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Malaysian Flight Disappearance 'Deliberate'
An anonymous reader writes "Malaysia's Prime Minister announced at a press conference that Flight 370, which disappeared a week ago, was diverted as a result of 'deliberate action.' The investigation has now focused in two ways: first, they're looking more closely at the passengers and crew, and second, they've narrowed the search for the plane down to two corridors. One stretches from Kazakhstan to northern Thailand, and the other goes from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean. 'That conclusion was based on a final signal from the plane picked up on satellite at 8:11 a.m. on March 8, nearly seven hours after ground control lost contact with the jet, he said.'
The Prime Minister said the plane's communications system and the transponder system were both disabled early on during the flight. The time of the plane's final satellite contact would have put its fuel reserves very low. 'Police on Saturday morning drove into the residential compound where the missing plane's pilot lives in Kuala Lumpur, according a guard and several local reporters who were barred from entering the complex. ... Experts have previously said that whoever disabled the plane's communication systems and then flew the jet must have had a high degree of technical knowledge and flying experience. One possibility they have raised was that one of the pilots wanted to commit suicide."
The Prime Minister said the plane's communications system and the transponder system were both disabled early on during the flight. The time of the plane's final satellite contact would have put its fuel reserves very low. 'Police on Saturday morning drove into the residential compound where the missing plane's pilot lives in Kuala Lumpur, according a guard and several local reporters who were barred from entering the complex. ... Experts have previously said that whoever disabled the plane's communication systems and then flew the jet must have had a high degree of technical knowledge and flying experience. One possibility they have raised was that one of the pilots wanted to commit suicide."
Whether this article or the previous one on religion will receive more comments. Probably the religion one but this will give it a run for the money. Guessing 300 comments
It sure must take a selfish fuck, but they're out there.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Boom.
1. Why are cockpit voices recorded only in the black box? If other data from a plane is constantly being sent for maintenance purposes, while in flight, why do planes not also not relay cockpit voices to some storage system, for just such a situation? CCTV keeps footage for a few hours or a few days, why is this kind of valuable data not also routinely stored? 2. I don't know how low you have to fly a plane to fly "under the radar" but isn't is possible that the pilot or a hijacker flew the plane below radar to somewhere where it is now on the ground? 3. One other possibility: the plane was shot down, and the country that did it, realizing the mistake, is participating in the search to cover up. Militaries have shot down civilian jets before. The Soviet Union and the USA have both done so.
Lets say you were a pilot with intent to commit suicide (and take everyone with you; ignoring the sociopathy involved in that)... Why go through the effort of 'hiding' the plane? Turning off the transponder and comms, changing altitude and direction, and flying for a few more hours? The plane was already over the ocean, easy to dive it straight down. Less than a minute and it's done.
My intuition says that someone wanted a 777 and wanted to hide it.
Damnit Scully, we had it this time! We had it, had them, and those bastards took it away from us!
They landed on any of a hundred small island airstrips with the full knowledge of the Malay government, and by now that alien's body has made it back to the Pentagon and out of our reach.
Terrorists took it. They landed it somewhere they could temporarily store it to refuel, repaint and arm it with whatever weapon they plan on using.
It slightly blows my mind that companies (airlines) would buy a piece of hardware that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, which is incredibly mobile and used to travel thousands of miles at a time, with a huge amount of liability (billions potentially), and not include any kind of built in, always-on, hard-wired tracking device. Especially in this day and age. We're just talking about pinging tiny little packets of positional data every few minutes.
Better known as 318230.
Why is USA so much in love with this gays'-and-women's heads chopping nation? Oil...? Petrodollars? :-]]]]]]
db couper
Boom baby boom (dumbass)
A 777-2000 is worth 230 Million dollars. The pilot(s) could sell it for $23 million dollars and live high off the hog. I think every airline better put in an automatic beacon using satellite and/or HF radio to know where every plane is at all times and the pilot(s) can't turn it off. There was another plane stolen in Angola by a mechanic ten years ago. It was never found. I'm sure that guy is living very well also. This is organized crime. IMHO. YMMV.
The plane was deliberately stolen and was landed somewhere in the middle east or Africa. It could be at an abandoned airfield or an improvised one in a desert area, hidden in a hangar or hidden by an improvised cover. It is being fitted with a stolen nuclear bomb as we speak. The passengers and crew have most likely all been killed.
A Boeing 777 200EL has sufficient range to reach the east coast of the USA and deliver the nuke in a suicide strike. The terrorists involved could have maybe purchased or stolen a smaller jet like a Gulfstream. However, even the highest-end Gulfstream does not have sufficient range to reach the USA. A large commercial airliner is perfect for this job.
