Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Malaysian Flight Disappearance 'Deliberate'

Posted by Soulskill on from the hope-dwindling dept.

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."

62 of 436 comments (clear)

  1. Suicide By Jet Plane by rmdingler · · Score: 2
    It's happened before.

    It sure must take a selfish fuck, but they're out there.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:Suicide By Jet Plane by king+neckbeard · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would disagree on that matter. For starters, a suicide might be to provide insurance money for one's family (a la Death of a Salesman), or to protect a state secret ( a la every spy-related work with a poison pill or similar device). More realistically, though, someone may be in a great deal of suffering due to an inoperable condition, and one's loved ones would likely feel better knowing that the one they care about isn't suffering anymore.

      --
      This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
    2. Re:Suicide By Jet Plane by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

      What if you're suicidal but still want to troll the entire world?

    3. Re:Suicide By Jet Plane by Wycliffe · · Score: 2

      No only that but if you are suffering with an inoperable condition chances are that they'll have to morn your passing
      very soon anyways so it seems less selfish to say goodbye to everyone and save them the extra months of suffering.

    4. Re:Suicide By Jet Plane by Savage-Rabbit · · Score: 4, Informative

      Of course we don't know that it was suicide. It could just have been an unusually unreasonable highjacker who didn't understand that the 777-200 had shorter range than for example Wikipedia lists because it wasn't fully fueled for the relatively short flight to Beijing.

      That's what I was thinking too. This happened to an Ethiopian Airlines flight that was hijacked back in 1996. The hijackers ignored the captains warning that his aircraft's fuel load was insufficient to get them to Australia where the hijackers wanted to go and eventually he was forced to ditch the aircraft in the sea off the Comoros Islands, due to fuel starvation. He would have probably stood a good chance of pulling off a near textbook belly-landing if one of the hijackers hadn't started wrestling with him for the controls seconds before the aircraft touched down on the water which caused one of the engines to touch the water too soon so the machine broke up. Some 125 out of 175 passengers and crew were killed but more would have died if the co-pilot hadn't kept the hijackers off the captains back for most of the landing. It was a pretty impressive feat of airmanship considering the circumstances.

      --
      Only to idiots, are orders laws.
      -- Henning von Tresckow
    5. Re:Suicide By Jet Plane by king+neckbeard · · Score: 5, Funny

      And you end up with a population that's better at auto-erotic asphyxiation.

      --
      This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
    6. Re:Suicide By Jet Plane by aevan · · Score: 2

      The pilot seems to think they were suicidal by the way they were talking; they weren't ignorant there wasn't sufficient fuel for the flight.

    7. Re:Suicide By Jet Plane by flyingsquid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      BULLSHIT. I don't care how much fucking pain you're in. You want to end your own life? Fine, go right ahead. I believe everyone has the right, and God knows I understand the appeal. I've been there. It's not so much the pain, which is bearable, as the lack of joy or any pleasure in your work, your friends, or your family, and the prospect that it will never end. In that situation, suicide becomes a rational decision.

      But even when things were at their darkest, I never lost sight of one fact: the fact that killing myself was in the end a purely selfish act, and one that would cause a tremendous amount of pain and suffering and trauma. For my friends and my family when they found out, for the people who would find my body hanging by a rope, for the people who would have to go through my things and figure out what to do with them... it was the quickest and easiest way to relieve the suffering, but I never thought for a moment that there would be anything remotely noble about going through with it.

      But if killing yourself is selfish, how much more selfish is it to kill 233 other people- the people who put themselves in your care, in your trust? That's not selfish, that's outright malicious. There is something deeply fucked up, purely malicious, and wholly evil about someone who, in the process of killing themselves, takes other people with them. It's one thing if your life is so fucked up you just want out. But just because you're miserable, what the hell gives you the right to deny other people their happiness? The poor bastards from Iran who just wanted to have opportunities abroad that they didn't have at home, and used those stolen passports... if this was a pilot suicide, no matter how much pain he's in, what gives him the right to deny them their dreams, to take them from their friends and family? If this is in fact a pilot suicide, then I hope there's a Hell, and I hope it's got all nine levels like in Dante, because this guy should straight to the lowest fucking level, the level for people who commit treachery, and there's no amount of suffering that would be too much for a crime like that.

