Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?
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keithledgerwood.tumblr.com
My default assumption was they took off, an accident occurred that damaged cockpit and forced a turnaround, the damage was so great that the crew were unable to survive and turned on autopilot to stop an immediate crash, which then flew for seven hours till fuel ended, presumably with passengers pounding on the locked and hardened cockpit door.
So whilst I am in wild speculation territory I would like to know if there are some experts who might be able to say "bird strikes cannot disable radios" or "oxygen canisters do not leak" or "stewardesses can open the cockpit door" or some such.
I tend towards cockup not conspiracy myself.
(I recognise I may have missed discussions covering this and apologise if it is obvious)
They enter a code and if the cockpit doesn't reject it within a certain time frame the door opens.
See Helios flight 522.
Therefore, it would be a great coincidence that both of these tracking systems would be disabled at the same time. It seems therefore that the most logical explanation is foul play.
I thought/hoped the same as you, that some sort of failure resulted in the tracking systems failing as well, and then the plane crashed, but it sadly doesn't seem as likely given the timing of events.
I have no problem with your questioning my logic and my response, as I'm not expert, but keep your bollocks to yourself.
http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/Boeing%20777-...
1.Something happened like explosive decompression, Explosive decompression occurs at a rate swifter than that at which air can escape from the lungs, typically in less than 0.1 to 0.5 seconds.Everybody onboard(including pilots) would have died in less than a second due to castrophic mechanical failure which caused explosive decompression.
2.Plane was on autopilot there after ,nobody complained since nobody was alive.Fell silent into the ocean and rests there.
3.Plane blewup and disintegrated just like an endevaour....leaving only ash...nothing was left.
4.I dont know why boeing company is not talking about this much, they just are silent ....the biggest benefactor if pilot theory is right is boeing.Boeing benefits alot if its pilot error which caused the incident.
5.Boeing looses a lot if its mechanical or structural or some design failure...."The longer-range 777-300ER and 777-200LR variants entered service in 2004 and 2006 respectively"...they are relatively new...however malaysian airlines is boeing 777-200ER 1997 release...is it possible to have some structural or design or mechanical failure which caused explosive decompression...even pilots die in less than a second...if it occurs.
6.Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Cracks Found in the Wings of 40 New...this clearly shows even the latest 787 is not safe leave alone an old plane like boeing 777-200ER.
7.If its done deliberately by some pilot why nobody is claiming credit for it...ofcourse he wouldnt have done it for himself.
The whole media is trying to protect the company "boeing" by showing pilot has conspirators...I cannot see even 1% of people questioning boeing the company...
Latest Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Cracks Found in the Wings of 40 New....
All the more we should question boeing...
We just have 2 companies monopoly of aircraft industry.....I am looking at young startups which will start in aircraft manufacturing industry and change the game.
First, the 777 is not an "old" plane. It's a very reliable and advanced aircraft with tons of redundancy; things don't just fail nowadays like they used to. Despite its age, there is absolutely zero reason why there should be a structural or mechanical failure. These aircraft aren't Chevrolets, they're built to stand up to daily abuse that they will likely never experience during their lifetime. Tell that to UPS and FedEx, which are still using 727s from the 70s.
Explosive decompression, even if it did happen, does not kill instantly. See also: Aloha Flight 243. Again, the 777 has very advanced pressurization systems. No reason that it should have killed everyone immediately.
Disintegration should have left debris. There was none.
Also, your statement about the 787 is irrelevant and misleading. The cracks found in the wings are hairline, and are caused by its composite construction. Things like this occur during the birth of an aircraft and get ironed out over the years, just like software. The 787 has nothing to do with the 777, which is a tried-and-true metal aircraft, and as I've reiterated before, age is irrelevant in these types of things. There has not been a single 777 fatality to date except the SFO Asiana disaster last year, which was caused by pilot error. The 777 seems to be a fairly bulletproof aircraft.
Conspiracy theories aren't really the best approach to anything. Boeing has proven itself with the 777, and the 787 is a revolutionary design that will have some problems, just like the first jet engines did in the 50s.
Let's leave the speculation to the NTSB and just tell who we love we love them. It's no use twisting around old evidence or constructing conspiracy theories at this point.
Here's where I got it almost right: "2.Plane was on autopilot there after ,nobody complained since nobody was alive.Fell silent into the ocean and rests there" The plane according to most was found near indian ocean some 2000 kms...it flew on autopilot for 7 hours.
>>Disintegration should have left debris. There was none. Debris is found some 2500 kms away..now resting in the ocean.
Boeing is being sued by one law firm today:"4.I dont know why boeing company is not talking about this much, they just are silent ....the biggest benefactor if pilot theory is right is boeing.Boeing benefits alot if its pilot error which caused the incident."
>> No "consipracy theory here" its indeed looking more like mechanical failure and the pilots died due to depressurization...boeing should own responsibility.
I might be wrong abt 787 , it was too much stretch to bring two 787 and 777 together but they are from the same company, that is my point,boeing needs to own some responsibility for this kind of failure either mechanical or design failure. They have put an off switch for ACARS?..why did they have off switch in the first place? Is it not design failure?
Finally they have only 2 hours of recording of cockpit in blackbox for an international flight which might be flying 7 hours...?Explain that design failure...how can they only have 2 hour recording...even kid will tell 2 hours is not enough for 250 million price tag.
Sadly, I feel like whatever happened, the amount of sophistication involved increasingly points toward the involvement of one or more state actors. If that's the case, I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever find out what happened to this plane...
Indeed. And not just the "what", but the "why" as well.
Given all this effort it is very unlikely any of the passengers will be found alive so what would warrant the murder of all the passengers.
Digging should turn up something very interesting.
