Malaysia Airlines MH370

.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/07/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane-missing/index.html

Search and rescue teams already deployed

I'm heading back to KL tonight and while I'm not particularly worried about my own flight (at least, no more than usual), this doesn't look good at all. :( missing for just about ten hours now.

The thing that weirds me out is that apart from a brief passage over the South China Sea, the plane should be flying mostly over land.... It doesn't seem like there's anywhere along the route where it might have went down without being detected?

Yeah the only thing I'm willing to believe is that the plane was over the ocean at its last reported location, before it stopped transmitting

Yep, that's the only part that's been confirmed... It was travelling at cruising altitude in good weather, so it's really unclear what happened after that.

yeah this is horrifying, how can it just disappear?

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/6013600/

http://my.news.yahoo.com/mas-aircraft-goes-missing--says-airline-023820132.html

UPDATE [12:37]: Tuoi Tre, a leading daily in Vietnam, reports that the Vietnamese Navy has confirmed the plane crashed into the ocean. According to Navy Admiral Ngo Van Phat, Commander of the Region 5, military radar recorded that the plane crashed into the sea at a location 153 miles South of Phu Quoc island.

Oh god, probably my #1 nightmare way to die. Because you have all those minutes (as the plane descends) to contemplate your imminent death upon the deep dark sea. Shudder, shudder, shudder.

oh man :(

WSJ already running a story about the financial implications to Malaysia Airlines that will result from this

I'm gonna go throw up

PEK has released passenger manifests

I fly over the ocean a lot, and always feel some anxiety, so these (extremely, extremely rare) events chill me to the bone.

(I feel bad that my reaction here is so self-centered. Pity-- thinking of the passengers and their loved ones-- outstrips fear, by far by far, in this situation, but words are much less apt to express the former. There are no words.)

I usually feel more "reassured" (or less terrible unease) when these things are due to pilot error rather than random mechanical failure... not exactly sure why. (Less vicarious sense of helplessness?) Though I guess often it's a combination (in varying proportions) of the two.

MAS still hasn't made an official announcement yet, but they're holding pressers every two hours so prob just a matter of time. :(

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/08/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140308

Three hours later and everybody is still relying on the secondhand report from Tuổi Trẻ

had to run a report to see if any of our clients were on that service :(

no use guessing what happened at this stage, just shocked this happened to MH and to a Boeing 777

http://news.zing.vn/Phat-hien-dau-loang-cot-khoi-nghi-cua-Boeing-mat-tich-post397765.html#home_featured.noibat

Apparently a 20km long oil slick was found by the Vietnamese Navy; people at FlyerTalk (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/other-asian-australian-south-pacific-airlines/1558464-mh-370-772-kul-pek-missing-7-mar-2014-search-rescue-activated.html) have calculated that the coordinates given in the article are within ~30 km of the last known location of the plane

"Vietnamese aircraft spots liquid and "rubbish" on surface in overlapping waters of Malaysia and Vietnam, official tells CNN. "

Jesus

Just found out that an old college friend, her sister and her mother was on the flight. Another sister is close friends with my brother and she's devastated right now. Argh this is so so so fucked.

Fucking hell, Roz

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight.html?emc=edit_na_20140308&nlid=15444095&_r=1

NYT confirming the reports of the oil slick. Guess it's a foregone conclusion by this point

this is completely terrifying

As disturbing as this is, is it a rarer occurrence than it used to be? In my childhood and young adulthood, I remember crashes happened seemingly all the time. Maybe they still do and they get buried by other news, but air travel has to be safer now than it was even just 15-20 years ago.

They are currently on the 13th series of Air Crash Investigation and they still haven't run of air crash incidents, so that is a hell of a lot of crashes :(

odd but maybe nothing:

In a development that raised fears of foul play, investigators said they were looking into reports that two men — one Italian, the other Austrian — whose names were identical to those listed on the plane’s passenger manifest, had reported their passports stolen.

The Italian citizen, Luigi Maraldi, told news organizations in his country that his passport had been stolen while he was in Asia, that he is currently in Bangkok and that he was is not the Luigi Maraldi listed on the plane’s manifest. The Austrian Foreign Ministry said, according to news accounts, that the one of its citizens, Christian Kozel, 30, reported that his passport was stolen two years ago in Thailand.

the false-optimistic rumors and reports that were running rampant yesterday (ie, "towers just received a signal from the plane! we heard it may have landed at an alternate location") have to be the worst for these fearful families. Looks bleak at this point, sadly.

As disturbing as this is, is it a rarer occurrence than it used to be?

Depends where you are in the world from what I can tell, and also what airlines. The huge, terrifying series of American air crashes in the late seventies and early to mid eighties have always given me some pause since I grew up with them -- for a while there it seemed like there was one big one every year or more, and the PSA Flight 182 disaster in San Diego occurred while I was there in third grade. Things fell off from there, but there have been plenty of notable commuter/local route air crashes in the last decade alone, and it's fairly well documented that pilots run crazy long shifts for comparatively low pay (one reason I liked that Sully pilot with the 2009 Hudson river landing is that he pretty much immediately used his public fame to say "Guys, things are REALLY fucked on that front.").

As Ask The Pilot points out (can't find the exact post, but it's there somewhere), the Asiana crash in SF last year was the first crash-with-fatalities of an airliner in the US since 2001. Considering there are around 30,000 flights/day worldwide, crash stats are still insanely low (but yeah, they were higher in the 70s/80s -- 1985 still stands as the worst year on record).