Logistical issues such as refueling with Jet-A fuel and hiding the plane from satellite and aerial surveillance would have to be overcome to pull this off.
If I'm right, God help us.
When a jet lands it lays down quite a lot of rubber. A search for new skid marks on roads near water in countries with poor military radar (Bangladesh?) might indicate where the plane put down. Evidence of a recently placed fuel dump might also be worth a search.
A 9/11 type attack might be the aim here. I'm wondering how well a carrier group could defend itself against a diving attack. Also, how may of our embassies are close enough to the ocean that the host country Air Force might not have time to react to a low altitude offshore approach?
Maybe he wanted to see Mt Everest, close up.
Both links suck. One is from the NY Times, which is paywalled. The other leads to some generic "select your state" bullshit from the AP. Garbage. Does anyone even TRY to RTFA anymore?
"It slightly blows my mind that companies (airlines) would buy a piece of hardware that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, which is incredibly mobile and used to travel thousands of miles at a time, with a huge amount of liability (billions potentially), and not include any kind of built in, always-on, hard-wired tracking device. Especially in this day and age. "
Most airlines do, just not the Malaysians.
It is possible somehow both pilots lost control of the plane and it flew on auto pilot, following whatever route was programmed into it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I bet this is an act of Putin's and the plane is somewhere at an abandoned runway of Kazahstan. They will blame the Chechens for the hijackings helping their Ujgur compatriots against Chinese occupation. Then tomorrow or a few days later (after Crimea wote for secession) Russians will all of a sudden find it, escape the passengers. China will be thankful and will ignore U.N. sanctions against Russia and Russia will have a casus belli for bombing Groznij. But again it is just me making conspiratorial theories. ;-)
Why would a company do this? it doesn't increase revenue, reduce costs, etc. The value of such real time tracking would be exceedingly limited except in a situation like this. And in this situation, the value is somewhat sketchy.. maybe you'd save some search costs because you'd find the wreckage sooner, but everyone's using this as a big training exercise, so they'd be spending that money anyway.
Look, that area is contentious and has LOADS of satellites flying overhead. IOW, loads of pix were taken. It should be easy enough to subtract the KNOWN flights from those sats. and see what remains.
BUT, nobody is coming forth with that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Would the US back China if they struck the terrorist country first?
1) It is expensive. To get the always-on you need satellite communication, which isn't cheap -- especially if you are taking about doing it for however many thousands of flights in the air. Also, it wouldn't stop a hijacking or intentional act by a pilot. Plus, it would be easy to defeat by breaking the mic's in the cockpit.
2) Unless the places it is flying over have military radar active at all times, once the transponder was disabled, it wouldn't show up on most civilian radar, as these typically use the transponder response to the radar ping instead of the actual primary radar reflection.
3) Possible, but unless the country is really, really good, no cover-up will be successful, as Malaysia, and more importantly China, are not going to just let this slide.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (also marketed as China Southern Airlines flight 748 through a codeshare) was a scheduled passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China, when on 8 March this Boeing 777-200ER aircraft “disappeared” in flight with 227 passengers on board from 15 countries, most of whom were Chinese, and 12 crew members.
Interesting to note, this report says, was that Flight 370 was already under GRU “surveillance” after it received a “highly suspicious” cargo load that had been traced to the Indian Ocean nation Republic of Seychelles, and where it had previously been aboard the US-flagged container ship MV Maersk Alabama.
What first aroused GRU suspicions regarding the MV Maersk Alabama, this report continues, was that within 24-hours of off-loading this “highly suspicious” cargo load bound for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the two highly-trained US Navy Seals assigned to protect it, Mark Daniel Kennedy, 43, and Jeffrey Keith Reynolds, 44, were found dead under “suspicious circumstances.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/2-...
Both Kennedy and Reynolds, this report says, were employed by the Virginia Beach, Virginia-based maritime security firm The Trident Group which was founded by US Navy Special Operations Personnel (SEAL’s) and Senior US Naval Surface Warfare Officers and has long been known by the GRU to protect vital transfers of both atomic and biological materials throughout the world.
Upon GRU “assests” confirming that this “highly suspicious” cargo was aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on 8 March, this report notes, Moscow notified China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) of their concerns and received “assurances” that “all measures” would be taken as to ascertain what was being kept so hidden when this aircraft entered into their airspace.
However, this report says, and as yet for still unknown reasons, the MSS was preparing to divert Flight 370 from its scheduled destination of Beijing to Haikou Meilan International Airport (HAK) located inHainan Province (aka Hainan Island).