Also, the answer might well be "what" instead of who. Many people have pointed out that the cargo manifest hasn't been published, and that the airline declared 50 less seats as available for boarding than the plane had. This means it had several tons of cargo on board.
Gold, for it's weight, is very expensive. Transporting gold of high enough volumes for it to be worth killing so many people, steal a plane as well as making all of that possible wouldn't be worth it, I would say.
2 tons of gold are something that a reasonable person can actually expect to be able to convert into money without undue risk to his person. A stolen airplane isn't.
People keep talking about how this needs so much sophistication that it's probably a state action.
All I can see is something that one person with good planning could have done. That is, the pilot or the co-pilot waits until the other guy visits bathroom, climbs high enough and disables pressurization to knock out/kill the passengers and the rest of the crew, then disable communications, turn off transponder, sneak out of controlled airspace behind another plane, land anywhere with an unused strip with a truck waiting, abscond with the cargo.
That requires sophistication and careful planning, but is not beyond the realm of the possible.
Given that 2 tons of stolen gold can't be legally sold, I'd suspect that anyone with that kind of cash on hand might be the kind it would be risky to do business with...
If you stole a ton of gold, you could sell it piecemeal for the rest of your life and live like a king.
Combining this fact with the 20 Freescale engineers that were on board is it possible they were transporting some kind of important prototype chips?
the blocking off of passenger seats often indicates an especially heavy or oddly weighted cargo.
something else that is notable is that you know several large world governments have continuous satellite tracking of this flight but are not sharing any information about it.
They do?
If you were part of the plan to hide this plan, surely you'd go along with the ruse and send some search teams to go look at some empty water somewhere else.
I'd guess the crews on the ships and planes would have to do so many hours of training a year anyway, so them circling about for a while would probably count towards that.
http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2014/03/17/missing-mh3...
Looking into it again, this page [0] seems to suggest it is a Uyghur name?
[0] http://therealsingapore.com/content/who-passenger-84-mh370-a...
How could they be important/valuable/dangerous enough to justify the hijacking or destruction of a commercial airliner containing hundreds of passengers? That sounds completely insane to me.
When was the last time you heard of 20 employees of a company being murdered?
To do so by killing 220+ other people makes such a theory even more absurd.
I knew I should have specified something along the lines of "and as part of a criminal fraud or theft or deliberate talent destroying act, or..."
As you say, the sole purpose of 9/11 wasn't to target those specific companies.
You'll need to explain that one for me.
Right now, it sounds awfully like you're trying to pin a story on an accepted tragedy. (for me at least...)
Most companies with hundreds of billions in market cap would not send many important people on a single plane together. Freescale, not quite that large, arguably made a significant business mistake here, but the market impact so far seems limited.
That said, I think it's highly improbable that the Freescale guys were targeted like this, but mainly because the political consequences of being caught doing something like this would probably be much too painful for most of the states who might really benefit from debriefing those engineers at length.
Hijacking an airliner has captivated the attention of the entire planet. If they wanted to get rid of these guys stealthily this is not the way.
...zing?
Isn't it a "hidden in plain site" sort of stealth though.
Everyone assumes that the plane was lost naturally and so there is no-one looking to find those you've taken. Meanwhile you can have the plane melted down, dispose of bodies and cargo and keep whatever it was you wanted without any one (or country) knowing you've got it.
Stealthy.
There are a ton of risks involved in all of this. How could they hijackers have known that the Malaysian air force wasn't properly looking at its radar? They could have scrambled jets at that point and all of this complicated plan would have been for nothing. What if the flight they allegedly used for the radar shadow would have been delayed or they would have been delayed? What if there had been a military ship with their own radar on an exercise or patrol? After all they flew over one of the busiest water lanes in the world with an active piracy problem. What if ...
You are looking at it after the fact and not from the perspective of someone who had to come up with the plan and evaluate all the risks.
I'm not saying that kidnapping or killing a handful of people on the ground would be easy. But compared to such an unprecedented and skilled aircraft hijacking plan it seems like a piece of cake. Not to forget all the attention that MH370 gets.
If you wanted to use one of the actual Malaysian Airlines pilots to divert the plane, I expect you might have great difficulty being confident about approaching the right guy (if any) without first being turned down and reported. Likely nothing else in the above is unduly difficult for a number of state actors. The rest of the passengers might not be killed either.
> Ditching the aircraft safely into calm waters is even more unrealistic. First of all AFAIK it has never been successfully done with a wide-body aircraft and even in a small-body aircraft it would be a major risk. It would require perfect weather and calm ocean. And it would have happened at night!
Perhaps, though if the plane went south to the Indian Ocean SATCOM arc it would apparently have been daylight when it was last pinged. (Source: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re... ) The primary radar reports seem to suggest otherwise though.
> There are a ton of risks involved in all of this. How could they hijackers have known that the Malaysian air force wasn't properly looking at its radar? They could have scrambled jets at that point and all of this complicated plan would have been for nothing. What if the flight they allegedly used for the radar shadow would have been delayed or they would have been delayed? What if there had been a military ship with their own radar on an exercise or patrol? After all they flew over one of the busiest water lanes in the world with an active piracy problem. What if ...
Flight 370 in all probability was pinged several times by primary radar without any decisive response. Someone whose job was to be well-informed about these things a) might well choose to take the calculated risk that Malaysia would do nothing effective and b) would likely have been right.
> You are looking at it after the fact and not from the perspective of someone who had to come up with the plan and evaluate all the risks.
> I'm not saying that kidnapping or killing a handful of people on the ground would be easy. But compared to such an unprecedented and skilled aircraft hijacking plan it seems like a piece of cake.
On the contrary, I think that any such alternative plan to kidnap and interrogate a handful of the Freescale guys would probably seem at least as risky if you described it in some detail, then looked at it with as much scepticism as you've directed at the flight-370 version.