I do worry about fatigue/low pay (something else ATP talks about) -- pilots on regional carriers start at something like $14k/year. iirc, fatigue was one of the factors in the Colgan Air crash outside Buffalo a few years ago. And Sully OTM.

Besides that there was that comair crash in Kentucky and then there was a crash in buffalo iirc but that's it.

flying is still the safest means of travel, it's just that...when something goes wrong, the odds of still being alive afterwards are much worse. you can survive a car wreck. very difficult to survive a plane crash. and if the death isn't instant...very painful.

not to be grotesque, it's just...one of those things where although the probabilities side with your safety, the lows are that much lower if you're that .01%.

Wasn't there a study showing that most air crashes are actually pretty survivable as well? Like some large percentage of crash victims are not fatalities?

when I saw the video of that asiana air crash I was stunned that only a couple people died (and only one bc of the crash!)

yeah and before yesterday, Msia Airlines had had only two fatal crashes in 40 years of operations, one of which was a hijacking. It's a pretty impressive record, considering they run about 120,000 flights a year... whatever the problems MAS has with financial management (and there have been MANY, no thanks to govt/political interference) have never extended to its flight operations.

what constitutes a 'large percentage'?

Very early to speculate, but was reminded of the crash of Air France 447 and Adam Air 574

The MA 777 was damaged in a runway collision two years ago. I'm wondering if there was more damage that was undetected during the repairs.

http://www.examiner.com/article/two-wide-body-jets-collide-at-shanghai-pudong-airport-damaging-both-planes

The China Eastern Airbus was waiting to take off when a wing of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 bumped the left elevator on the tail of the Airbus. Both aircraft received damage that prevented them from continuing their flights.

The top portion of the wing of the Malaysia Airlines plane was broken off and dangled on the tail of the China Eastern Airbus, according to pictures posted by passengers on the Internet.

i had a frightening conversation with a friend's father, an aerospace engineer, not too long ago. basically i'm never going to fly on a south american airline.

(lots of REALLY outdated planes flying out there with false credentials apparently)

ok what

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/air-force-chief-malaysia-jet-may-have-turned-back

It looks like the two people on false passports were traveling together.

Two people who traveled on the missing Malaysian Airlines flight under the passports of an Italian and an Austrian citizen appear to have bought their tickets together.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/09/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?c=homepage-t

That's fucked up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587

^^ Does anybody remember this at all?? I literally have no recollection of this

Conspiracy theorists will point to the ticket purchase + majority Chinese passenger list + recent incident in Kunming, obviously

http://news.asiaone.com/news/relax/pilot-i-established-contact-plane

^ Pilot ahead of MH370 claims to have established contact with the plane

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/malaysia-airlines-plane-accident-flight-mh370-stolen-passport/1/347505.html

Apparently two more passengers in addition to the two above used stolen passports, for a total of four

The transport minister seems to have clarified that it is just two passengers they are looking at.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587

^^ Does anybody remember this at all?? I literally have no recollection of this

Yeah, I definitely remember it. Coming so soon after 9/11, people were (understandably) freaking out about it possibly being another attack. Those fears were quashed early on in the investigation, iirc.

(I had a crippling fear of flying, and the 1-2 of 9/11 and flight 587 kept me from flying for at least another year.)

Artist friend said on FB that there was a delegation of 29 Chinese visual artists on the flight.

Yeah, Dayo I remember the 2001 crash is Queens really vividly too. It was awful.

Yeah, coming so soon after 9/11, the Queens crash was a major scare. There was also this incident around the same time which just added to my general unease about flying:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linate_Airport_disaster

queens crash i remember mainly for the odd sense of relief that accompanied it, finally a 'normal' plane crash, in my head i think i use it as a marker of that weird hysterical rumors and panic post-9/11 period, when everyone was worried about crop dusters.

(I had a crippling fear of flying, and the 1-2 of 9/11 and flight 587 kept me from flying for at least another year.)

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Sunday, March 9, 2014 6:24 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i STILL Have a hard time flying based on that era

Interview with Patrick Smith (Ask The Pilot), basically saying "we don't know, so the media should stop speculating" and "flying is still unbelievably safe":
http://globalnews.ca/video/1196335/interview-pilot-patrick-smith-comments-on-missing-malaysian-plane

(note framed photo of Bob Mould in the background)

The Queens crash terrified me as it happened two days before I flew to New York for the first time for my honeymoon (which we had booked in August and came pretty close to canceling in September ).

The transport minister seems to have clarified that it is just two passengers they are looking at.

lol yeah, this fucking guy. -_- He's kind of the face of incompetence over here - getting basic facts wrong is pretty much his MO.

This has completely taken over my timeline btw, seems like almost everyone I know either knew someone on the plane, or knew others who did. I live in Subang, which was where Malaysia's international airport was based at before it moved to its current location, so lots of families here were/are in the aviation industry. My dad was a pilot and many of the people I grew up with went on to become pilots or flight attendants - it's hit home pretty hard.

Roz, that's horrible, I'm sorry :(

I flew out of KLIA this past summer, with my friend, who has traveled all over Asia and is resolute in his belief that KLIA is the worst airport he's ever been to - this stems from an incident in which his flight was delayed 8 hours (in one hour increments), while he was dealing with a pretty bad hangover... When we flew out our flight was delayed by an hour and my friend went "Ugnhhghh here we go again" but luckily it didn't get delayed again

The more I read about AA 537 the more I wonder how the hell could I have forgotten about this - 200+ people dying, and it crashed into a frikkin neighborhood! I think I must have been too preoccupied with 9/11 at the time

So weird how one's childhood memories can be centered around airline disasters - I still remember TWA 800 pretty vividly

M

My most vivid memory of AA 587 was how this firefighter at the 9/11 benefit concert weeks before the crash had called out Osama w/something like "this is my face and I live in rockaway, bitch!" (It was sort of the big takeaway from the concert that a lot of ppl had) and then the crash happened and it was a bit too on the nose for comfort.