Prior to entering the People Liberation Army (PLA) protected zones of the South China Sea known as the Spratly Islands, this report continues, Flight 370 “significantly deviated” from its flight course and was tracked by VKO satellites and radar flying into the Indian Ocean region and completing its nearly 3,447 kilometer (2,142 miles) flight to Diego Garcia. (large enough runway)
Critical to note about Flight 370’s flight deviation, GRU experts in this report say, was that it occurred during the same time period that all of the Spratly Island mobile phone communications operated by China Mobile were being jammed.
China Mobile, it should be noted, extended phone coverage in the Spratly Islands in 2011 so that PLA soldiers stationed on the islands, fishermen, and merchant vessels within the area would be able to use mobile services, and can also provide assistance during storms and sea rescues.
As to how the US Navy was able to divert Flight 370 to its Diego Garcia base, this report says, appears to have been accomplished remotely as this Boeing 777-200ER aircraft is equipped with a fly-by-wire (FBW) system that replaces the conventional manual flight controls of an aircraft with an electronic interface allowing it to be controlled like any drone-type aircraft.
However, this report notes, though this aircraft can be controlled remotely, the same cannot be said of its communication systems which can only be shut down manually; and in the case of Flight 370, its data reporting system was shut down at 1:07 a.m., followed by its transponder (which transmits location and altitude) which was shut down at 1:21 a.m.
What remains “perplexing” about this incident, GRU analysts in this report say, are why the
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Whatever country the hijackers are from better watch it because US bombs will be coming there way (especially so if the country has oil or other natural resources)
So we learned nothing from the 2001 US bombardment and invasion of Saudi Arabia then?
They're from the Ukraine, and plan to use the plane to deliver a few nukes they didn't hand over in the '90s to Moscow.
If you want to commit suicide, why not ditch the plane straight down? Why would you plot a course somewhere into the middle of the Indian Ocean?
If you didn't want it to look like suicide, why not ditch into rural China? There has to be some way a professional pilot could make it look more accidental.
Some pilots have defected with their planes. If you do not count it as "theft" of aircraft it is very difficult to steal an aircraft. In my memory only this guy managed to do it. But he had the advantage of becoming invisible if electricity passes through him and he had a remote controlled steel hand too.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Perhaps the pilot, or a hijacker wanted to offer once in a lifetime experience for the passengers: stranding on a mysterious island, somewhere in the South China Sea, hiding from a bunch of mercenaries wanting to destabilize China's stock markets and becoming a planefull of mysterious hooded heroes, fighting against those who are failing cities all over.
I read on Debbie Schlussel how she thinks the plane was probably hijacked by Muslims on board to one of the Jihadi hotspots in the world, like maybe Somalia or Pakistan.
I agree w/ her basic theory, but think that this was an inside job. The pilots probably turned off the transponders and then flew for the next several hours. They could have gone to a number of nearby Jihadi spots, not necessarily as far as the Kazakh-Turkmen border:
- Mindanao, Philippines, for Abu Sayyaf/MILF
- Any Jemiah Islamiya/Lashkar Jihad base in Indonesia, including Aceh
- Yala, Thailand, which has a Malay backed Muslim insurrection
- Arakan region of Bangladesh/Myanmar, in support of anti-Myanmar Jihadi activities in the area
The idea behind it was probably to get such a plane down and study it so that they could figure out how to hijack future such planes and use them for 9/11 style attacks, except bigger in scale. One idea might have been to smuggle the plane into the hands of Jihadis in Pakistan or elsewhere, in return for weapons or other material that could be used in any of the above regions.
How hard would it be to make this plane "reappear" as another plane with a flight destination of New York City? It would seem like a legit flight (might have to make another plane disappear, but you have already seemed to master that trick once).
Of course, by then you have had time to retrofit the plane with your crude nuke you have put together (hell, you have the entire space of the 777 to fit the thing, so it could more primitive than the trinity test. . . ). You could then deviate the flight only at the very last minute to the best possible position to detonate for maximized damage (fighter jets would have no time to respond).
Probably being paranoid here, but why else would you need a 777 that could only be used for a short time before being discovered?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Of course! Magic coconuts! Why didn't we think of this sooner?
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/malaysia-recruits-witch-doctors-find-missing-passenger-jet-article-1.1720770
But the off button does serve a purpose. Sometimes transponders malfunction and send false data to ATC/pilots. In this case, they have to be shut off. I understand that it makes it easier for a terrorist to take control of a plane. but without a way to switch it off if it malfunctions, there could be severe problems flying the plane.
There are tons of rumours spreading in mass media, most of it are not true or are outdated sooner or later. A good writeup is this article on AeroInside.com: http://www.aeroinside.com/item...
First they lose the plane comepltelty, then it's found to maybe still be in one piece for 4 or 5 hours later with the engines still running, and it's over the Indian ocean, o rmaybe not, or maybe Bengal, and maybe it was was 45,000', or 25,000, and all this contradicting info is still coming out SEVEN DAYS LATER. Yet still thru all this all I ever hear any talking head say is - we know it crashed, even if they keep changing what body of water it crashed into. If they've gotten all this wrong before how does anybody know it crashed!?!?