  2. Three thoughts... by davidmcg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Three thoughts... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2

      The maintenance data stream is also incredibly restricted by bandwidth, so a continuous audio stream at a fidelity which can cover voices in the cock pit *and* instrument activation noises (something people talking about CVR use often miss), you are talking about a data stream that often isn't viable.

    2. Re:Three thoughts... by Albanach · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Which is a fair point, but it could still broadcast it's GPS location and altitude every five minutes. If I rent a $20,000 dollar car from Hertz it lets them know where I am with their car. Why airlines let planes costing hundreds of millions fly around the globe absent similar technology is surely a little strange?

    3. Re: Three thoughts... by Mitsoid · · Score: 2

      It does...

      The problem is the range of the transponder broadcast is roughly 100 miles (1ghz frequency). When a plane goes off the coast, they quickly go out of range off any listening posts...

      The US and Europe are both working on a new system for taking over water... Using satellite support probably... But for now, after 100 miles out to sea, radar is the primary method of tracking

    4. Re:Three thoughts... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2

      The problem is that over large tracts of water, transmission range is a huge issue - turning back aircraft traveling toward the US over the Atlantic or Pacific oceans on 9/11 was very problematic because they were out of radio range and the long range communication system had no guarantees on ability.

    5. Re:Three thoughts... by Albanach · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Surely the transmission range to a satellite is the same when you're at 35,000 feet whether or not you're above water? REI will sell you a satellite beacon that can ping your coordinates as often as every 2.5 minutes and costs less than $100 with a $99 per year subscription fee for the Immersat service.

    6. Re:Three thoughts... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2

      Problem with sat based transmissions is that they require decent weather, otherwise you are out of luck.

    7. Re:Three thoughts... by schnell · · Score: 2

      REI will sell you a satellite beacon that can ping your coordinates as often as every 2.5 minutes and costs less than $100 with a $99 per year subscription fee for the Immersat service.

      You're referring to the GlobalStar SPOT satellite beacon system (not Inmarsat). It's a neat idea but using this as an example falls victim to the same fallacies as 99% of the other speculation about this topic on Slashdot: people try to transpose their experiences with bandwidth availability on land to over the ocean... which is to say that bandwidth is just so much more rare and expensive there that most people can't imagine how it is.

      It is a truism that telecom providers build their bandwidth where the users are. Have you ever noticed how much worse your bandwidth costs/options are in East Dead Cow Skull Texas vs. Austin? Well, take that and extrapolate it to an area of the world where there is literally no land for hundreds or thousands of miles to hang infrastructure on, and the ONLY users to ever pass through are a few dozen ships or aircraft per day.

      To take your example, GlobalStar SPOT only works within the range of a SPOT Hub because their satellites can't connect sat-to-sat (which is ridiculously more expensive to build). So over the ocean would not work. (A poster above wondered why their $30/day Hertz rent-a-car could be tracked but a $200M airplane couldn't ... for the same reason, because the Hertz car can use cell phone towers.) If the plane was over the continental US then tracking would be no problem but in "the space in between" ... not so much.)

      Long story short, even satellite services (like GlobalStar, Hughes, ViaSat and others) focus their capacity on where the users are. The mid-Oceanic spans and areas like the Arctic, Antarctic and Indian Oceans face the worst and most expensive bandwidth crunch on the planet for the simple reason that almost any investment in serving those areas will be a failure because there just aren't enough vehicles/people there to hang up $250M+ satellites to provide connectivity... and if you do (as Inmarsat and others have), you will find that cheapskate airlines will refuse to pay the requisite costs because, honestly, how often does a plane go down in these areas?

      --
      "95% of all Slashdot .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated." -Benjamin Franklin
  3. does it add up? by nblender · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:does it add up? by rasmusbr · · Score: 2

      But the plane would only have had enough fuel to fly to Beijing (plus some additional safety margin).

      One possibility is that a highjacker made the same mistake that you did and ran out of fuel over the ocean.

    2. Re:does it add up? by KingOfBLASH · · Score: 2

      The cabin is "pressurized" in the sense that they have 1 ATM of pressure inside it and the pressure inside the cabin won't change even if they go to 40,000 ft -- where the air is so rarified you would pass out without a mask (or die of frostbite, not sure which would happen first).