Still nothing at all...and that's becoming increasingly bizarre. IIRC by this time with the Air France crash, for instance, they'd found clear/confirmed signs of debris, and that was the fricking middle of the Atlantic.

Lots of strange theories circulating about mobile phones still ringing when dialed but no official confirmation.

the plane is in my house
but don't tell no one

i checked greatdreams.com but there's no theory posted yet

Here is exactly what Rahman said about the appearance of the passengers on the stolen passports.

“It is confirmed now that they are not Asian looking men,” he said.

A reporter asked Rahman to say “roughly” what they looked like. He replied “Do you know a footballer by the name of Balotelli [using an approximate pronunciation of the name]”.

Reporters shouted the the name Balotelli, pronouncing the name footballer’s name correctly. Rahman corrected his initially pronunciation, and said: “Balotelli, yes”.

Still nothing at all...and that's becoming increasingly bizarre. IIRC by this time with the Air France crash, for instance, they'd found clear/confirmed signs of debris, and that was the fricking middle of the Atlantic.

― Ned Raggett, Monday, March 10, 2014 9:30 AM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

One possibility (out of many) is that it may never be solved, as Patrick Smith notes:

We will probably learn the full and sad story of Malaysia flight 370, but the possibility exists that we won’t. Much of what happened to Air France 447 still remains shrouded in mystery. Or consider the crash of a South African Airways 747 into the Indian Ocean back in 1987. Investigators believe that a cargo fire was responsible, but officially the disaster remains unsolved, the wreckage having fallen into thousands of feet of water, the bulk it never recovered.

http://www.thehardtackle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/balotellicthefirstpostdotcodotuk.jpg

Insane to me that anyone can get on a flight with a stolen passport. Not faked, but stolen. Didn't the people they belonged to report their theft immediately, especially since it seems their loss apparently caused them to miss a flight? WTF?

Fake passports are generally stolen, aren't they? You just replace the photo.

I assumed it was really rare but the girl who sits next to me at work laughed at my naivete and said that she knows three people who could knock one up that was good enough to fool UK immigration for about £1000. We occasionally see them used as ID in my line of work.

But they scan them, don't they? The number has to be legit. So wouldn't it come up stolen?

Related to that:

Booking information accessed through the KLM Web site showed that the passengers using the passports had adjacent ticket numbers and that both were booked on a subsequent flight from Beijing to Amsterdam. One, traveling under Maraldi’s name, was to continue to Copenhagen and the other to Frankfurt, Germany. Their itineraries were separately confirmed by an employee of China Southern Airlines, which was a code-share partner on the flights and sold them the tickets.

Nevertheless, Interpol statistics show that 39 million passports were lost or stolen as of the end of last year, and experts said travelers in Asia often use stolen documents. The international police agency expressed frustration Sunday that few of its 190 member countries “systematically” searched the database to determine whether documents being used to board a plane are listed as lost or stolen.

39 million? That'll do it.

I think it would depend on which database was being used to check. I would assume that if you tried to get into Austria on a stolen Austrian passport it would get flagged but if you went from Malaysia to China on an Austrian passport stolen in Thailand it might not show up. You'd have to have one database for every passport ever issued around the world.

Or one database for all reported stolen?

That might be more sensible. Any system short of biometric passports linked to a central database with online photo-identification is going to be a long way from foolproof though.

39 million lost or stolen passports?!

This database already exists, per Reuters:

Interpol maintains a vast database of more than 40 million lost and stolen travel documents, and has long urged member countries to make greater use of it to stop people crossing borders on false papers. Few countries systematically do so, it said in a statement

Lots of strange theories circulating about mobile phones still ringing when dialed but no official confirmation.

Spooky!

on saturday, after i first heard about her being on the plane, I tried calling my friend even though I knew there'd be no ringing tone. There wasn't. :( :(

Here is exactly what Rahman said about the appearance of the passengers on the stolen passports.

“It is confirmed now that they are not Asian looking men,” he said.

A reporter asked Rahman to say “roughly” what they looked like. He replied “Do you know a footballer by the name of Balotelli [using an approximate pronunciation of the name]”.

Reporters shouted the the name Balotelli, pronouncing the name footballer’s name correctly. Rahman corrected his initially pronunciation, and said: “Balotelli, yes”.

― Thanks in anticipation of your opinions (nakhchivan), Monday, March 10, 2014 9:50 PM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

should've heard my entire newsroom groan at this. The follow-up question, btw: "are you saying that he was an African?"

The thing is, the Gulf of Thailand is I think, a couple hundred feet deep at max - it's not the Atlantic Ocean... average depth is just not that deep

I was talking to someone at dinner who's kind of into this stuff, and he says that 50% of the inquiries made into the Interpol database come from three countries - UK, US, and some other country. Apparently it's still really easy to travel on a stolen passport in, at least, SE Asia, without triggering off any alarms or anything

There was a snippet somewhere (Guardian?) saying that after a plane crash in India a while back, 10 passengers were found to have had false passports.

