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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

There is a realistic possibility that those piloting the plane used this and/or other stealth techniques and landed intact. There are lots of groups around the world that would love to have a working $250M aircraft. Maybe there is a massive airplane chop shop that this went to, or someone wants to load it up with explosives and fly it to some country they disagree with.

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.

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I think it's highly unrealistic. The plan simply involves too many risks. First of all how could the potential hijackers know that the Malaysian military wasn't properly monitoring the radar? There would have been a huge risk of the Malaysian military discovering it and scrambling jets.

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.

...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.

Flying the aircraft isn't the only problem in such a complicated plan. So even if the pilot was exceptional it would still require many other highly skilled people. And there would be huge risks at every step. It would be thousands of details to get right. Maybe they were just lucky. But it's far more likely that they crashed somewhere, maybe as the result of the hijacking.

And maybe we'll never know...

Personally, I find the whole military radar thing to be extremely suspicious. The fact that this plane flew over the whole country without being noticed even though it was tracked on military radar is just too implausible. Yet it happened.

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.

Why would you need a 777 when you can probably pick up old Russian cargo planes much easier and for a fraction of the cost and without needing super skilled pilots?

Extreme long range? It was a 777-200ER (Enhanced Range) - that model holds records for distance flying:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777#777-200ER

If we assume that there is some level of outside planning here, with maybe a state actor involved, then getting the plane secretly fuelled up beyond the assumed 7.5 hour range would perhaps not be too difficult.

What are the odds that if you had that plane, you could 'sneak in' to US airspace and pull another 9/11?

That's why I find it difficult to believe that anyone would steal that plane with the goal of attacking the US (or any country with a well developed air defense system).

Until that plane is found I suspect people will be keeping a very close eye on wide body jets approaching and within their airspaces.

It could also be used to attack countries without a well developed air defense system. It might not even be a country in the west.

Depends. If it had been done in the "Huh, that's strange" stage of this mystery, then I'd say the odds are pretty good. But with no communication for this many days, the odds are that whatever the plan was, it didn't work, and the plane is crashed or unable to fly, wherever it is, and that the US, especially, is looking out for an attack.

Trust me, you can get an aircraft with enough range to get anywhere in the world in a couple of hops for much less than the cost of organizing a highly sophisticated hijacking operation. And your range is much longer when your aircraft is operated by an apparently legitimate charter service that has permission to fly into most countries and don't have to worry about hiding from radar.

By contrast, the effective range of a suspicious phantom plane against fighter jets on high alert is zero.

It's one thing to have a big airplane.

It's another thing to have a big invisible airplane.

The fact that the plane was taken up to 45,000, far above it's recommended limit, bothers me in this regard. What would the effects be on the passengers? Would this have been orchestrated in order to somehow incapacitate them?

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.

its all pressurised under the same envelope. The pilots have oxygen masks.

The pressurisation is not independent, but the emergency O2 is - the cockpit is supplied from tanks and the cabin from chemical generators.

The cabin generators can be disabled by tripping a circuit breaker (and they only last about 12 minutes anyway).

The cockpit isn't pressurised separately. It's possible to alter oxygen masks deployment, I know for sure it must be done landing at some altitude airports like Quito which are higher up than normal cabin altitude.

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 cockpit isn't airtight - it would be at the same pressure as the rest of the cabin.

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.

There are huge safety margins in aviation.

Ascending to 45,000 ft or above is an aerodynamics issue, not a pressurization issue. Pressurization ("cabin altitude") will adjust automatically.

There are not many ways to incapacitate hundreds of passengers.

This is true. When I started thinking about it nothing obvious came to mind.

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.

Who is to say that any ransom demand would have been made publicly? It may well be that one has been made but that we just don't know about it.

The hijackers would probably want to make it public. It's an insurance for their safety right now. A government might simply bomb the parked aircraft and blame it on a crash or the hijackers.

There are ways to cover that - not all the hijackers will be with the plane. All they've got to do is keep some proof of the negotiation for the survivors to publish and that would be easily disprovable.

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.

But why not make it public?

Because publicly people don't negotiate with terrorists.

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.

>> A ransom demand would have been made by now.

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.

In that case, it'd be much less suspicious to purchase a small private jet. No reason to hijack a big airplane everyone would be looking for.

What you get with this plane is huge fuel and cargo capacity not to mention unsupported range.

Neither of which are requirements to do serious damage, and as has been said numerous times before, there are plenty of other planes that meet that criteria that could have been obtained much more easily and not in full view of the public eye.

"Neither of which are requirements to do serious damage"

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.