Having stapled my tin foil hat to my head, exactly who benefits from this mystery? I'd say the CIA, which is in the hot seat for spying on their minders. Does the CIA have ECM/ECCM and suitable aircraft? Could they intercept, misdirect and cloak a 777 whilst jamming comms? Could they later 'discover' it to reinforce their importance? Or perhaps they intend to save it for a later false flag operation. It could have reached Diego Garcia. Just saying.......
Look in the Taklamakan Desert, 50 miles South of the Silk Road. Or turn a blind eye to the obvious landing expanse.
...how this airliner is deflecting discussion from Russia, the Ukraine, and the Crimea.
Just sayin'....
Yesterday I thought so too, but afaik a plane on autopilot cannot change altitude and course the way this plane did over the last seven recorded hours. If the satellite pings aren't just another piece of desinformation, they establish that the plane was deliberately steered. Beyond that, our guesses are just as good as the findings of bomoh kelapa.
Several knowledgeable sources have noted that fuel is both expensive and heavy. Extra weight creates drag. Airlines tend to load an aircraft with the amount of fuel required for a flight and a reserve to cover delays that weather and air traffic cause, not filled to the brim.
After I land, I don't know what I would do with 239 - X number of people in Kabul or Bangladesh.
Credit for the inspiration: When I was in sixth grade I read a comic where they steal ships. A submarine releases a fog of anesthetic in the path of the ship. One person on board uses oxygen cylinder to escape. When everyone has fainted this guy, radios out claiming to be a different ship (Campbell Cross, I still remember the fake name) coming in for assistance. Meanwhile the pirates board the plane, secure the crew below the decks, repaint the ships name. Radio out saying there are np debris, no ship to be seen. Participate in the grid search and then slink away. The tamil name for the title is "kaatril karaintha kappalkaL" , or ships dissolving into thin air. It was translated from some British comic book. I don't know the name of the original in English. The heros who solve the mystery are Lawrence and Judo David. Can any one help find the original?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This article repeats an error that bugs me in so many "whodunit" cases. Disabling the transponders would require flipping a circuit breaker, so whoever did so had "a high degree of technical knowledge", the article says. Really? Flipping a circuit breaker off is that hard? The piece must have been written by a Yankee.
I notice the same thing in other cases - the bad guy built a pipe bomb, so he must have had explosives training. He connected it to a clock, so he must be an expert in electronics. I have yet to see any of these "must have been trained" bad guys do anything I didn't do when I was twelve years old.
So we learned nothing from the 2001 US bombardment and invasion of Saudi Arabia then?
Either Ahmadinejad or Assad are beind this one. It doesn't matter that Ahmadinejad is out of power - he wanted to nuke Israel (it doesn't matter if that was a mistranslation). Assad just needs a good bombing anyway (it doesn't matter how he's going to price his oil).
'Cause Blackwater got BILLS TO PAY (it doesn't amtter that Blackwater changed its name to Xe and then to Academi to cover its tracks). And we've got bombs on the shelf that are getting close to their expiration date! Plus: jobs!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A flying saucer from outer space full of green and purple aliens did it.
Well, the Coconut of Quendor is that from which all magic flows.
Don't rule out that it may have been a technical malfunction. Somewhere it's stated that it was 14 minutes between the disabling of two different systems. An electrical problem that resulted in a fire may very well be the culprit in this rendering the aircraft without any feasible means to communicate and navigate.
There have also been speculations about structural failure causing decompression.
Until the aircraft is found we frankly don't have a clue about what happened and everything is speculation. It's always easy to blame the human factor.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It landed on the beach of an island that keeps moving.
The passengers are all busy pressing a button every day without knowing why.
Not to mention that there is a Polar bear and a smoke monster on this tropical island, which would make rescue operations very difficult.
Either Ahmadinejad or Assad are beind this one.
Spoken like an American. Have you looked at a map lately? You mention two people that have some worrying local power, talking about something far from their regions of influence.
Whatever country the hijackers are from better watch it because US bombs will be coming there way (especially so if the country has oil or other natural resources)
And if the hijackers came from the USA then that would be an own-goal.
What did matter is he was a puppet with very little power making some populist noise to try to increase his support. Wait - don't tell me you thought Iran was a democracy with an elected President able to make serious decisions? Haven't you been paying attention? He could no more nuke Israel than the Mayor of New Jersey could nuke Canada.
It is ironic that the Chinese government is complaining about a lack of information from the Malaysian government given their record of covering up past incidents (eg: SARS in 2003 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/09/sars.china and the 2009 earthquake http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/chinas-quake-coverup-1678542.html).