Yeah i was wondering whether this was less a possible link to anything sinister and more a 'welp a lot of ppl travel on stolen passports eh'

I do the majority of my travels under a stolen Irish passport tbrr

daniel o'dayo

So are these just all horrible criminals or common people simply (naively) trying to circumvent fees and stuff? Because someone still has to come up with money to buy the ticket, right? Unless they're, um, stolen too. Anyway, I always thought of passports as key to security (as such) so it's disheartening and almost hard to believe passports offer little in the way of reassurance. Really, you'd think people attempting to but unable to get a visa or get on a flight because they lack a valid passport would be the biggest red flag of all, and I would have hoped their solution wasn't as simple as "oh, I know a dude who can get you a stolen passport." That seems several magnitudes greater than getting a fake ID to drink underage.

Shhhh

More spooky!

Adding another wrinkle to the case, the Wall Street Journal reports that airliners "such as the Malaysian jet also carry emergency beacons to transmit the aircraft's location in the event of a mishap so that rescue teams can reach the site."

These beacons, called emergency locator devices, are activated by impact on land or water, along with other emergency communications equipment. Malaysia's aviation regulator said no signals were received from flight MH370's beacon.

Xps, most people who can't get a visa aren't criminals, they're people who are perceived as likely to want to settle in the destination country. If you're Nigerian, living in Malaysia or Thailand temporarily and want to see family in Europe, a fake passport is probably one of the easier ways. I've known teachers coming to conferences get denied visas for a brief stay because they are considered from 'high risk' immigration countries.

UK, US, and some other country.

The other country is Australia. It's actually the airlines that do the checks for flights to/from those countries either because it is mandated of (in the case of the UK) the airline gets heavily fined for bringing someone to immigration without proper documentation.

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/analysis-sabotage-most-common-factor-in-en-route-accidents-396830/

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/03/10/malaysia_airlines_passports_travel_agent_says_tickets_for_men_traveling.html

da-da-da!

what does that sound effect mean?

sorry, corny comment on fabricated espionage/international drama angle

i read it as the sound when link finds the map or compass or key in a chest.

-- people moving esp into china from a southeast asian country on a fraudulent or stolen passport isn't shocking at all. the flight also doesn't seem like a serious terrorist target, originating in a muslim state and landing in china. it's not at the top of my list for potential causes.

-- the talk of xinjiang-related terrorism and mentioning the kunming attack is crazy, too, i think, and shows a lack of understanding of the situation of xinjiang separatist or even islamist or whatever terrorism in china.

Good summary so far: http://theaviationist.com/2014/03/11/mh370-known-unknown-facts/

One of the people on a stolen passport was an Iranian kid who wanted to migrate to Europe.

http://i.imgur.com/T254OOk.jpg

Not a great resemblance to Balotelli, tbh.

IIRC, Iranians don't need visas to get into Malaysia so it's a popular transport hub to Europe for illegal migrants.

guy on the left maybe Ronaldo-ish

nearly punched a student in the pub last night giving out the most whitebread blatherwitted bollocks about this to his friends re: Malaysia

The other country is Australia

Yep, this. I used to work at the passport office/DFAT. We were extremely thorough about this stuff and our passports use the 2 row digital code and all the fancy new watermarked plastic and such, but I guess if there's a ton of countries not even bothering to crosscheck these things on an Interpol database, kind of whats the point?

I'd assume, as it appears is the case here, a large majority of these are for immigration purposes. And then possibly trafficking of people and/or parents spiriting kids away from ex partners (based on my experience seeing this stuff in action anyway)

Yeah the more details that come out about the stolen passports the less credence I give (if I gave any at all) to that angle being related to terrorism

Elvis' link OTM in that the only reason it's even in play at all is because we literally know absolutely nothing about what happened

the other country is uae wrt interpol passport database

i agree the stolen passports are most likely a red herring. though i imagine there are a fair few people rubbing their hands in glee at the iranian connection

i think the only reason xinjiang came up was because there was something about one of the artists on board being uyghur and the chinese state media blacking out his name to avoid causing panic? something like that

then there's the five passengers who checked in but didn't fly. i don't fly that often but it's pretty normal to have a number of absentees on flights right?

shit like this chills me to the bone but it's impossible not to want to speculate

The passenger who was a uyghur was actually a CCP official I think

Even the airliners.net folks have run out of steam... One speculation is that the crew became hypoxic - bleurgh...

Reminded of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Air_Flight_574
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_611

Brief article on stolen passports on Radio 4 last night, they said that Spain tried to adopt a system like the US after the Madrid bombing but it was abandoned on the grounds of cost and that no air carrier would support it for fear of it deterring customers.

The US are the only country that takes it really seriously, even in the UK and Aus the check is entirely delegated to air carriers and they take it seriously at they think they have to demonstrate - the US has grounded planes in foreign countries before apparently the federal government weren't happy they had all the details, and they also require it for flights to Mexico and the Caribbean as they are claimed to be US air space.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/11/the-difficulty-and-mystery-of-mh370-search-explained-in-two-graphics/

then there's the five passengers who checked in but didn't fly. i don't fly that often but it's pretty normal to have a number of absentees on flights right?

Police chief now saying that apart from one woman who missed the flight completely, everyone who booked a ticket boarded the plane. No explanation about the five passengers mentioned earlier. I don't even know what to think anymore.

Anyway, once I missed a flight after I checked in early, because I lost track of time reading at the airport cafe and didn't hear them paging for me. Arrived at the gate just in time to see them take my luggage out of the plane. -_- Dumbest and prob the most expensive mistake I've ever made.