I think the real primary reason to discount it at the moment is indeed the attention: the political blowback for being caught would be too painful, even if you'd had the minimal good sense not to deliberately kill the Chinese or US citizens on board. It would be a huge causus belli, more or less a second 9/11. Any attempt to misdirect the blame would likely not hold up long. (And a few secondary ones: China is the #1 usual suspect for military-industrial espionage on the US at present, and there are several additional reasons it wouldn't want to, or have to, pull something like this. A state hijacker would presumably be well informed enough not to be caught out by the disabling-ACARS-doesn't-shut-down-SATCOM gotcha. And probably if you pull a random airliner off its course in SE Asia you're quite likely to catch a significant number of interesting-looking people like the Freescale group.)
I doubt it because the aircraft simply adds a huge amount of risk and has little benefit. The only two benefits are that they are all in one place and that they are on a vehicle which can bring them out of the country. But the former could certainly be achieved in another way. Where they on a business trip in Malaysia? That would simplify it a lot because you could get them easily in the hotel or even better on the transfer to the airport.
The latter is almost perfect. You hijack the minibusses used by the transfer company. You load up the unsuspecting employees. Drive them to a hideout and either force them with weapons or by using knock-out gas. Wait a few hours until it's night. And then you can drive them to the coast, load them into a small boat, and bring them to a larger vessel waiting off the coast. There are of course risks, like a random police encounter or someone noticing you loading people onto a small boat. But to me it seems they pale in comparison to successfully hijacking an aircraft, flying it unassisted while evading radar to a hidden location, which is far away from any civilians or foreign military infrastructure, getting rid of 220 people, getting rid of a huge aircraft.
But in the end who would be worth all this attention and money? I guess buying off the person you want would be cheaper. If some country wanted to hire the Freescale guys then promising each $1m/yr would probably be cheaper and significantly less risky.
A ground contact could easily watch for the shadow plane's takeoff and indicate via radio that the operation was a go. It's quite possible that they had multiple windows of opportunity if all they wanted was the plane. Of course if it had to be that particular flight due to passengers or cargo it would be a different story.
Post-9/11, if anyone tries to hijack an airplane they're going to have every able-bodied male between the ages of 18 and 40 come at them with the expectation that they're fighting for their life. I know I personally would take my chances that they don't have a bomb: if I do nothing, I would assume I am definitely going to die. If I do something, the passengers collectively could overpower them and hope were bluffing about the bomb. If they weren't, it's the same outcome as doing nothing.
Fedex Flight 705 (7 April 1994), before 9/11. Pilot tried to kill other pilots so he could crash plane into FedEx hub and destroy it and employees. Was subdued, barely, by a pilot with cracked skull that then managed to land the plane.
Egypt Air 990 (31 October 1999), before 9/11. Pilot deliberately killed everyone on board, thought it wasn't a weapon.
And if you didn't have the money to actually continue funding a start-up, you could create the front, offer to fly all the employees to some destination-team-building exercise and kidnap them from there.
It's like in other disasters where lots of people get killed but the news focuses on the two Americans standing nearby.
http://www.geenstijl.nl/archives/images/EH-eSUP-2014-01-NSS....
It would be a very hard to reach target, though.
Chances are there are hundreds of aircraft flying right next to your target everyday, simply hijack one of those on the day and fly it right into your target. 9/11 already proved the viability of this tactic.
So either (a) it's an act of war by another country or (b) the far simpler a pilot committed suicide.
However, it if was a state actor, would you as the US tell people that? Wars cost trillions. Perhaps just sweep it under the rug.
This case is really suspicious but I still think this was just an accident.
I can think of three with no effort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_YS-11_hijackin...
Nations (and other organizations) have been carrying out false flag operations since forever. In the 1960s there was Operation Northwoods - a plan by the US government to bomb US civilian aircraft and plant evidence it was Cuba who did it to justify invading Cuba. The Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on it and it would have been implemented except JFK wouldn't sign off on it.
So even if this had nation state involvement, it is about the same danger to get on an aircraft as it always has been, or go out in a crowded event, or theater, school, etc... which are also targets for terrorism. Example would be the failed Lavon Affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
It's hard to believe to say the least. If such scenario does exist what makes you think that you can figure it out by yourself?
>what makes you think that you can figure it out by yourself?
I don't think I can figure it out myself, nor did I ever claim to or make any attempt to figure it out myself.
I was replying specifically to "If a state was involved that would mean that boarding a plane is extremely dangerous from now on." I was saying if and that is a big if nation states were involved that boarding a plane would not be extremely dangerous from now on. Not any more dangerous that it currently is, as there has always been a history of nation state involvement in aircraft disaster, it just doesn't happen very often.
>and that the plane is fine and parked somewhere, perhaps it never took off
If this was a false flag operation, the plane and its passengers would almost certainly not be fine. They are generally designed to create death.
Why, it wouldn't be the first either destruction or hijacking or both of a plane with nation-state involvement, so I don't see how it would change anything?
I agree ... and so I think it's become useful to identify the skills and knowledge of each of the jet's passengers. You have to assume that, in this case, the plane was hijacked in order to obtain one of the passengers.
Terrorism simply doesn't make sense!
The freescale connection is a total red herring. Either they intended to land/crash the plane somewhere and failed, or the plane was the target and it's now sitting in some deserted desert airstrip getting retrofitted for whatever mission it is intended for.
Passenger lists would be known in advance. My guess is if they wanted some piece of material/cargo enough to pull off an operation like this, they would have just taken the cargo itself. It would presumably be something so valuable/unique that the owner wasn't going to just file a "missing baggage" claim. If it was about cargo, it would also seem that it would be more efficient to steal the cargo, and then blow up the plane. That would make the original owner of the item believe it was permanently lost/destroyed vs. being in this unknown state, and possibly giving the owner time to react or inform other governments.