      Because this is a sealed system it's basically a big balloon. So long as you don't disarm the doors and deflate the balloon, the plane will float. And the plane is designed to have the doors opened and still float for long enough for everyone to disembark

      That's why during the "miracle on the hudson" the plane didn't just go down to the bottom and drown everyone aboard.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

    3. Re:does it add up? by mikael · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Climb to 45000 feet, depressurize the plane, kill off the passengers, land the plane somewhere, and you've got a nice delivery vehicle for something explosive.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    4. Re:does it add up? by flyingsquid · · Score: 2

      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.

      So first, a potential argument against the suicide scenario is that it would be more rational to simply fly the plane straight down instead of flying on for 7 hours. Of course, if we are talking about a suicidal pilot, then we're talking about someone sadistic and deranged enough to kill 238 people. This is, by definition, not someone who is thinking in terms of what is the most rational response to a given situation, but a deeply fucked up individual. If they're sadistic enough to kill over 200 people and inflict untold suffering on their loved ones, maybe they're also sadistic enough to torment them for seven hours first. We're not talking about a simple suicide here, we're talking about a murder-suicide like Columbine or a suicide bomber.

      Second, if someone wanted to steal a 777 for a terrorist attack, then why haven't we seen the attack? If there's a terrorist plot like during 9/11, then it requires the element of surprise. The more time passes, the more time there is for people to unravel the plot and send in the Special Forces to take out the plotters.

      Third, if it's piracy, why haven't we seen the ransom? If you're a Somali pirate, then once you've got the ship safely in the harbor in Somalia, you send a message to the owners of the ship that you're open for negotiation. Also, if you want to do the piracy thing, you have to find somewhere sufficiently lawless that they won't arrest you when you land. Even a place like Kazakhstan isn't lawless enough; you don't just need a repressive dictatorship, you need a failed state level of anarchy, somewhere like Somalia or the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. And as for selling the plane on the black market, you might be able to pinch and sell a few parts... but this is the most famous airplane in the world right now. there's no way in hell you could sell so much as a rivet if it had the serial number on it.

      Pilot suicide is, unfortunately, the simplest explanation that fits the facts. We've seen it before and it would fit what happened here. For the sakes of the crew and families, I desperately hope that's wrong, but it's been more than a week- if these people were alive, we'd probably have heard by now.

    5. Re:does it add up? by Gavagai80 · · Score: 2

      But why bother using up fuel saving the plane for later use when you can just fly into your target immediately? It's not that easy to land, refuel and take off in a plane that size unnoticed.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
  4. Ter'rists... or ALIEMS? by pla · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  5. Tracking by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Tracking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      not include any kind of built in, always-on, hard-wired tracking device

      They experimented with hard-wired positional tracking, but the cables became very long.

    2. Re:Tracking by chalkyj · · Score: 2

      I'm not sure you need to guarantee it resists all possible sabotage efforts. It just needs to not have an "off" button in the cockpit and be located in an inaccessible area of the aircraft. I assume the answer to this question is simply that the planes involved are probably fairly old, and that new planes do indeed have features like this. If I can buy a car with that sort of feature for anti-theft I'm sure putting it on a plane can't be terribly difficult.

    3. Re:Tracking by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How would you guarantee such a tracking device resists all possible sabotage efforts?

      That kind of mindset seems to be common in Slashdot. "If something is not completely perfect, it's completely useless." Many times comes up in security-related articles.

    4. Re:Tracking by kyrsjo · · Score: 2

      You may want to be able to cut power to the device, not just "switch off" as send an electrical signal which basically means "please switch yourself off".

      Further, it is actually possible to disable the CVR and FDR ("the black box") - just trip the circuit breaker. There may be some battery backup, but this only lasts for ~10 minutes:
      http://books.google.fr/books?i...
      This happened on SilkAir flight 185, which probably was deliberately crashed by its captain:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

      Whether the transmitters which may or may not have been running on this flight where possible to switch off, I don't know - one possible location is actually inside the engine nacelle - so it may have been wired to be always on as long as the engine is running, shutting down when the engine control circuitry looses power. Or maybe the pilot just didn't know about them?