Vessel Monitoring System.
They are required to have these tracking devices by NOAA in the USA. The boats have to pay huge fines if they stray outside their allowed zones and are not allowed to fish without out. If you've ever watched "Deadliest Catch", those boats all have one.
These devices regularly report the vessel's position via satellite and have internal batteries and no "off" switch. If you do remove power, the device immediately reports it as a power loss event and you have some explaining to do. If you block the GPS antenna it reports that too and again you have some explaining to do. All events are queued internally in flash so they will eventually be sent. If a vessel is not heard from for awhile NOAA all hell breaks loose since the assumption is that it has sunk, so it's in the vessel operator's interest to leave the damn thing alone.
These devices are quite small, use very little power, and the data throughput is tiny. It boggles my mind that airplanes don't have something equivalent.
The suicide idea falls down when you consider the size of the crew.
Flipping a circuit breaker off is that hard?
Which breakers?
You have to have some understanding of the systems involved to know which ones to disable which will leave the aircraft in a flyable state but unable to communicate. The average technologically adept person will probably think of the radio. But then there are three or more different comm types with redundant channels. People familiar with aviation will get the transponder. But if you said ACARS to the average person, they'd probably respond, "Duh??"
Have gnu, will travel.
To add to what the above poster has written, landing with a heavy fuel load is difficult and dangerous so the tanks are not completely filled unless that's what the trip needs.
For example QF32, an Airbus A380 which had multiple problems due to secondary damage from an engine explosion, was overweight due to a large fuel load and landed very carefully at a decent rate of two and a half feet per second but still blew out some tyres.
However I'm not a pilot, I'm just relating something from a book written by one.
Only republican presidents start wars, especially over oil.
Democratic presidents issued "stern warnings".
A fishing trawler has sufficient range to reach the east coast of the USA and deliver the nuke in a suicide strike.
Think again before you think you must have privacy in public against street photographers or privacy against NSA's surveillance, because it is photographers and the NSA who will catch terrorists in the end. If a photographer was able to take pictures of the a hijacker in a place before it takes off, or the NSA was able to intercept some phone calls, such tragedies could have been avoided, like in Anastasia Roupakioti's novel "700 miles".
It seems likely that it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere. A really surreal option I thought about was that all the passengers could have been in on it and wanted to go somewhere else for some reason. That seems very unlikely, but hey, if it turns out that's what happened, I called it!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
According to TFA, both systems are on one breaker. Someone would need to check the manual to see which breaker. Either of us could do that in about ten minutes, I'd think.
I think you missed his point in your rush to judge him. He says it's got to be one of them because the Military industrial complex is running out of money.
Or in other words, it can be anyone in his mind, because one of those two will get the blame in order to generate revenue for a couple companies.
A couple of arcs of position are available from the last satellite ping. To the North, the arc is mostly over land in Western China though Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are also covered. To the South, the arc is mostly over ocean West of Australia but it crosses Sumatra. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...
That’s a valid (and fairly chilling) reference, but insofar as the two tracking systems/transponders were deactivated at different times and deliberately it seems quite obvious that nothing of a sudden or accidental nature occurred - at least not at the outset of the episode. Of course something catastrophic or at the very least final must have occurred later on because well aeroplanes don’t stay aloft indefinitely.
"Place me in the company of those who seek Truth, but deliver me from those who believe to have found it."
I think we invaded iraq and afghanistan, not saudi arabia. but what do I know? I was too busy fiddling with my armaments and armor to see where they were shipping me off to.
Really?
James A Polk, a democrat got us into the Mexican American war
Woodrow Wilson, another democrat got us into World War 1.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, yet another democrat got us into World War 2
While Eisenhower was president when the US sent military advisers into French Indochina, it was Kennedy that tripled out presence in 1961 and again in tripling it in 1962 and started our actual intervention into the battles with US troops instead of collaborating with the south on strategy and training it's military.
Your comment should read only modern democrat presidents issue warnings. You might also say they fail to back them up when someone crosses their red lines and all but that is probably going overboard.
Even if we find the jet the voice record has been erased since it's looped over the most interesting part: the takeover.
This may have been intended: ditch in deep ocean, and CVR is erased if found anyway.
Also: if the flight lasted hours, why didn't the passengers rebel or at least call on airplane phones like for flight 93?
Where they incapacited on purpose? (Dump the oxygen while pilot dons a mask)
Finally why didn't the emergency locators activate when the plane hit the ground/ocean? I heard no theories on this.
The plane is just lost.