Provided that the plane was deliberately flown in-tact to an unknown location, my personal guess would be that this was about 1 or more individuals on the plane specifically.
I also doubt it's about the plane itself. This specific plane is now a highly visible piece of equipment, and it would be fairly easy to obtain planes with similar load-bearing capacity in less obvious means.
I don't think it was a state actor though. If it was a state actor, who would it have been? My bets are on Pakistan if it was a state actor; they're one of the only ones with a sophisticated enough intelligence organization to be able to hide a plane like this. In many cases, it's hard to tell where the ISI ends and the Taliban begins. Though the same could be said for Iran and Hezbollah, though the Iranian government has taken a reconciliatory tone with the west as of late and I don't think they'd risk it. It likely wasn't North Korea; the social engineering required would be too high and the North Koreans are largely incompetent at covert operations outside their borders due to their xenophobia. I don't think many other states with the capability to do something like this would risk it; the amount of publicity on this is too high.
If the plane was hijacked and successfully landed somewhere (and that's a big if -- IMO it's just as likely that it's at the bottom of the ocean and will never be found) it was probably a coordinated effort between a terrorist group and rogue elements within the Pakistani ISI. I don't think the older pilot was involved; there's been a lot made of his links to a controversial opposition leader in Malaysia, but his ideology doesn't align with any of the terror groups (Anwar Ibrahim is considered a liberal reformer) and all of the "controversy" around him is corruption-related -- not the type of thing that would cause someone to shift toward radical Islam.
If this were ISI or a state level actor, the absolute riskiest part would be hijacking a plane in flight with passengers. You risk them uprising, getting the word out about the hijacking, and then you'd have to execute them once you land. Why not steal an empty plane at an airport or buy an older plane through an intermediary?
Stealing an empty plane from an airport would likely get you shot down before you made it 100 miles; air traffic is heavily controlled at passenger airports. If you want to break free of the air traffic system, you do it in the air over a sparsely populated and/or mountainous region. Older planes are expensive, especially large ones in working order with the range and cargo capabilities of a 777 (a working 777 would cost more than $200 million and be accompanied by a lot of paperwork.)
All of this is speculation anyway; we don't even know if it was hijacked or if it even landed if it was. It's just fun to play armchair intelligence analyst in the absence of good information.
The first rule of being an armchair intelligence analyst is to rule out the ridiculously silly, and "maybe they just wanted a 777-200" falls into that category along with "maybe those 9-11 planes were just a cover for a controlled demolition"
My guess is that this bears the traits of the worst disasters, an unforeseeable and unique cascade of system failures that led to the pilots having some control of a crippled plane.
Is whatever this flight was carrying worth risking fraying their alliances? Highly improbable.
Also most of my family know about the aviation business ( father was a military Pilot then became a military ATCO now a Senior Civilian ATCO , Several relatives are Commercial Pilots for various Airlines) , And what they all think is that it was either {a fire and plane crashed in the ocean} or {the plane exploded in air} or {both}. Seriously stop watching so much FOX.
If anything, the common theme on this site was to find every possible explanation other than terrorism. Sorry to be the party pooper, but there are people out there who operate without regard to our beliefs and at times love to exploit the stories we tell ourselves.
As of yet we haven't seen any group take responsibility, no claims of hostages or anything remotely indicative of this. So if it was taken by a terrorist group, where is the terrorism they plan to conduct with it?
(Luckily they used the "wrong" anthrax, so not much harm done).
The same organisation also did odd things in Australia. They made sarin and VX gas, tested that on sheep, and the. Used the gases in several assassinations.
They released sarin in Matsumoto, killing 8 people and harming 200. They didn't claim that attack.
Aum Shinrikyo are well funded, have smart people working for them, and are happy to murder people.
Also, IIRC Aum never used anthrax (although they did stockpile it), only sarin and VX, which are chemical agents, not biological.
Here are some links to the anthrax stuff:
http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_AumShi...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC88589/#!po=5.952...
This attack could have been significantly worse.
The 777 is a fairly common long distance aircraft. Would it be possible to give it a new paint job, and then in similar fashion to the OP, fly in the shadow of an existing flight?
For example, you paint it up like a Lufthansa 777, and then try to follow one of those flight paths at some point between London and New York. If anyone gets a visual on the mystery plane flying into US airspace, it looks like a commercial flight simply not responding. Not quite as suspicious as a jet or military aircraft. Would they shoot down a commercial 777 that's flying a standard route, with no indication of it being hijacked, or a threat?
I'll admit, the above idea is absurd, but this entire situation is making little sense. I hope we get some answers one day.
Edit: A lot of people are saying in other comments that hijacking a plane isn't an effective method of acquiring a 777, or stealing cargo, or kidnapping people. However, it's been 10 days, and we simply know the plane disappeared. That seems pretty effective, a 777, 230 passengers, and cargo, all gone, and no one even knows if they were targeted, or if the plane malfunctioned and crashed in the ocean. If any of the above were of value to someone, it wasn't only effective, it was near perfect.
China isn't exactly a country I would mess with, I think they would be about as restrained as Russia. Terrorist would expect a big response from them, or do they see them the same as pre-Bush US?
Even if they got the plane for later use, just trying to use it would be amazingly difficult. However we did tell them how we knew it flew so they do know what to knock out to fly it again.
As for claiming responsibility, disappearing a plane and not claiming it is simply amazing, do it twice and aviation will shut down in that part of the world, do it three times, well hell.
In other words: Yes. I’m not sure what you meant, but the answer is yes.