    5. Re:Tracking by rubycodez · · Score: 2

      not hard to understand at all. such systems have been proposed, read about them. the satellites that will have to be launched, the gear that will be installed. billions of dollars and years of time (e.g. Next Gen)

      harsh reality and what people imagine about capabilities of technology are two very different things

    6. Re:Tracking by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2

      Sorry Thoth, as an answer to this and your other posts:
      How exactly should a bribed ground crew sabotage an external communication systems in a way that they still work before launch (otherwise the plane would not launch) but fail after take off? Regardless of your suspected 25 million dollar bribe.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    7. Re:Tracking by Rich0 · · Score: 2

      So now you just need to bribe a few extra people to clear a plane for flight with a non-functional tracking device installed by maintainence?

      That isn't as easy as it sounds. Conspiracies never work when they involve many people - sooner or later somebody talks. If you want to bribe the maintenance crew you might have to involve several people, all of whom will be treated as suspects after you commit your crime. How are they going to explain a million bucks in their bank account? Also, the first thing they're going to suspect is that you're probably going to result in 200 people getting killed - how many people are willing to have that on their conscience for some cash?

      It would be like trying to bribe all the employees of a bank to just let you empty the vault. People can only be bribed if their perception of the harm inflicted is compatible with their moral values, and they feel like they're fairly likely to get away with it. Getting info via a bribe tends to be easier. Tampering with safety equipment on a plane is probably going to be rather difficult to pull off.

  6. Nuke bomb theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re: Nuke bomb theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      Except that it is extremely easy to buy (or steal) a used commercial or cargo aircraft without going to all the trouble of hijacking and mass murder and evading the air forces and navies of half the planet. And it would be even easier to sail a nuke-laden yacht into any number of east coast harbors. Why would a terrorist go to all this trouble when there are much easier and less risky ways of accomplishing the goal you describe?

  7. Look for skid marks by mdsolar · · Score: 2

    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?

  8. blows my mind by lagomorpha2 · · Score: 2

    "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.

    1. Re:blows my mind by dbIII · · Score: 2

      Get to know just a little bit more about airlines and you'll see that most are converging towards Aeroflot standards (or lack thereof).

  9. Helios flight disaster. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There are very few clues. Some tantalizing pings, between 4 to 6 on the satellites, some delay in transponder being turned off etc are the bare facts on which these elaborate theories are being spun. But I keep thinking about the Helios flight disaster. The maintenance crew had left the cabin pressurization in "manual" mode. The pilot did not notice. The plane warned about cabin pressure. But the pilot was confused and continued to climb to cruise altitude. Deprived of oxygen, all of them died when the oxygen ran out. Pilots never put on the mask and died soon. Plane without pilots, may be with a few passengers alive for half an hour longer, flew on auto pilot for several hours. One crew member, a flight attendant, a former navy diver was seen in the cockpit lugging a (probably empty oxygen) cylinder by the chase planes. Eventually ran out of fuel and crashed in the mountain.

    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
    1. Re:Helios flight disaster. by robinsonne · · Score: 4, Informative

      But then the transponder would have still been on...

  10. Re:This plane was stolen for money. IMHO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The pilot(s) could sell it for $23 million dollars and live high off the hog.

    Yes - there's a huge black market in 777s.

  11. what is missing is that mutliple govs. know. by WindBourne · · Score: 2

    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.
  12. Re:Watch out by quenda · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  13. Suicide By Jet Plane by Albanach · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  14. Worst Case Scenario by Idou · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
    1. Re:Worst Case Scenario by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Here is some fictional writing I saw on reddit. It is a crazy story....... http://pastebin.com/d97LkvF7

      What is the craziest way the mystery of Flight 370 could end? by Brutussin AskReddit

      [–]z3ndog 423 points 19 hours ago

      Iran's Trojan Horse

      The pilot's wife and 2 kids were kidnapped and the pilot was contacted via his cell 15m before takeoff with pics of his family, tied up, gagged, with knives to their throats by masked bad guys. He was given instructions to turn off the transponder, turn to the west, and allow the 2+ Iranian terrorists (fake passports) into the cockpit.

      Immediately prior, the two terrorists removed a 250W High Power Waterproof OEM Signal Jammer with Omni-directional Antennas from their overhead luggage and activated it, effectively jamming all cell phone transmissions.

      The plane was directed to fly west across Malaysia and then redirected north to Myanmar's (Burma) Hanthawaddy International Airport in the Bago Region; Myanmar which is located about 50 miles (80 km) away from Yangon. This is a remote airstrip that was under construction and not expected to be opened until 2018; however, which was controlled by Syrian Islamists.

