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Comment by joyofdata | Hacker News Reader

If this was a movie plot it would be bashed for being unrealistic ...

"It doesn't make any sense somebody could hijack a plane that easily - you know, just deactivate the transponder and be gone - it's not that simple, of course - that would be ridiculous - and there is radar everywhere. Also the earth is covered with photo satellites - they would find the plane in no time - you know, a plane is a pretty big thing - haha - so anyway, bit naive, but the acting was alright - so if it wasn't about the transponder plot hole I'd give it a solid 8 ..."

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If? You mean when this story becomes a movie plot. I give it one year after they find it.

This seems like a great place for me to add my wild and crazy crack pot 99.99% likely to be total nonsense theory to the cacophony of other similar theories... which would make a great plot device for a movie none the less. I'll give you the cliff notes version

When handing over from one ATC to another, MH370 adopted the identity of another plane in the area, and the other plane switched off it's transponders (let's call this other plane AB123). Leading to a scenario where the whole world is looking for a plane in the sea when it's actually airborne, but just happens to look like another plane on radar, and they landed it at some backwater airport (AB123's destination) that's under terrorist control (for example, how big a team would you need to take over Port Blair Airport on the Andaman islands? I'm guessing not very many, and no would be any wiser if you ran it as normal)

But why do this? Because whoever stole this plane needs to be able to fly MH370 into someones airspace unnoticed to do something bad, and flight AB123 is scheduled to fly into that airspace sometime soon, but if flight AB123 had been hijacked, or had gone missing, it would raise alarms. But to the outside world, flight ABC123 is fine, it's MH370 that everyone is worried about... but flight AB123 is MH370.

So where is AB123? I don't know. Maybe thats the plane the oil rig worker saw crash, or maybe they figured out some other way to hide it. Perhaps both planes flew to AB123's destination, but with one flying directly above the other so that it looks like one plane on radar (I don't know how Radar works but this would work for a movie) Also, AB123 might not be a passenger jet, it could be a cargo plane, or some other kind of plane that doesn't come with a bunch of passengers that people would miss.

Anyhoot, that's my crazy theory and even I don't believe it, but a small part of me hope's it's right because the people on Flight MH370 could still be alive.

At the very least, I think this is a good plot for a movie.

Complication: when the plane's "secondary radar" stopped (the transponders that report things like ID and altitude), both Malaysian and Vietnamese "primary radar" could still see it (the unassisted bounce back of the radar's radio waves). If they saw two biggish pips in the general vicinity they'd likely have said something by now, at least the Vietnamese, who've got to be getting annoyed by Malaysia's handling of this. E.g. per Wikipedia 'According to the Vietnamese deputy minister of transport, Pham Quy Tieu, "We informed Malaysia on the day we lost contact with the flight that we noticed the flight turned back west but Malaysia did not respond."'

I don't know what you're saying, but I assume you've found a fundamental flaw with my theory. Two biggish pips?

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough, and thinking further, probably wrong on the main point:

You postulate two planes in the same area, that would look roughly the same on primary radar when their transponder was off (or maybe I misread you/assumed incorrectly about both looking big, see below). "Biggish" in that the 777 is a rather large aircraft with a presumably large radar cross section, "pip" as in a blob of light appearing on the radar's screen.

Going further, when they looked at the recordings of what their radar(s) saw, they'd see one "biggish pip" suddenly returning transponder information and another stop ... it's hard to imagine coordination to the split second, although it's possible.

Ah, I see one way in which I could be wrong: assuming the use of a small jet, it could be configured with a powerful enough transponder to simulate the 777's. So both pips would not necessarily be big, and if the location was carefully chosen maybe the small jet's wouldn't be seen by the radars. And that's more likely, after all, if they had a big jet to start with....

So what you're saying is I'm 100% correct and this is definitely what happened?

But back to being serious for a second. If mh370 really did keep on flying for five hours on the route that has been suggested, is there any other way it could go unnoticed? I'd like to think that it's impossible for something the size of a 777 to fly unhindered through the sky over several countries post 9/11. But then again, I had hoped someone couldn't make a plane vanish seemingly at the flick of a switch.

You seem to know your onions, is it possible to have two planes flying close enough together that they show up as one blip on radar? What's the pixel to kilometre ratio on those things?

Heh, I deduced a way it might be possible, assuming sufficient coordination.

I don't know specifics of radar, just the general principles. The major possibility here is that your suggested transfer of which transponder is saying "I'm MH123 at the same altitude" happened at a range where no radar would be giving a good enough return from the putative small jet assuming the role. Which upon review wasn't the scenario you were positing.

And if it was giving enough of a return to be seen, especially in retrospect as experts reviewed it, well, we'd have heard about it by now.

But if AB123 was big, we'd really have heard about it and it's near collision with MH370, or someone would be wondering why AB123 moved really quickly a noticeable distance at the same time MH370 went off the air. Or perhaps AB123's altitude was different, they were far enough the radars' couldn't tell that, and it's transponder was customized to lie about the altitude.... But people would still wonder, and would be questioning AB123's flight crew if they saw anything, etc. etc.

(I'm tired enough the above isn't entirely coherent, but it'll give you some things to chew on.)

Again, I would like to stress that I know all of this is unlikely, but there's is no reason why both planes would need to coordinate this down to the second. Mh370 goes offline, takes an hour to get into position with ab123. Then they make the switch.

Once mh370 goes missing, it stays missing. The trick is in making it look like ab123 is behaving normally. And while everyone is distracted by the search for mh370, I wonder how closely they would be looking at irregularities in other flights that aren't missing and aren't reporting any problems.

Looks like two planes can fly close enough together to look like one plane on radar...

http://keithledgerwood.tumblr.com/post/79838944823/did-malay...

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