Five people doing it at once though... seems kind of unlikely, but I guess it's possible if they were travelling in a group.

i spent about an hour today at work reading wikipedia pages about aviation disasters

yeah I did that yesterday :(

Really don't know much about this stuff but seems like the most plausible explanation so far? http://mh370lost.tumblr.com/post/79214607814/my-recommendation-to-the-ntsb

Wow

a horrifying possibility.

Not a great resemblance to Balotelli, tbh.

Turns out the aviation chief wasn't comparing their looks to Balotelli at all: he was using Balotelli to make a point about race and nationality not being the same thing, re: his "not Asian-looking" comment.

“Do you know a footballer by the name of Bartoli (sic)? He’s an Italian. Do you know what he looks like? Balotelli,” he told reporters late on Monday.
“I don’t want to dwell about this but they (nationality and race) are not the same thing.”

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j4-AFCn1jZNe3jDmr0d6r-ab5B3A?docId=20d66805-865b-428e-9a8a-ea382e9ea846

Roz that is fascinating/scary, but I gotta say that it beats the hell out of all the other ways to die in an airplane that I can think of, just drift off slowly.

I remember watching live coverage of this hypoxic plane on autopilot on TV:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash

was that the payne stewart plane?

yep and from the "Similar Incidents" on that wiki page:

2000 Australia Beechcraft King Air crash
Main article: 2000 Australia Beechcraft King Air crash

On September 4, 2000 a Beechcraft 200 Super King Air departed from Perth, Australia, destined for Leonora, a mining town 370 miles (600 km) away, carrying seven passengers plus the pilot.[13][14] After 22 minutes of flight, the aircraft had passed through its assigned altitude. It was at this point that Air Traffic Control noticed that the pilot's speech had become significantly impaired and he was unable to respond to instructions.[13] Communications continued with the pilot for a further eight minutes before he lapsed into unconsciousness and no sounds of life on board could be heard.[13]

so the plane crashed on camera? jesus

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/11/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

(CNN) -- [Breaking news update at 1:23 p.m. ET]

The Malaysian Air Force has traced the last known location of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 to a spot above Pulau Perak, a very small island in the Straits of Malacca and hundreds of miles from the usual Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight path, according to a senior Malaysian Air Force official. The official declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

If the Malaysian Air Force data cited by the source is correct, the aircraft was flying the opposite direction from its scheduled destination and on the opposite side of the Malay Peninsula from its scheduled route.

which is to say if this is true, that possibility Roz cited seems vv plausible

wow, that is radically off course.

I don't think autopilot would take a plane that far off vector though.

When autopilot disengages the plane would basically go straight down, not loop back in a reverse direction hundreds of miles off course.

maybe it's possible that the pilot attempted to turn it around manually and then engaged autopilot at some point, not due to any logical reason but due to disorientation due to lack of oxygen? cf "mumbling" and what not.

i'm no pilot obv.

what a crazy story.

The pilot would need to report/radio any change of course before taking it off vector. That type of drastic redirection is simply not something you do without telling anyone. Even in dire, dire, dire aircraft emergencies, the pilot or co-pilot is constantly monitoring and reporting over the radio even in the black. They were not in the black though, there are several dozens of air traffic control stations/airports across Northern Malaysia, Southern Thailand and Southern Vietnam.

Crazy indeed.

This is starting to seem a lot more like hijacking - either by passengers or with collusion of one or more of the crew. Turning off the transponder, flying below radar in the opposite direction of planned route...

Meanwhile this sounds weird.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/Airline-probing-report-2-visited-cockpit-in-2011-5306680.php

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140311134342-flight-course-00001224-story-top.jpg

Meanwhile this sounds weird.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/Airline-probing-report-2-visited-cockpit-in-2011-5306680.php

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, March 11, 2014 2:20 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/03/11/article-2578146-1C31386700000578-612_634x382.jpg

player's ball

is that Samantha Fox in the middle?

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140311134342-flight-course-00001224-story-top.jpg

― christmas candy bar (al leong), Tuesday, March 11, 2014 2:22 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

based on this it seems likely that they decided to turn back to kuala lampur but lost control of the plane for some reason after that?

why is the new radar info/location just being released

According to the Malaysian Air Force official, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media

777 Passenger Oxygen masks do not deploy until cabin altitude reaches 13,500. Passengers were likely already unconscious by then, if it was a slow decompression

uh, no. you might get oxygen sickness but you are not unconscious. la paz is at 13,300 ft.

ha i meant altitude sickness

Okay the NYT story right now suggests MASS confusion:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/world/asia/malaysia-jet.html

Which Roz has already mentioned, but now, even more so?

people making LOST jokes about this are the worst.

is this perhaps another instance of a pilot intentionally downing a plane? though generally when that happens it's more sudden because the crew offers interference. terrorism seems to be out. this is seriously crazy. the hypoxia theory did seem good but doesn't seem to jive with the course correction they did make.

my guess is now that the territories are expanding they'll find out soon. the contradictions, while not exactly unusual in a disaster situation, are so numerous that it's hard to have a handle of what is and isn't.

all the different agencies working on this seem to have contradicting information but none of them are communicating to each other about it. :/

Just read something that said the slow decompression theory could not have happened because the plane was not fitted with the "SATCOM antenna adapter" mentioned in the Tumblr piece.

This is starting to seem a lot more like hijacking - either by passengers or with collusion of one or more of the crew. Turning off the transponder, flying below radar in the opposite direction of planned route...