The data is hopeless due to backward ass countries. Heres what happened. The plane lost compression. The pilots turned the plane around in an emergency maneuver just before thay passed out. The plane then over-spead ripping the satellite and comms areal snd antennas from the plane, hence mostly lost comms. The plane climbed above 40k feet killing everyone onboard and continued to porpoise ... The plane continued into the Indian Ocean and crashed when it ran out of fuel... Simple.
"Shuttle Tydirium, what is your cargo and destination?"
Admiral Firmus Piett
Well, it's a very difficult problem. There are solutions that can be built and some are actively being worked on, but you are talking about literally thousands of political jurisdictions around the world, a LOT of ocean, and limited ranges of land communication methods of doing this. Data is also an issue. Transponders are shut off periodically today because of data conflicts or confusion. (That's why it's right next to the pilots and isn't hard to shut off.) We also can't predict what functions will work properly in the event of a catastrophic failure. (Which is the most likely event for an aircraft over an ocean)
It's a lot of work for something that very rarely happens.
I think cabin pressure is the most likely explanation myself. Tho I'm puzzled why the transponder would have been turned off in this case, unless an untrained individual was in the cockpit "flipping switches".
The pilot had a flight simulator in his home. It would be interesting to know if he had flown the exact hijacked path on his simulator.
Of course, the government probably already knows this, and knows where the plane is right now. Won't be telling us anytime soon.
Yes, over land this tracking is easy. Your car can't cross the ocean however. The "hole" in current tracking is being distant out to sea where most failures are going to be catastrophic and such a system may not provide a lot of information anyway. The benefit of such tracking is probably oversold as well. (As it pertains to this investigation) Knowing where the plane sits on the bottom of the ocean provides no answers to investigators. Current tracking already made it clear the plane went off course intentionally. The more realistic benefit to improved tracking is search and rescue, but looking for it to help with investigating the cause of crash incidents is a bit wishful thinking.
I'm inclined to lean toward this being a rogue pilot. Since 9/11 I feel like hijacking a plane is a really bad idea with a low chance of success. Perhaps I have some culture bias; in the United States, I'm sure there would be some opposition to a plane being taken over. Personally, I would assume the worst would happen and I'd be in the opposition. Bias set aside, if the passengers had no indication there was deviation to the flightplan, then there would be no opposition. The most likely way of not arousing suspicion would be if all events transpired exclusively in the cockpit.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
"What country is that?" "I dunno, but let's free the shit outta it!" :KABOOM!:
Look at our ever-climbing debt ceiling. Our government hasn't learned shit.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
as a diversion by crashing it in the US/UK/etc while Russia uses that time to invade Ukraine and other states. If ist in the US they will be too busy running around like a chicken with a cut off head and none of the allies will touch Ukraine with out US support.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
That went right over your head. His point was that although most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. We obviously have a history of not attacking the country where the bombers are from.
if attackers where targeting China it woudl be them that I woudl be worried about
Slate is suggesting a circuitous path to near Kyrgyzstan. http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
They have not released the cargo manifest yet. Who knows, there might have been hundreds of millions of dollars worth of diamonds or art or cash/bearer bonds on board. They would not need more than a 5,000 ft runway to land on if they did not plan to take off again. They could even have pulled a 'Thunderball' landing on the water and then camouflaged the plane with nets. This makes as much or even more sense than many of the other theories. If they never find the plane, it will have been the perfect crime.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
I wouldn't believe a word of this without proof. This sounds exactly like what an Asian company would say under the circumstances to cover for non-working hardware that they knew damn well didn't work but didn't fix for monetary reasons. You know, Toyota blaming drivers for braking incorrectly even though it was their software glitch. Certain Japanese nuclear power plant companies are a good example too, lol.
this scenario is reminding me a lot of Neal Stephenson's book REAMDE
,,mixed with ignorance. A Gulfstream V can do Johannesburg to NY. No need for a 777 and 200 abducted people and their 10000 relatives angrily demanding an explanation.
Maybe you start employing some proper cops instead of Leading Edge NSA Craputers. Say, cops who respond to reports instead of filing it into Craputer Database 321 and then continuing to listen to Angela Merkel. Would that be a start ?
Diego Garcia
Plane is now here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/DiegoGarcia1.png
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
You claim a man said something, then you say it doesn't matter if he did not. I find your powers of reasoning quite compelling.
Who has the most to gain from the world focusing on a mysterious airliner disappearance and forgetting about the Ukrainian crisis? Vladimir Putin.
Not saying that he made it happen, but of all the groups out there that have the means to pull something like this off, he's the most likely suspect. Especially with the referendum coming up. A terrorist organization would have already taken credit.
To be clear, I'm still betting on something catastrophic happening to the plane.
...The pilot's wife and kids were simultaneously killed and subsequently buried in a remote field after the plane landed...
but they haven't been killed at all. They are still available for journalists to talk to should they wish.