When it comes to likelihood and explanations, Dan Ariely has done tremendous work on explaining how a more detailed story, especially one pandering to our anecdotal prejudice, seems more likely: He commonly gives the example of how a shy person seems more likely to become a librarian than a factory worker but… ‘shy’ isn’t very specific trait, and the less glamorous option is ten times more likely overall, making the likelihood for a shy person to be screwing bolts far higher, dozens of times actually, than lending books.
There you have both: Are they terrorists? Are they skilled? Can pilots make mistakes? Both are unlikely events that may or may not match our experience, actually our mediated experience: few people have met active terrorist and lived (well, the same Dan Ariely is a known exception) or been flown by a bad pilot and been able to tell the story.
It's not complexity that they like, as much as a comfortable prejudice, that either Hollywood-grade airplane-acrobatics are common, or that horrible people are very cunning. You can quote statistics, but then again I don’t recommend it: you’ll become tedious, dull and insensitive before you are even done explaining your methodology about average-end-of-quality-of-life (death is too… binary) and how airplane catastrophies are actually generally positive.
I, for one, can’t get out of my head that there is an increasing disparity in every industry, especially all cultural ones, leading to PR becoming overly sophisticated, and that promoting a movie requires connexion to up to News casters (obviously, see all ‘promo’ segments) that might have been upped to pirates (for documenting Captain Philipps) therefore… this must be Liam Neeson promoting his latest action flick. That’s like, such a good idea I can’t believe no one has tried it earlier.
Even if TCAS on MH370 wasn’t working for some reason, an in-expensive portable ADS-B receiver paired with an iPad and Foreflight app would allow a pilot to receive the ADS-B output being transmitted by SQ68 at that time."
http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR
That ADS-B receiver runs about $20-30.
Now what could cause that - perhaps a good mystery. Everyone likes a good mystery.
Baikonur is a pretty f'ing good place to hide something like a 777, and is very proximal to the last possible position. Been there. Middle of nowhere. Airstrip is high security, remote, and has underground hangers. Local populace are very well versed in "I see nothing". It's also jurisdictionally weird, being a bit of Kaz rented to Russia as sovereign territory, meaning that any legal search would be very tricky to arrange to say the least.
Add that to the big old pile of theories.
That's a rather controversial claim. You could probably make the case that, instead, the Clinton Administration exploited the Right's obsession with the Lewinsky affair to drown out any serious domestic criticsm of its policy in Yugoslavia.
It's pretty unlikely, though, given that it was loaded with Chinese nationals, and if they got rumbled... that'd be some fallout, hopefully just diplomatic.
Russians building up rhetoric and pushing tensions to a high not seen since the cold war? An airliner that mysteriously disappears with some evidence pointing toward an elaborate hijacking scheme? Tell me that doesn't sound like an outline for one of his books.
I'm not trying to be flippant with the fact that hundreds of people lost their lives or that friends and families are being crushed by the uncertainty. It's just a thought that springs to mind.
Was disappointed.
The story also had the jet ‘disappear’ on the boundary between ATC zones. This was actually the first thing that came to my mind when I heard the first reports about MH370.
The world of Snow Crash and Diamond Age is a very palpable future.
Unfortunately, whether it landed or not, the odds that the passengers are alive are very small. A ransom demand would have been made by now.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230470990...
If your goal is to acquire a working Boeing 777, on a secret airfield somewhere in Western China or Eastern Kazakhstan (see this map for orientation: http://www.airliners.net/uf/109874/phpnIOEWi.jpeg), then you don't have to be particularly smart or rational to realize that hijacking a commercial flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 240 people on board, and then attempting to stealthily cross both India and Pakistan, as proposed in the OP, is not your best option.
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/no-hazar...
- A depressurization event, either as a result of an accident or a botched hijacking (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522)
- Pilot suicide, with a somewhat unexpected signature (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990)
Pretty much anything is possible, indeed. However, I'd recommend this post on airliners.net for a comprehensive sanity check: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...
But: Wikipedia on water landing (ditching) shows a high survival rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditching#Passenger_airplane_wat...
I'm confused.
And since we have no idea who did what, where, why and how, its far to early to judge if it made any sense or not.
That is not to say that I condone senseless violence. However to prevent further incidents you must understand the motivations of the perpetrators and understand from their world view. Just saying they are evil isn't going to help you understand why they did it.
After all if you don't understand how desperate they are, you don't know to what level they will stoop.
2. Not all terrorists are after Americans
3. Religious terrorists can find a way to justify anything using their book of choice.
edit: ... especially one that is capable of this operation and not interested in publicizing their involvement in doing so.
This is a plot by a group of violent fundamentalist Buddhist terrorists.
That is exactly what I am scared of. That the intent was never to demand a ransom. Obviously they were after the plane - to use it as a weapon. Or use it as a carrier of some weapon.
777-200-er has the range of a tu with hunreds of thousands of pounds more payload and it hold 20x the fuel of a citation x with 10x the mass. It also has double the range of a 777 freighter, with a similar maximum takeoff weight. So these are not interchangeble, but yes they are options.
I have no idea if the cockpit is pressurized separately from the rest of the plane, or if there's any way to tamper with the deployment of the plane's oxygen masks. It's all speculation on my part.
The cabin generators can be disabled by tripping a circuit breaker (and they only last about 12 minutes anyway).
De pressurizing the plane would be extremely dangerous anyway, even with your oxygen mask on. Among other things the cabin temperature would drop to -50°C or so, the low pressure could induce fatal embolism, loss of consciousness, etc.
The recommended limit around 43,100 ft. 45,000 ft isn't that far above it so it's possible that there may be no impact on passengers at that level (if you're saying 43,100ft is safe, you're going to have a margin for error, it's not going to depressurize at 43,101 ft).
Certainly if it was part of your plan to incapacitate the passengers it seems overly complex, risky and uncertain.