― o. nate, Tuesday, March 11, 2014 11:17 AM (1 hour ago)

:-(

This is starting to seem a lot more like hijacking - either by passengers or with collusion of one or more of the crew. Turning off the transponder, flying below radar in the opposite direction of planned route...
― o. nate, Tuesday, March 11, 2014 11:17 AM (1 hour ago)

just playing devil's advocate here but if you hijacked a plane, you wouldn't actually have to do any of this stuff right? you could just take over the plane and crash it into the sea immediately. why bother going thru the hassle of making the plane undetectable and flying miles off course

it would seem odd to just hijack and plane and intentionally crash it immediately, right? i feel like if it was a political hijacking they'd be trying for a 9/11 repeat. possible outlandish theory: it was hijacked and it was turning around to head back to kuala lumpur but didn't make it and in fact went way off course (either by crew interference/misdirection or by hijacker incompetence?)

Most hijackers don't try to crash planes.

I mean, hijacking is rare these days but it's usually people wanting to be flown somewhere weird, claim asylum or extort money.

Crashing a plane usually indicates a failed hijacking. Using planes as missiles is... not common.

Yeah, the hijacking scenario only seems to work if you imagine the hijacker(s) had some intention other than immediately crashing the plane and then something happened to interrupt their plans, either an accident or some kind of struggle.

if this is terrorism the group responsible needs a new publicist

The redirected flightpath shown in the NYT graphic suggests that MH370 would have passed very close to the Royal Malaysian Air Force Academy and Training Centers near Aloh Setar & Ipoh on it's way into the Strait of Malacca.

Also, that flight path suggests the 777 would have entered Hat Yai's airspace, a major international airport in southern Thailand.

It was reported that the last communication with the plane was by a private pilot deep into Vietnam airspace on his way to Japan? (ie, extremely far from the Strait of Malacca).

The hypoxia-related Helios #522 crash in 2005 is super-unsettling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

Air Crash Investigations episode on the crash: http://youtu.be/HLN5D4lOlos

Yeah terrorism doesnt jibe with me. Whats the point if no one knows what happened, and (it seems) no one's claimed responsibility?

As to:
Meanwhile this sounds weird.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/Airline-probing-report-2-visited-cockpit-in-2011-5306680.php

I'd suggest ignoring this. A Current Affair is a trashbloid show with about as much rigor as Fox News.

Still, there is the photo.

lol we had (maybe have?) a current affair here. alot of this stuff - passports, passengers that didn't board - seems like real blind alleys. at some point something about some of the passengers will become known and ppl will give it significance only cuz it's a new piece of information where information is lacking. airplane crashes can take forever to get figured out even when they know pretty quickly what happened on a basic level to the plane (even when it crashes on land) and ppl hate not knowing everything and knowing it immediately so there's gonna be theories conspiracy and otherwise for years to come no matter what sad simple explanation it does ultimately turn out to be. ppl still have theories about the mary celeste.

Man that Helios info is tough to take. They just had to switch the cabin pressurization to auto.

i always wonder about that person they thought they saw trying to regain control of the aircraft just when it became too late

I'm pretty sure all the hypoxic flights listed in this thread:
A) remained at cruising altitude...
B) in an auto-piloted vector (and some into holding patterns at destination!) until crashing...
C) with a constant presence of ATC surveillance and/or scrambled jet pursuit.

MH370 is 0/3 of those criteria as it:
A) descended under civilian radar ceiling of 30k feet ~1 hour into flight
B) took a nearly 180 degree reverse turn just prior to transponders being disabled (manually or via malfunction), travelling several hundred miles off course for ~1 hour
C) went radio silent

A small Malaysian news outlet ran a story that people on the EAST* coast of Malayasiar Peninsula heard jet screaming in the middle of the night:
http://www.thesundaily.my/news/983037

*the opposite side of the Malaysiar Peninsula that current search is being performed.

It is unclear why the contact from the west coast, if correct, was not made public until now. Asked on Monday why crews were searching the strait, the country's civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, told reporters: "There are some things that I can tell you and some things that I can't."

Malaysian officials have given ambiguous, inaccurate and at times directly contradictory information since the aircraft's disappearance, raising concerns among families of the passengers.

Adding to the confusion, Tengku Sariffuddin Tengku Ahmad, a spokesman for the prime minister's office, said in a telephone interview that he had checked with senior military officials, who told him there was no evidence that the plane had recrossed the Malaysian peninsula, only that it may have attempted to turn back.

If that report from Mangar is true, then the plane would have been traveling due east to cross the Peninsular from Marang and end up in Pulau Perak (where the RMAF admitted today they tracked the plane to).

It would have been radically off course to be heading back to KL as some have theorized and instead more in line with Northern Sumatra, Indonesia or even Sri Lanka... and who knows how low the plane would have to be flying to have audible jet screaming noise but it is estimated the plane traveled 350miles/600km after losing contact with ATC.

I know that's a stretch as there could be alternate reasons for loud jet like noises in Marang that happened to coincide with the timeline... nor has the RMAF been upfront with their information.

re: conspiracy theories, yeah, check this part of the Helios wikiw:

Suspicions that the aircraft had been hijacked were ruled out by Greece's foreign ministry. Initial claims that the aircraft was shot down by the fighter jets have been refuted by eyewitnesses and the government.[citation needed]

Malaysia's air force chief has denied an earlier media report that the military last tracked a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner over the Strait of Malacca, far west from where it last made contact with civilian air traffic control when it disappeared four days ago.

I've been following the sprawling flyertalk thread on this and it's crazy that we still have almost no confirmed information of any kind about what might have happened.

