...] There must have been 30 of us on the same flight. They tried to get the other 20 making up the same party on the same flight but it was full.
Was IBM doing one of their so-called "Resource Actions" at the time . . . ?
Did your manager look surprised when you returned from the event . . . ?
Bond Villain Voice: "Ah, Mr. IBMer! . . . I wasn't expecting you . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's a big deal for a struggling semiconductor company like Freescale to lose that much talent in one go.
It has been suggested on al-Jazeera that the two in question were Iranian terrorists and that this was a terror attack to retaliate against US sponsorship if Israel's program of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists.
That's the link to be explored here.
No, alien abductions only seem to happen to the most stupid people you ever meet. There were way too many smart people on the plane to have the alien encounter (cause aliens are scared of smart people).
Also, all alien encounters seems to be limited to what US government can cover up, the aliens doesn't seem to be interested in the rest of the world.
Really? A trading company I worked for would routinely have 20-50 employees on the same flight for company-sponsored weekends away.
It's up to four or five now, which is certainly enough to hijack a plane. However, I have also heard that the pax with stolen passports were flying onward to Amsterdam, and supposedly drug smugglers like to go in packs, so it's also possible that these were just drug smugglers.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That sounds rather farfetched. Terrorists blowing up a Malaysian plane traveling to China because the US and/or Israel are killing Iranian scientists? Seriously? In case you haven't heard, China has been having a bit of a terrorism problem of its own lately, which makes a lot more sense.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I haven't heard of a single company that doesn't have limits on how many employees can travel with the same aircraft/bus/hovercraft/whatever. It's simple, quite cheap risk management.
A previous company I worked with put 180 of the 250 employees on the same flight to a company gathering - the other 70 came by another plane. Even at say a max limit of 40 you'd need seven planes instead of two and when each route has one plane/day either you need to fly them in stages or fly to other nearby cities and have them shuttled in, it would be a huge logistics nightmare. And I don't know any company I've worked for that wouldn't load up a rented bus full of employees. I think the alternative would be to never, ever go offsite with your employees for any meeting, never arrange any social gathering with organized transport and I think such a company would quickly die because people don't want to work there. YMMV.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That maybe true but they operated internationally
Tell you what ...
You go try checking with other International Airlines ... and here is a short list of International Airlines that you can call up or write to ...
Singapore Airline, or Cathay Pacific, or Dragon Air, or United Airways, or British Airways, or American Airline, or Quantas
Go check with them exactly how many of their Pilots and/or First Officers were graduates of the MARA college.
Go check now, and then come back and tell us how "international" the MARA graduates are.
The truth is, out of the hundreds of airlines all over the world, only TWO airlines employ graduates from MARA as pilots / first officers.
One is MAS, and its subsidiaries.
The other is AirAsia, and its subsidiaries.
Only these two airlines are reckless enough to employ graduates from MARA as pilots / first officers.
As for the others ... why are they not hiring MARA graduates ? Why ???
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"Malaysia - a country whereby RACE means everything."
Thats in 3 weeks time, and since everything in Formula 1 is different this year who knows whats going to happen
Nice try, but the captain has been flying commercial jets since the early 1980s, according to the BBC.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Hey, look! Slashdot mods as informative racist rants against Malaysians!
I know we're a bit of a groupthink crowd, but seriously. Stop. Just stop.
...they could have been abducted by aliens you know.
Reporter: There's a rumor that your son was abducted by aliens.
Nathan Arizona: Son, don't print that. If the wife reads it, she'll lose all hope.
Don't think so...would have cost them a fortune as part of benefits package was 9x annual salary payout for death while travelling on company business. Much cheaper just to sell us off to another company and have them do the nasty layoff stuff about 6 years later. Which is what they did.
Thanks for this.
Can I ask some additional questions?
How it it different with ships? A ship can be in the middle of the pacific and you can track its location, speed and heading online. What technology are they using?
When you view an aircraft's track on a site like FlightAware, where is the data coming from? Is it guesstimating based on ATC data?
Why wouldn't an EPIRB work post-crash? Why does a Cessna have an EPIRB but not a 777?
If you guys are so smart, how come you still have PhD's?
And grad students. Really. Get with the program.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Right, because you were in the cabin with him all that time.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
That sounds rather farfetched. Terrorists blowing up a Malaysian plane traveling to China because the US and/or Israel are killing Iranian scientists? Seriously? In case you haven't heard, China has been having a bit of a terrorism problem of its own lately, which makes a lot more sense.
Given the current political climate, I'd be more inclined to believe something along the lines of:
US Governmental Secret Agencies Destroy Malaysian Flight attempting to show that NOWHERE IN THE WORLD is safe from Terrorist Homosexual Paedophile Cannabis-users who hoard Files Released by Snowden.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
FlightAware is coalescing a range of data. In the US they can use a time-delayed FAA radar feeds, feeds from ADS-B receivers, possibly other aircraft originated data (ADS-A/C), and fore-knowledge of the expected location based on filed plans and aircraft speed to date. In Australia there's little radar coverage over the interior or outer sea approaches: ground-based ADS systems are useful but there are significant blind spots and ATC relies on aircraft reports over voice (VHF, HF, sometimes satellite) and projections based on filed airspeed etc.
Commercial ships can routinely report a GPS location once an hour and it would be useful if the ship suddenly disappeared. They can do that by satellite or HF radio although I don't know the specific system. Ships rarely disintegrate in too short a time to issue a mayday or deploy an ELT. In any case they will be within, say, 20 nautical miles of its last reported location.
Emergency Locator Transmitters are the aviation device. They use a 406Mhz digital signal uplink to a satellite: the data carries a unique ID registered to the device/aircraft. Most emit a local homing signal on 121 and 243 Mhz that's not useful in a global sense. All have to survive the initial catastrophic event, and subsequent fall to Earth, to be useful. Some are automatically activated/ejected from the the aircraft after severe jolt, some are not. Some are activated by immersion, some are not. All should float if free of other wreckage. None work if submerged (either to receive GPS to get a location, or to transmit it). While certainly useful they are not an infallible system.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
You have apparently never been to California, where some of the world's brightest minds believe the most irrational nonsense. That goes double for Silicon Valley, where the unfortunate phrase "drank the Kool-Aid" was coined.
I see we have never been to Malaysia.
I remember the first time I was in Kuala Lumpur, I was shocked to see newspaper ads for apartments that openly declared "Chinese only" or "Malay Muslim woman only, 18-25" or some such. The racism is all out in the open and codified in law. Every citizen's mandatory ID card has a field for race and religion. Race is there because different people's votes count differently come election time, and religion is there so that when you're eating during the day on Ramadan, when the religious police come into the restaurants you show them and you don't get arrested.
Did we learn something today? Much better than just ignorantly shouting "RACISM!" at a culture with which we are unfamiliar.
Actually, racism is still racism even when and if it is openly endorsed by society.
Strange, I thought that it originated in the Jonestown mass murder-suicide of several hundreds (thousands) of Christian idiots in Venezuela somewhere, in the late 1970s. The group members were given their self-administered poison dissolved in "Kool-Aid", partly to hide it's nature from the many children murdered by their religious parents.
As the old saying goes - religion poisons EVERYTHING it touches.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"