That said, given what happened on Flight 77, if you were hijacking a plane, a plan to deal with the passengers would make a lot of sense. I'm just not sure this plan to do so does.
Ascending to 45,000 ft or above is an aerodynamics issue, not a pressurization issue. Pressurization ("cabin altitude") will adjust automatically.
But that doesn't change the fact that flying at 45,000ft probably wouldn't do it and would be a very risky way of not doing it.
A rogue state like North Korea would have the capability, but they don't really have the motive since they can acquire passenger airplanes by other means. (North Korea's national airline has 27 planes -- if they wanted to make a nuclear kamikaze plane, they'd just use one of those.)
If the last contact of any sort had been the 'good night message', then we would never have known.
Imagine I wanted to kill a person, and I've decided to use a car to do so. I can't use my own car for obvious reasons, so any stolen car will do as long as it doesn't connect to me.
The hijacking and stealthily flying it to North Korea are so complex it's beyond ridiculous. There are so many more details which could go wrong and a much bigger international backlash especially from China. And why would they fly back across Malaysia if they wanted to go to North Korea?
On the upside if they are holding a bunch of really smart guys hostage and giving them stuff to build things with then a real Iron Man suit is surely inevitable.
The collision avoidance system only works when the transponder is enabled. So flying in the radar shadow of another aircraft would take some extreme skill. And wouldn't they have to adjust their position according to the position of the several radar antennas? What about potential mobile radar systems, e.g., on military ships? It would have also all depended on perfectly finding SIA68. What if it had a two hour delay? Not unlikely on international flights.
Where would they secretly land the aircraft? It takes a more than 1km straight and wide runway. And it has to be remote enough from any town or military installation. But they would have to bring large amount of supplies like jet fuel. (Which they would secretly get where?) They would have to deal with 240 people on board. Someone who would steal such an aircraft is certainly ruthless but ruthless enough to murder 240 people? They would have to hide the aircraft from satellite surveillance. It would take a ground crew to refuel and maintain the aircraft.
All in all there are so many things which could go wrong. And it's very unlikely that a bunch of amateurs could pull it off.
The pilot had decades of experience and a flight simulator in his home where he could practice such things. If he was involved, he probably could have pulled it off.
...how could the potential hijackers know that the Malaysian military wasn't properly monitoring the radar?...
We don't know what the contingency plan was, because fighters weren't dispatched. Maybe pulling off this plan was a million to one shot, and they just got lucky.
IMO, the only reason that one would try for stealth in this situation is if their intention was to land the plane somewhere. If their intention was to crash, they didn't need stealth or 7 hours of flying time. They could have pushed forward on the stick for a few seconds and dove the plane into the ocean.
And maybe we'll never know...
Personally, I think perhaps somebody on duty was involved somehow. Perhaps bribed, perhaps threatened, maybe both, or just a co-conspirator.
It's a crazy idea and pretty unlikely. But to me it seems like the least unlikely scenario, for now.
I don't think it would take too much skill to merge your radar blip with another airliner. Just pull up behind it and slightly above it (to avoid the wake turbulence) and get close. Radar doesn't have superb spatial resolution, so you don't have to pull perfectly in line with the other plane. As long as you're fairly close to it (within a couple of plane-lengths, I would imagine) then the two planes will show up as a single radar contact. Sitting right behind another plane like that while it's cruising would not be too difficult.
Until that plane is found I suspect people will be keeping a very close eye on wide body jets approaching and within their airspaces.
By contrast, the effective range of a suspicious phantom plane against fighter jets on high alert is zero.
It's another thing to have a big invisible airplane.
Besides, if they knew where the plane is to bomb it this would be a hostage situation right now. They might be in a country which wouldn't welcome the incursion but I can't see the Chinese being overly bothered about that given the number of their citizens on-board.
Now we all know that that isn't true so it may be they felt that keeping it quiet (for now at least) would give them a better chance of getting what they want.
Confirmation bias?
Slow burn fire randomly taking out communications systems and electronics undetected over a long period of time. Pilots freak out and head West for the coast, program way points on autopilot. Fire then cracks the hull, leading to a slow depressurization, incapacitating crew. Plane heads into the Indian ocean with all onboard unconscious or dead, until it runs out of fuel, and crashes into the ocean.
2. Pilots turned off transponders before their last communication.
2. Not proven. ACARS can fail without pilot intervention. That's confirmation bias.
Always interesting the difference between the languages over time.
With reference to the flight, I truly hope they find it somewhere safe.
Snuck is "orig. and chiefly U.S." according to the OED, but it's definitely growing in British usage, too: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sneaked%2Csnuc...
Presumably both were acceptable over here at some stage. "I see no reason why gunpowder and treason should ever be forgot."
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes#Quotes_about_Fawkes
(Now you've made me want to watch V for Vendetta again!)
MH370 makes for an incredible setup to 'Lost'.
Why is that even possible? An oversight? If you think about just how many liberties we passengers had to give up after 9/11 worldwide, why was this still there? We can't take any liquids on board anymore but if the pilot wants, he can make the plane disappear at will? Yeah, the liquid thing was really the only security risk here...
Imho, tracking of planes should never be able to be turned off. Why should it? Could there ever be a situation were it would be vital to have these systems not running?
This was already answered several days ago. All electrical equipment has to be able to be switched off - there were cases where fires started in planes because electrical circuits could not be cut.
The pilot is the captain of the airship and can take any decision deemed necessary for the safety of the aircraft and its passengers and that decision is final(this is actually defined in the airspace law, would need to look for a quote). That means that the pilot has to have the ability to turn off any and all electrical parts of the aircraft if that would ensure its safety(in case of a fire). That power cannot and should not be taken away from the pilot - you don't want a plane crash due to a fire which couldn't have been put out because the burning thing was always-on due to some regulations.