      The plane landed without incident and was taxied to a hanger under contruction where it was boarded by more Islamists with fully automatic weapons, including a highly trained Iranian Military pilot and 3 member flight crew. The Maylasian pilot and crew were taken outside and executed in a manner visible to the passengers. The pilot's wife and kids were simultaneously killed and subsequently buried in a remote field after the plane landed.

      The plane's communication electronics were completely disabled (turned off the satellite transmissions that tipped off authorities that the plane had not crashed and in fact this oversight was reported in the news). Once this was completed, the plane lifted off and turned to fly south across the Bay of Bengal and around the tip of India... then turned northwest over the Arabian Sea enroute to Iran. The plane was subsequently landed at Gonbad-e Qabus airport (also underconstruction) in the north eastern section of Iran.

      The hostages were moved to a remote prison to be held indefinitely.

      The plane was stripped of all Malaysian air identification and paint. It was then repainted to the specs of an Turkish Airlines 777 plane. The plane was retrofitted with military grade electronics (including electronic countermeasures (ECM) and radar warning (RWR) systems, chaff/flare dispensers; all pulled from a retired F14 Tomcat based in Iran from 2003). Additionally, the jet was equipped and armed with a fully operational nuclear bomb from Iran's now functional nuclear weapons program using the 240 pounds of 84% enriched Uranium from Natanz. This device was expected to produce a yield of 22 kiloton (40% bigger than Little Boy) and have an effective blast radius of 4.5 miles.

      Only April 14th, the Islamists bribed a local official at Trabzon (TZX) Turkey to enable the swapping of the Turkish Airlines TK 2837 airplane with the nuke equipped 777 that will now utilize the transponder from 2837.

      The plane departed TZX and skipped the scheduled landing in IST. Upon arriving near JFK, the plane's transponder was turned off and rapidly descended to 5000 feet with ECM activated... The FAA repeated the same mistake from 9-11 and doesn't notify NORAD about this anomoly as they investigated the details of the missing flight TK 2837. The plane turned southwest and proceeded across Philadelphia and towards the ultimate destination of Washington DC, where 4 F16's are scrambled from the 1st Fighter Wing at Langley Air Force Base.

  15. Taklamakan Desert by AmbiLobe · · Score: 2

    Look in the Taklamakan Desert, 50 miles South of the Silk Road. Or turn a blind eye to the obvious landing expanse.

  16. It's interesting.... by Rick+Zeman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...how this airliner is deflecting discussion from Russia, the Ukraine, and the Crimea.

    Just sayin'....

  17. No by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  18. Already being done for fishing boats by Clueless+Moron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  19. Re:flip the breaker = high degree of technical kno by PPH · · Score: 2

    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.
  20. Nuke bomb theory makes no sense by dbIII · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A fishing trawler has sufficient range to reach the east coast of the USA and deliver the nuke in a suicide strike.

    1. Re:Nuke bomb theory makes no sense by Vladus2000 · · Score: 2

      Typically you want a nuke at altitude for maximum damage. Setting it off on a boat would not have near the radius. Not only do you get good downward force and range from above, the EMP would do damage to a larger area as well. One would hope you couldn't get close enough with no transponder, hopefully we don't find out. Personally, I would consider it a waste to use one at sea level.

  21. No radio contact, no hostage ransom request by Greyfox · · Score: 2

    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?

  22. Re:There's more than one pilot by dbIII · · Score: 2

    My mistake - should have added "in the cockpit" for those that are slow to think but quick to post.

  23. Last ping position by mdsolar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

  24. Doesn’t match with the reported facts. by qubex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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."
  25. Re:Watch out by noh8rz10 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  26. CVR only lasts two hours by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  27. Worked in the Battle of Endor by lunadude · · Score: 2

    "Shuttle Tydirium, what is your cargo and destination?"
    Admiral Firmus Piett

  28. Seems like a rogue pilot by Chewbacon · · Score: 2

    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.
  29. Re:Watch out by Chewbacon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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.
  30. Re:Stealing an aircraft is rare and difficult. by roothog · · Score: 4, Informative

    A 727 was stolen in 2003 and has never been found: Wiki

  31. More than you would think it seems. by macshome · · Score: 3, Funny

    Ahem http://vietnam.craigslist.org/...