An updated version of the last link I posted, which takes into account the latest developments:

http://www.lowyat.net/2014/03/was-there-a-problem-with-the-mh370-boeing-777-200-aircraft/

Possible life raft from missing plane found off of Port Dickson, 100km SOUTH of Kuala Lumpur.

http://www.nst.com.my/latest/font-color-red-missing-mh370-font-hopes-as-fishermen-find-life-raft-near-pd-1.509222

yeah and they lost it, dumbasses. -_- no info yet, but hopefully they'll send divers down to retrieve it soon (that's the paper I work for btw, and our reporter there has already got on a boat out to the location.)

the straits of malacca are notorious for having all kinds of weird crap in it though - won't be surprised if it was a life raft from a boat or a ship. I asked a flight attendant friend and he said he couldn't tell from the pic whether it was something that could have come from a plane.

another dead end :( :(

MALACCA: The life raft found 10 nautical miles from Port Dickson town on Tuesday is not from the missing MH370 aircraft said Kuala Linggi Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) enforcement head, Captain Abu Bakar Idris.

They've clarified the conflicting reports about the east and west coast signals detected:

1. Plane disappeared from air traffic control over the Gulf of Thailand at 1.30 am.
2. An unidentified aircraft, that they believe but can't confirm was MH370, was detected by the military's primary radar at 2.15 am, 200miles north of Penang, indicating the possibility of a turn back. They're currently comparing notes with other agencies including NTSB to determine the aircraft's identification, and continuing the search in the Malacca Straits based on that possibility.

Since nobody knows fuckall about anything I guess it doesn't hurt to post some rumors

http://i.imgur.com/CTuTaCo.jpg

Everyone loves a good yarn

It seems like the Gulf of Thailand has been searched pretty thoroughly by now. Makes it seem more likely that it did veer off course and continued (perhaps on autopilot) for some distance before crashing.

could make sense if it *did* pass through some controlled airspace or another and out of pride or embarrassment the slip up isn't being revealed

Think I found it. Can you?

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-xlarge/18k34qxd52d21jpg.jpg

My understanding is that most commercial traffic control systems by default just display the transponder blips. They have to be manually switched to show raw radar blips. If that's the case and the transponder was switched off, then it wouldn't show up on most commercial flight tracking systems, although presumably military systems should have still caught it.

Apparently Vietnam sent a crew to check out that Vung Tau email lead and didn't find anything:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-11/malaysia-probes-hijack-to-sabotage-terror-not-ruled-out.html

Day 5.

How hard would it be to subpoena the cellular carriers' databases for last pings from the passenger's phones?

i feel like that info would be readily given up by everyone involved if it was deemed worthwhile?

I can't remember, do other countries insist you turn your phone off or put it in airplane mode? Not that everyone does, but that'd mean the last tower contact would be on the runway.

but there's a bunch of repeats of passenger's phones ringing while the plane was in the air, then not ringing a little later. Anecdotal, but still.

I saw an article that suggested only 25% of people turn their phone off or put it in flight mode. The plane may have been fitted with inflight cell service, although that makes it less likely that we're connecting to ground stations. It's worth a try and one might hope the authorities are doing so, but who knows.

I hadn't heard of this. There's an online crowdsourced campaign to tag satellite imagery of the area, though apparently the system is overloaded currently:

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_25327037/tomnod-campaign-missing-malaysian-jet?source=inthenews

A new update but...who knows?

http://gawker.com/the-chinese-government-has-released-satellite-images-sh-1542506193

The Chinese government has released satellite images of three floating pieces of debris that are believed to be from the missing Malaysian Airlines flight. The photos, taken on March 9, show the suspected wreckage in the South China Sea, just southeast of where Flight 370's transponder turned off.

There was a similar crowdsourced search set up on Amazon's Mechanical Turk for Steve Fossett's small plane when he disappeared in the eastern Sierras.

there was also this, which I hadn't heard about until I saw someone mention it in the gawker comments

http://mashable.com/2014/03/12/malaysia-airlines-370-search-area/

ok, this is starting to make a lot more sense than "the plane flew for another hour over multiple air force bases and international airports in two different countries before crashing in a completely different body of water hundreds of miles of course".

there was also this, which I hadn't heard about until I saw someone mention it in the gawker comments

http://mashable.com/2014/03/12/malaysia-airlines-370-search-area/

― christmas candy bar (al leong), Wednesday, March 12, 2014 2:36 PM (33 minutes ago)

it was posted in img form upthread about 10 hours ago.

*shrug*

*killfiled*

ahh i was looking on my iphone, didn't see it.

also sorry, i can't tell if you were killfiling me for that transgression or implying i had killfiled my homie 龜 who previously posted it. the latter isn't correct, he's my bro 4 life, i just wanted to assure him of that.

What, did I just hear something? Hmmm... strange.

.

.

.

lol

:)

i feel like i just got the death penalty for jaywalking

Ugh so if the Chinese satellite's photos are correct, I (think) that would put the wreckage right at the border between the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand

That puts a cloud of geopolitics over the incident - right now China's involved in a geopolitical dispute with pretty much all the SE Asia countries over who has control of the South China Sea (google "China nine dash line" for more infos)

I don't know if anybody would go so far as to accuse the Chinese government of withholding information but at the same time... I think this could be an angle?

I guess an explanation that is just as possible is taking some time to figure out whether pieces of wreckage that big could have come from a 777, which the NTSB seems to believe is not possible

i overheard a couple of people talking today how they suspected north korea might have shot the plane down since "they were flying right over north korea."