Of course, this simply means that the pilot could have been THREATENED with them being killed. But then he would have had to dispose of the co-pilot and the cabin crew, who would all know that something had gone wrong.
That can be handled by a minor adjustment. The sabotaging pilot smuggles a gun on board the aircraft. He kills the co-pilot behind his locked door. Then he closes the Fuselage Pressurisation Engine Compressor Bleed Valve, allowing the plane to slowly decompress and puts on an oxygen mask. At some point the falling cabin pressure causes the emergency passenger oxygen masks to deploy. At that point the pilot announces an emergency, asks the cabin crew and passengers to put on masks as says he is descending.
Instead he ASCENDS (as was noted by radar). The emergency oxygen runs out (or is turned off by the pilot), and the higher altitude ensures that all are dead rapidly. The pilot then descends to breathable altitude, leaves his seat to turn off all other transponders, and flies the plane to Hanthawaddy or elsewhere...
Someone needs to check Diego Garcia Airport
Ahem http://vietnam.craigslist.org/...
Not mine sonny!
Saw this in Vietnam........... You ain't gonna win naff all!!!.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
You do know that Ahmadinejad is no longer the President of Iran, right?
Are we speaking the same language?
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
This is stupid for a dozen reasons, the biggest of which is that Iran is in fact actively pursuing a detente with the West and is no way aligned with global Islamism (a quick glance at Middle Eastern politics makes this obvious), and the second is that Iran has no nuclear bomb. And finding anyone in Turkey who would cooperate with Iranian "terrorists" is impossible at both ends of the political spectrum, Sunni to secular-leftist.
Wow, when the truth and facts are a troll due to someone's preconcieved political notions that have no basis in reality, we are in seriously bad shape. The fact is, shit happens and the difference between a D or an R beside a president's name has little to do with them having to deal with it and often war is an inevitable ends to dealing with it. Although war is also seldom used in comparison to the amount of shit that happens.
The US is swimming right now in all the oil they got out of Iraq and Quwait. Oh wait...
Maybe the hijackers were Slashdot readers.
The plane was stolen not hijacked or used to commit suicide . If it was hijacked someone would be making demands for the safe return of the passengers. If it was used to commit suicide it would have been crashed and we would have found wreckage. Neither of these have occurred so the only other possibility is someone wanted the plane intact for some purpose. Who would need a plane that size with that range? Who has used planes as weapons? My guess is that the plane was taken by Al Qaeda and flown to Pakistan. It is being loaded with a nuclear bomb from Pakistan, North Korea or a dirty bomb with Soviet nuclear material. There are factions in Pakistan that are still very angry about us taking out Osama bin Laden and would cooperate in striking the US. North Korea recently detonated a test bomb so they have the technology. There is a risk that Soviet nuclear materials have made it onto the black market. The plane has a range of 8861 miles which puts London, New York or DC well within range from Pakistan. All they would need to do is shadow a commercial flight right into the target area. If I lived in any of the possible target cities I would take a vacation.
The article does not say why, but perhaps lack of radar contact along the Northern landlocked arc is the reason. Helpful graphic showing remaining fuel range from last ping arc. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...
The knowledgeable personnel suspected of deliberate action on this flight were the original crew, attempting, without success, to control a crippled aircraft. Cascading comm failures were malfunctions, cause unknown, that appear deliberate from afar. Other, as yet undetermined/cause unknown malfunctions degraded crew-controllable aviation, (50%) navigation (95%) communication (100%) capabilities. Aircraft is in the ocean, location unknown.
My theory is that this is a Malay government attempt to draw out would-be terrorists using a agent-provocateur scheme. The theory is that they set up a hijacking with the intent of arresting everyone at the last minute and scooping big headlines for themselves.
But, for some reason, the hijacking actually went through because someone in the lower levels of the security services was trying to do a mini-coup d-état on the leadership of the Malay CIA. The Malay government is seriously embarrassed and everyone involved is trying to cover up as much as possible before the plane is found.
The BBC had a report of an Iranian traveling with a false passport on the plane. Now this is weird because:
1) Iran is one of the most corrupt countries on earth, so someone could just bribe an government official there and get a real Iranian passport for the same price as a fake non-Iranian passport.
2) The BBC reported that this person was 'in transit to Germany'. If so, then why was he in Malaysia? That's like going from San Francisco to Seattle by way of Buenos Aries.
3) Why would this person be on a plane to Beijing? No one goes to China without a visa and the visa people in China would have known that the passport was fake. Maybe he knew that he would never reach China, so it wouldn't matter that he would have been discovered to have a fake passport at Chinese immigration.
4) 2) The BBC reported that this person was penniless. If so, then how did he get to Malaysia? And how did he get the funds for a ticket to Beijing?
