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Comment by fnsa | Hacker News Reader

A theory is that the cargo area of the plane contained valuable goods: gold, silver, diamonds, etc and that's what the hijackers were after.

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.

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No one in their right mind would attempt to transport 25 tons of gold on a commercial passenger flight.

How do you transport 25 tons of gold across land and sea?

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.

Yes, but Malaysia PM said there's only mangosteens in the cargo.

Tomorrow's headline: no mangosteens in cargo.

And then we'll have conspiracy theories about what happened to the mangosteens en-route.

Insurance companies have insurance as well. It's a long chain of interlinked companies.

You'd probably charter a cargo airliner with armed security. And send maybe less than 25 tons of gold per flight.

It does happen, security by obscurity is actually quite prevalent outside of Infosec: if nobody knows it's there how can it be stolen?

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.

agree, something very valuable was on that flight, whether it was a person/people or the cargo.

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.

1. Do you have any idea how many seats are typically blocked out on this route for Malaysia to China flights? This might happen on dozens of flights every day, so please provide some proof if 50 blocked-out seats is unusual.

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?

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