Hacker News Reader

Comment by nashequilibrium | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com