This does not mean pilots can break rules as long as they make sure to do so safely, but if a situation is unsafe they may break all rules necessary to make it safe again. Furthermore, pilots are required to inform ATC of any deviations they made from the regs or ATC instructions (of course this is one of the rules they're allowed to break if making such a radio call would be unsafe). Again, this is only for the U.S., but other countries do tend to look us for how to do aviation safety.
1. In case of electrical failure to extend battery charges for 2-way communication.
2. If the device goes nuts and is better off.
3. To be turned off so that it doesn't interfere with a backup transponder.
I believe it's more like Timtim's Flight 714
[1] http://www.tintinologist.org/guides/characters/names.html
However, it is already evident that there is much more going on - that the forces involved are far from benign, that the events are far from random and that whatever is at stake is of a Very High Value to someone.
From this: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-15/missing-malaysian-f...
the 777 can have up to 25 tons worth of cargo payload.
25 tons of gold is worth ~ $1B, that's quite a bit more than the value of the plane itself.
My guess is air freight is the safest method, does it matter if it goes on a DHL 777 or a Commercial 777? Either way, the plane could be hijacked.
But I suspect you'd have somebody with an insurance claim for $1 billion in gold, and an insurance company going bankrupt as a result.
Search for "Heathrow Runway Robberies", etc. There were a number of documentaries on the subject, IIRC there were several gangs that specialized in jacking crap off planes in airports. It's possible (however unlikely) that some graduated beyond the airport.
the 50 blocked-out seats indicate a heavy and/or oddly distributed cargo.
let's get real here - this is definitely not the work of hijackers, this is some intelligence service stealing a plane with something _very_ valuable on it. there are far too many what-ifs for even a large criminal or terrorist organization.
2. If it is unusual, the cargo might be more prone to error. Is it possible the cargo shifted back, causing the flight to quickly rise to 45,000ft before stalling and crashing down?
Unless the perpetrators know the various limitations of each radar installation?
However thats not the case nowadays. Even if you had a nasty radar from the 80's you see that the trace is twice the size it should be. (We'll I'd hope)
I'd assume that military radar ops would be looking for this, as this is a great way to sneak assets about.
When they say they put national security second to investigating the flight, what they're saying is that they're now exposing a lot of information about these radar systems with other countries in order to figure out what happened.
But then, I also assume that modern radar systems have some way to automatically filter displayed tracks for "glitches" or temporary loss of contact to a airplane signal to avoid distracting or tiring out airspace controllers.
They could use an algorithm to generate different satellite images through the possible search images as the google doodle, they could put a toggle button, 'anything look like a plane or wreckage here?' Yes/no. For every yes, show it to more people, see if they agree
I’m sure google has better algorithm experts to figure out what the best images to show are than I can figure out,
but google can find that plane
I've already submitted this to google via email at proposals@google.com as suggested on http://www.google.com/doodles/about
I suspect there are people on HN who are fewer degrees of seperation from who figures out the google doodle than I am though
If you happen to be one of those people, who might be able to send a personal email, or send a text, or make a phone call to someone who could advocate for that being the google doodle, I would appreciate that
needless to say, if google was able to help solve this mystery, I would imagine that would be pretty good publicity for the company
Thanks for your consideration
(sorry for the spam) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7414422
Of course, they'd need to talk to Tomnod first to make sure they're ready for that kind of traffic, as it seems they've already had scaling issues, but hopefully this doesn't pose too many problems.
seems like that might be the neatest solution
It gives me hope that there will be still a chance for a resistance movement when the time will come.
Is it not possible to work out the number of airports within it's range, and examine those?
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/where-...
If you don't plan on taking off again, and don't care much about the landing gear, a skilled pilot could land the plane on a runway shorter than 5000ft.
I guess the government propaganda machine is really working when our only conclusion to things is it must be terrorism. More funding for the spooks!
I am talking about satellite phones they put behind some seats in commercial airplanes.
http://www.usairways.com/en-US/traveltools/intheair/business...
I'd be ok with people not upvoting submissions that do nothing more than fear mongering.
I wonder what happened to the passengers - and if anyone realized what was happening after several hours.
1. The weather. Check on that. On a clear night it is possible to sneak up behind and tail an aircraft. Night Fighters did it all the time in WW2. And they had to get close enough and hang on and to check "friend or foe"! 2. Not sure where the FIR boundary was, but if it was close to their westward track (last radio call was a handover) more doubt on the ground. 3. They could have listened in to the radio calls of SIA68 with their radio. That would have given them height and position info too. So long as they did not transmit, nobody could have picked up anything from that. 4. If they had also switched off all the navigation lights nobody on the ground, or in SIA would be likely to have seen anything - rear view from a commercial aircraft is nil! Two aircraft at 35000 feet sound the same as one. 5. Timing on one other score was perfect. Night flight when radar operators are dozy, landing just before dawn - time to camouflage the plane from satellites, and a diversion of a China sea crash to confuse everyone.
Good thinking, keep it up. Looking forward to more insights!
1. China or some other country shot it down by mistake and trying to cover up. 2. Something of immense importance was present on that plane or may be a person.
In either cases substantial involvement of some state needs to be there.
That's the default expectation in this kind of situation, but in this case it's actually slightly hard to see how it could have happened. The evidence suggests that when it first "disappeared", and likely for hours afterwards, the plane was under controlled flight by someone with at least some idea of what they were doing. Whoever was flying the plane could easily deliberately crash it at any time while flying over the ocean, of course, but if their intention was just to crash the plane somewhere non-specific, why not just do it right away or soon afterwards? So they very probably had other intentions.