One of the first story's that got me reading his fiction. Why go though all the trouble of building a complex bomb when you can just fill the belly of that airplane with as much radioactive dust and you can and spread it over New York or Washington like a crop duster over a corn field?
At most they just need to make some panels blow off at low altitude to spread as much as they can. The result would be worst than any bomb. You wipe out a city the size of New York (Washington, etc) and you also make it uninhabitable for 40 to 100 years. Much stronger physiological impact as there is no way you can clean that stuff up for that time. Heinlein talked about using low half life radiation (5 years) so you could just walk back in. I doubt terrorists would be so considerate.
As a side note, he wrote this thing in the mid 40's. How scare is that shit:P
If the plane was hijacked, the hijackers might know about the weaknesses in Malaysia's air defenses. See the article "Series of Errors by Malaysia Mounts, Complicating the Task of Finding Flight 370".
The article says, "a [Malaysian] four-person air defense radar crew did nothing about the unauthorized flight. ... As a result, combat aircraft never scrambled to investigate. The plane, identified at the time by Mr. Najib as Flight 370, passed directly over Penang, a largely urban state with more than 1.6 million people, then turned and headed out over the Strait of Malacca."
Because of this delay, we don't know where the plane is. Maybe the hijackers bribed the air defense radar crew to do nothing about the flight, or maybe some of the radar crew members wanted to help the hijackers.
"Franklin D. Roosevelt, yet another democrat got us into World War 2"
I thought the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor and sinking all the battleships had something to do with it.
You mean the bombing we had knowledge of and didn't prevent in order to allow our entry into WWII?
We could have relaxed our economic policy towards Japan and issued a stern warning instead of going to war with Germany I guess. Well, we did give Japan a stern warning but it didn't work because we demanded the complete withdrawal of all Japanese troops from French Indochina and China. Japan wasn't worried about us until we started clamping down on them economically for their actions in china and surrounding territories and demanding they cease. The US Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, documented in his diary that he had discussions with Roosevelt about how to manipulate Japan "into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves".
Well, that is we could of until Germany attacked the US which we know they had plans for doing but do not know if those plans were simply provisional contingency plans like we keep on regular basis or an actual strategy they were going to implement at some point in time.
Anyways, the point still stands. The D and R mean nothing beside a president's name as shit happens and it gets dealt with. The GP was factually incorrect. Democrats get us into war too. Available evidence and history shows us that we could have avoided an attack on Perl Harbor by the Japanese but didn't really want to. To say Roosevelt was only responding is a little naive.
Plane would be much more likely to go undetected moving south into the ocean rather than north, and wouldn't have that much fuel left if it went straight for the closest ends of the arcs suggested by inmarsat ... i think this map tells the story http://goo.gl/uZsAeE
You would not fly for hours just to suicide. I doubt he would do it for money since I would think pilots make good money. Maybe they are filming a REAL reality show survivor on some small island. Since people are getting tired of all these fake reality shows.
First it was two guys with stolen passports and oh noes an Iranian.. Media makes no attempt to provide regional context for use of stolen passports. Instead they spend their time on "terror" conspiracy theories.
Then it was pilots with flight sims in their homes are suspicious as are pilots who let girls in the cockpit.
Now it is someone did it.. someone turned this off, turned that off. This was unusual that was unusual.. an orgy of people seeing what they want to see especially if it keeps eyeballs watching the news and clicking the links.
There was mention of like 20 engineers from Freescale or somebody on-board. If for example Iran or somebody needed a sudden infusion of brain talent, perhaps they redirected the flight for said group of personnel. That would be feasible based on the other details (direction of last know flight, potential fuel capacity, somebody who might have need of such engineering talent despite embargos.)
I think you missed the point that quenda was making, because it is the same as the point you made.
In the graphic, an envelope of 1 hour flight distance is shown for each arc. The envelopes for the North and South arcs don't overlap. In fact it looks like would take three hours to get from one arc to the other. Drawing radii from the arc ends to the satellite position, it looks like you'd have to get to Sri Lanka before the arc ends are within an hour's travel distance. But, news reports indicate detection of hourly pings. If similar arcs are associated with the other pings, then there may never be time to jump from one arc to the other if they are never consistent with a position near Sri Lanka, so the Southern arc might be excluded on geometric grounds.
FDR cut off oil shipments to Japan.
For the same reason terrorism exists in the first place.
What a coincidence! That's the island from Lost. They're filming a sequel. It's called "Fucked."
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
This kind of hijacking would be a logical move up-market for those Somali pirates who steal ships in the Bay of Bengal. Those bastards would not claim credit for it until they had a deal to negotiate. They probably crashed it in the sea because they found an airliner somewhat more difficult to handle than a ship.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.