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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

The problem still remains: where the fuck did that machine vanish?

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.

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> I mean, you can't exactly land a big fat Boeing on a strip of bush without any ground tech support...

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.

We can assume the plane was half-loaded (after hours of flight, the fuel should be mostly used up, so the passengers+cargo remain as freight).

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 ~1.5km-2km long runway to get the plane down in one piece or with everyone alive

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.

>You'll need a ~1500m long piece of hard and flat-ish ground, a good road will do

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.

The road itself needs not be as wide as the plane's wingspan though, only wider than the track (11m[0]).

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...

Not a "problem" at all - the sea is very, very big, and lots of it isn't covered by any sort of RADAR or other surveillance. Even major shipping lanes aren't anything like highways on land, there is usually no-one looking at any given patch of sea.

Yes, but if you hijack a plane, odds are high that you are after something. A sea landing has a high chance of killing everyone on board (if you're after a person), and next to no way of getting into the cargo hold (if you're after cargo).

If you're just after terrorism, then doing a 9/11-style attack would be far more effective.

If you hijack a plane odds are high that you screw up everything and crash.

Eh.. "The pilots landed the airliner on a narrow grass levee at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in the Michoud area of eastern New Orleans, bringing the airplane to a safe stop.[3]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TACA_Flight_110

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.

Yep, although the 737's a much, much smaller plane than the 777 (under half the seating capacity, wingspan or range, 25% of the weight)

If we go the terrorism route.

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.

Then, no "oh yeah, we blew up" confessions from terrorists or ransom demands either.

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.

> 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.

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...

Well this is a bit absurd, but what if the parachuted out of it? I have no idea what the motivation for hijacking it would be, though. Perhaps stealing something on the plane, or kidnapping someone. Again, just crazy speculation.

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