And an airplane in a controlled cruise over the ocean is unlikely to just happen to crash into it by accident. It will obviously run out of fuel at some point, but the people flying the plane almost certainly planned to do something interesting with it before that happened: the likely candidates are a) land it or b) crash it into something notable. They probably had the ability to read the fuel gauge and/or an a priori idea of what the available range was, too. Now there are all sorts of ways their plan could have gone wrong, or could have succeeded by crashing the plane, but they nearly all involve the plane landing and/or crashing on land, or relatively near a coastline on the approach to land instead of the deep ocean. AFAICS it's easier to list ways in which the plane could be lost in the deep ocean:
1) A Flight 93-style battle for the cockpit erupts while 370 is over the ocean
2) The person flying the plane is a terrorist/hijacker/pirate who lacks real airliner flying expertise but has been equipped with a cheat sheet telling him in detail exactly what to do. Everything goes fairly well for a long time until something unexpected happens and/or he messes up one of his scheduled actions. At this point he likely panics and maybe does something rash
3) The people in control attempt a controlled ditch somewhere in the ocean, probably in order to rendezvous with one or more speedboats and transfer themselves and some or all passengers. This could very easily go wrong, but succeed or fail the plane will probably end up sinking either way
4) The people in control attempt to strike out across the ocean for some distant target which they guess is near the limit of their range. But they miscalculate, and by the time they realise it they're trapped over the ocean with no path back near land in time
Scenarios 3 and 4 are fairly unlikely if you believe the radar interpretations suggesting that the plane went west across Malaysia and then north, though.
4. Seems a possibility.
It could've easily kept going for a long time and even been redirected in that mode. Once you run out of fuel of course, game over.
The passengers and aircrew would have had seven solid hours to try to break through that door, though, unless the plane landed somewhere first. Alternatively, hijackers (if hijackers there were) might have damaged the door or disabled its locking mechanism on their own way into the cockpit. Some desperate passengers might even deliberately start a fire in the fuselage, I suppose, as dangerous as that would be.
One big problem with 4 is that to believe this you probably have to discount the primary radar reports of the airplane heading west over Malaysia/Thailand and then north up the Malacca Strait and Andaman Sea. It's hard to imagine the plane getting feet-dry on that northern SATCOM arc, at about the end of its fuel endurance, and then then heading far out to sea again. (Unless it landed and refuelled somewhere...)
(EDIT: On second thoughts, I suppose you could turn east after the last radar contact and then go south, past the west of Indonesia, to the southern arc.)
But even if you do that, where would you be headed if you were on that southern Indian Ocean arc after 7 hours in flight? It's not exactly an efficient route to Australia or Indonesia, and everywhere else is either hopelessly far or in the wrong direction.
There are probably thousands of additional landing strips, even more if the hijackers don't require keeping the plane in perfect flying condition.
he just need some space to write and tumblr was his choice
State sponsored? WTF. This would be an act of war. If you want to go to war why wouldn't you just attack the other countries. Why screw around stealing 300 international citizens first?
Pretty simple stuff, most likely an accident.
Or possibly a political/mental act by a very small group/one person that got lucky.
Difficult to the point of high improbability? Methinks yes.
Once you go dark, you fly the traditional way with GPS and nav aides (GPS, VORs, etc, are broadcast, so you can use them passively) backed up by manual nav with time, speed, and bearings. Note that handheld (throw it on the dash) pilot grade GPSes are readily available and relatively cheap.
Intercepting the target aircraft is do-able via visual contact if your navigation is reasonably good and the target aircraft is on time.
If you have help on the ground, they could use FlightAware to update the hijacking crew via something like HF radio, again a passive receive on the hijacked aircraft. This would be very helpful for the hijacking crew to improve their intercept by adjusting their speed so that they sneak up under and behind the target aircraft.
Edit: As thekevan points out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7416153), the hijackers could use a ADS/B receiver (SDR and laptop or equivalent) to receive the position data from the target aircraft. This would make it pretty easy to form up on them. Again, this is passive (the target aircraft broadcasts its ADS/B information).
Maybe if you get all of the passengers numbers and check if any of the phones connected to a tower you could locate it?
If the plane indeed was landed on a remote airport with the passengers alive, the hijackers would have stripped the passengers of their clothes to ensure nobody could bring weapons or devices with them.
By now, most mobile phones (even the Nokia developing world ones) would have been out of battery.
I imagine it could surpass that though without depressurization.
Sure the batteries would be dead now but what about connection that were made before they landed? I though that data is stored by most phone companies upto at least 6 months.
The fuel would have gone out before most of the phones I would think. If they landed and passed any tower while doing so there is a chance something was picked up.
If the flight starts another journey from wherever it is, will it be possible to track it via radar ?
[EDIT] ACARS - http://theaviationist.com/2014/03/16/satcom-acars-explained/
But then again, this is hypothetical nonsense. The plane most probably crashed into the ocean.
Doesn't seem worth the fuel.
These black boxes from what I heard stop pinging after a month. Can we stop then, and just move on in life until one day some seat cushion washes up in California and have a moment if silence? Without it pinging, just how wide an area can a ship in substantial depth detect a wingtip?
I realize you didn't, but if you ask me, they should just frame that copilot, say they found on his flight simulator evidence that he intended to make that "deliberate" turn every night, disabling the transponder with the ctrl+shift+T combination and purposefully crashing hours later each time in a different location, with known Islamic terrorists on his WhatsApp and Skype, or a suicide note, then call off the hunt, pay the families off for failing to screen this guy effectively, bam, there's your closure, problem solved.
/insensitivity
I don't know, maybe to make aviation safer so it doesn't happen again, whatever "it" may be.
Why should Twitter bother debugging outages? Why should Facebook bother issuing post-mortems when bad things take their systems out? Just chalk it up to solar flares or blame some rogue developer and shrug your shoulders.