Radar data suggests missing Malaysia plane flown deliberately toward Andamans
reuters.com
reuters.com
I mean, you can't exactly land a big fat Boeing on a strip of bush without any ground tech support... you need a full-featured airport unless you want to risk the machine going up in a huge pile of burning mess upon the landing. Obviously no airport in the region (or planespotters) have noticed the machine landing...
Then, no "oh yeah, we blew up" confessions from terrorists or ransom demands either.
Something smells like fish. Weeks-old rotten fish.
edit: Okay, you can land a Boeing on an improvised landing strip. But preparing a 2km long, 45m wide strip in the middle of nowhere needs lots of manpower to prepare and certainly attracts attention. Unless a nation state sponsored this, no way that this plane was hijacked for passengers/cargo.
A 777 needs between 800m (dry runway and low weight at sea level) and 2000m (altitude, loaded, wet runway) excluding security buffer. You do need a flat and clean-ish surface (definitely not bush strips), but you don't need a "full-featured airport" just to land a plane, especially if you don't expect to get it in the air again.
The point is (as I wrote one post further down): you'll need a ~1.5km-2km long runway to get the plane down in one piece or with everyone alive (depends on what you actually want with that plane). And that is what smells here. Something like this (or even setting up a 2km landing strip broad enough to allow a Boeing to land!) would definitely not go unnoticed.
You'll need a ~1500m long piece of hard and flat-ish ground, a good road will do (again especially if you don't need the plane to get up in the air again, at least on short order). With risks, granted, but it'll do.
> Something like this (or even setting up a 2km landing strip broad enough to allow a Boeing to land!)
Width would probably be a bigger issue than length actually.
We're not exactly talking about developed countries here, a 45m wide strip is a German Autobahn - and thus bound to be having at least one driver a hour, so I don't see a viable way of putting down a plane in these relatively poor countries fully unnoticed.
Granted finding a good-quality 15~20m wide road with 20~30m of nothing whatsoever on either side remains a difficulty, but still a much lower one than having a fully equipped airport on hands (basically, you're looking for a 4 lane road)
[0] http://www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/jetliner/b777/b777_sche...
If you're just after terrorism, then doing a 9/11-style attack would be far more effective.
And note, after replacing the engines, two test pilots flew the plane off the levee. While not recommended or safe, a 737 can land and take off from a rough field.
First, you only declare you have done it if you don't plan on doing it again. This could merely be a test run. Determine if something is possible and then hide the evidence of what you have done. Examples, killing an entire load of passengers in flight so a dead plane arrives/crashes at its destination. The damage to the industry would be immense. How its done is from simply vacating the air in the cabin to poisoning them.
If not terrorism, who would take a plane that far off course except to possibly steal it or someone on it? That is more far fetched than simple terrorism.
I would have preferred it to be a mechanical issue, but that they tracked the plane off course and for so long makes that difficult, unless of course the pilots detected a decompression issue and tried to turn around. Even then they would simply go low and continue on, I cannot for see any reason no one would have raised contact unless they were prevented from doing so.
Maybe terrorists are just getting smarter. The uncertainty surrounding this incident has captured the world's attention in a way that yet another extremist hijacking would not. If someone truly wanted to cause terror among the flying public in a jaded post-9/11 world, this was the way to do it.
In fact, it is somewhat curious that none of these organizations have taken advantage of the uncertainty and stepped forward to claim responsibility, even if they had nothing to do with it. Surely there are many groups that would love to take credit for it. Perhaps they are playing the long game.
Yeah, that struck me too. Especially since the murder of Osama bin Laden, I'd thought Al-Qaeda could use another big-profile terror case attributed to them, and this is the perfect solution for their PR problems...
Even if you're willing to kill them all it takes some time that they could use to try and make some sort of signal.
This plane fell into the sea and we'll find it eventually. The sea is vast.
But I think you are right that the plane fell into the sea.
Additionally, a radio jammer could explain why there were no other radio comms from that plane, except the satellite uplink of the plane GSM picocell and the sat uplink of the engine MCU.
A GPS jammer will do absolutely nothing to a plane. Edit: A GSM jammer, even less
A "radio jammer"? For what frequency? For what range? VHF, HF?
Er… GSM?
Which makes even less sense in the middle of the sea
edit - yes, I did nick this from "The Langoliers"
I think we're now seeing, in realtime, another one of these stories begin. Very interesting.
I have a simple question that I haven't seen addressed anywhere: assuming that somebody on the plane left their cell phone on and forgot to turn it off, or that somebody tried to use their phone in-flight, wouldn't there be a record on the ground cell towers of that particular phone's SID "pinging" the tower as the plane flew overhead? Might be something to look into.
EDIT: source http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2014planemissing/2014-03/...
Not to mention the whole area is 80m deep tops, usually much less than that.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NOSAR_Kursk_sesmic_reading... the barely visible initial event (1.5 Richter scale) was caused by the explosion of 500kg of kerosene and 1000kg of concentrated high-test peroxide[1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-test_peroxide 85~95% H2O2, cheap and stable until in contact with a catalyst, then it decomposes explosively (~5000x volume increase) into O2 and H2O steam
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NOSAR_Kursk_sesmic_reading...
People will read whatever "new" about the plane is there. They will read the new, the correction, and the new correct version the correction, and the ... If your newspaper don't publish today's version, the people will go to another paper to read it.
To solve the problem, you must find a business model where the newspapers are rewarded for publishing correct information, and not the most recent gossip.
Since we haven't heared of any such operation (which would be extremely difficult to keep secret, given the circumstances), the reasonable assumption remains that the plane fell into the sea.
In thinking so, I might have underestimated the size of the planet a bit.
it is worth reflecting that it is far easier to convince people that you are in control than it is to actually be in control, and for most purposes they are almost the same thing
also, if you have to fire missiles at stuff, you probably aren't in control, given that if you are in control you do not need to and missiles are expensive
Occam's Razor. The plane fell in the sea. It is a very very big space to search.
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