But they are still not requirements to do serious damage. Do you understand? Someone seeking to do serious damage has much less conspicuous options at their disposal.

"Serious damage" is unspecific and arbitrary.

What makes this obvious?

Can you expand on what groups might be able to orchestrate such a complicated hijacking?

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.)

Not to imply I think it's possible, but deniability is an obvious reason not to use your own aircraft.

Deniability would have been a very likely outcome if a convincing crash scenario had been engineered. I suspect that the pilot was supposed to turn off the satcom link at the same time as the transponder. Now that we know that it kept flying for 7 hours and may have been shadowing this other plane, it looks clearly like deliberate theft.

If the last contact of any sort had been the 'good night message', then we would never have known.

Totally unnecessary and melodramatic, in this hypothetical situation all you need is a plane that has no attachment to the nation in question.

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.

Maybe they didn't want the plane, but someone on the plane. For example, those 20 Freescale Semiconductor employees. North Korea has a history of abducting foreigners, including a South Korean movie director kidnapped by Kim Jong-il to produce films for him.

There's an easier way of getting people. If you want 20 people taking an additional 200 people and an airliner with them seems overly complex compared to, say, hitting them on the back of the head as they're walking home and bundling them in a van.

How is it easier to go around hitting 20 people on the back the the head and then figuring out how to drive them to North Korea at the back of a van without being detected? If your goal is to get a large team of semiconductor engineers against their will, I can hardly think of a more efficient way than simply flying the plane they are on to your country.

It is a lot easier. Of course you would use a ship or even the official Air Koyo flight from KL instead of a van...

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?

How many would come to NK for $1m a year? If I were building a team of engineers in NK that's what I'd be offering rather than an incredibly risky and difficult manuver like this...

And that way you probably get better work out of them than if you're holding them hostage.

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.

It doesn't make any sense to kill 240 people, including babies and kids. Especially if this is a terrorist act, they could not religiously justify that, especially since these are mainly Chinese people rather than American.

What makes you think these hypothetical terrorists are after Americans, not Chinese? And why is religion the only reason they could be doing this?

The Chinese are victims to terrorism to;

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230470990...

Terrorists' rationales are often bizarre to non-indoctrinated: witness Oklahoma city bombing or Utøya. Besides if that was a doing of national separatist group in China, they'd have little problem with that.

my guess is that if it was hijacked by terrorists, the act is yet to come. They are after the plane, not the people.

This theory keeps coming up, but it doesn't make much sense.

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.

This leads me to wonder if maybe the cargo was the target. We already heard that the manifest has not been released and that they left 50 seats empty to compensate for the weight.

They just said the cargo was 3-4 tons of mangosteen:

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/no-hazar...

Anything is possible, but my guess is that if they were hijacked, they had a plan that went wrong. It's far more likely, and it's happened before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_961

This seems the most likely in my opinion. I wonder if the fate of Flight 961 would have been known if the captain hadn't deliberately mislead the hijackers about the direction they were flying in and landed close to a beach?

Add to that list:

- 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...

Thanks! That's a good summary post.

What i don't get: The aforementioned link to the Ethiopian water landing says: "The incident is the only true water landing of a widebody airliner with survivors."

But: Wikipedia on water landing (ditching) shows a high survival rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditching#Passenger_airplane_wat...

I'm confused.

Most of those are not "widebody airliner". The smaller the plane, the better the chances.

First, before you make statements like that, you need to understand the motivation of the people doing this.

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.

did you just use killing of innocent children as a justification against the possibility of this being a terrorist act? Of all the arguments against potential terrorist foundations, and there are many, the action off killing of innocent women and children appears to be the exact thesis for such an action. check, history.

1. Not all terrorists are religious

2. Not all terrorists are after Americans

3. Religious terrorists can find a way to justify anything using their book of choice.

Agree w/ 3. Regarding 1 & 2, I may be somewhat provincial, but is there a non-religious group who has it in for the Chinese?

edit: ... especially one that is capable of this operation and not interested in publicizing their involvement in doing so.

The Tibetans.

This is a plot by a group of violent fundamentalist Buddhist terrorists.

Genius.

Uighur separatists? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack

Note that there was a 'terrorist attack' in China a week or two earlier, in which five Uighur separatists with knives killed 30 random people and wounded hundreds in a crowded train station, before being shot by police. This shows that there are definitely 'terrorists' (not using the scare quotes because I necessarily disagree that they're terrorists, only because I honestly don't know what they are) who are interested in killing large numbers of Chinese people in the name of their cause.

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