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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?