:/

Haha that's insane and stupid

But not that far fetched if they had been a little bit farther north http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/05/world/asia/north-korea-missiles/

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/search-for-missing-malaysian-airliner-latest-possible-lead-may-be-falling-through/

Search planes dispatched by Malaysia on Thursday to examine an area where Chinese satellite images show what might be debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner didn't spot any debris, CBS News has been told.

The planes had "nil sighting," the Malaysian air force director of operations said.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304914904579434653903086282

WSJ reporting that US officials believe the plane could have flown for 4 more hours after contact was lost

Aviation investigators and national security officials believe the plane flew for a total of five hours, based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing Co. 777's engines as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program.

I can't tell from the story if this is a confirmed fact or another theory

you'd think that landing,crashing, or fuel exhaustion would be discernible from that data

that article says the engine data is transmitted every 30 minutes. so if they have that data they'd know when the plane stopped transmitting (within half an hour) right? the article is kinda vague there.

Raids on homes of crew denied

Hussien’s sixth point was deny reports of raids on the homes of crew members.

Reports suggesting that the Malaysian police searched the homes of the MH370 crew are not true. The Royal Malaysian police have issued a statement to that effect.

Not sure why they are so quick to deny that, I would have thought it was a legitimate line of enquiry in relation to possible suicide or malpractice by the crew.

They also denied the WSJ's report that the plane may have flown for a few hours after losing contact

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/world/asia/missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-370.html?hp&_r=0

SEPANG, Malaysia — After four days of reticence and evasive answers, the Malaysian military acknowledged on Wednesday that it had recorded, but initially ignored, radar signals that could have prompted a mission to intercept and track a missing jetliner — data that vastly expands the area where the plane might have traveled.

More informed speculation about what might cause a transponder to stop transmitting:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/12/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-transponder/

a few more details on the Indian Ocean theory

http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=22894802&ref=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FKB1J9l4sPE

U.S. officials have an "indication" the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner may have crashed in the Indian Ocean and is moving the USS Kidd to the area to begin searching.

It will take another 24 hours to move the ship into position, a senior Pentagon official told ABC News.

"We have an indication the plane went down in the Indian Ocean," the senior official said.

The official said there were indications that the plane flew four or five hours after disappearing from radar and that they believe it went into the water.

Pentagon officials said that the USS Kidd was being moved at the request of Malaysia and is heading towards an area where the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea meet. It has helicopters aboard that can scour the area.

Ok, so now we're back to where we were 2 days ago with a hijacking/hypoxia scenarios?

Also noted: the three large chunks of debris spotted by Chinese satellites yesterday that was consistent with an aircraft disaster was confirmed as not-wreckage (floating islands of garbage?)

i'm just assuming the plane is in antarctica

Probably should check out nearby volcanic islands for secret SPECTRE rocket bases also.

WSJ has corrected their story:

"U.S. investigators suspect Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 flew for hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, based on an analysis of signals sent through the plane's satellite-communication link designed to automatically transmit the status of onboard systems, according to people familiar with the matter. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said investigators based their suspicions on signals from monitoring systems embedded in the plane's Rolls-Royce PLC engines and described that process."

This would jibe with the "indications" that are leading US to shift search area to Indian Ocean.

¯\(°_o)/¯

welp

So, to summarize, what we know one week later is that a plane is missing, and by golly, someone's got to find it.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EuzXbndPNK0/UHmcXvjLJ7I/AAAAAAAAJm8/lbkyQsksTqw/s640/One+of+Our+Aircraft+Is+Missing+%5B1942.jpg

Btw, great place to nerd out on pilot jargon, technical lore and latest-breaking informed speculation:

http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/535538-malaysian-airlines-mh370-contact-lost-147.html

Great link!

does this help?

http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/5321ea30eab8ea0e51537934-909-682/unnamed-79.jpg

this is all so depressing b/c for all the heated debate about where the plane might have crashed, it seems a certainty that it did and that everyone on it has died.

yeah, I was holding out hope at least for the first day or so that maybe they survived and just had no cell phone access but their deaths seem a foregone conclusion now, sadly. a silver lining will at least be some closure for the families, but my guess is there are no survivors. still...who knows.

just saw my first FB friend say she thinks this is a gov't conspiracy/cover up, the humorous thing being that she thinks it happened before the crash, ie they were involved. O.....k. Though something has to be said for the way the Malaysian gov't and military have at times obfuscated details.

(though that points to ineptitude, not conspiracy)

Though something has to be said for the way the Malaysian gov't and military have at times obfuscated details.

They probably

1) haven't handled a crash of an internationally-bound passenger jet for a long time, if ever

2) probably aren't used to handling things with a lot of transparency

This is tacky and tasteless but may help diffuse the ridiculous frustration of losing a plane in the NSA/Big Brother age.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiouXtOCAAEcPTI.jpg

^^^Caption: Malaysian Airlines Expands Investigation To Include General Scope Of Space, Time (c) The Onion

shouldn't the plane be inside the cones? because it looks like it's violated the space-time continuum.

It should also resemble a DeLorean more closely

DEVIL'S ADVOCATE TIME!:

Just because the engines were sending out pings, does that mean that the aircraft was in flight? Say the plane went down and the fuel lines and power were not damaged, the engines could still be running, yes?*

*source: LOST season 1 pilot episode.

And then I see this:
https://twitter.com/han_horan/status/444240397427306496

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/for/4370884298.html

It seems to be that the only (admittedly implausible) theory with no contradictions is that the plane landed somewhere and they're hiding it in a hangar, or somewhere else. Why is no one seriously discussing this possibility?

...could be an abandoned airport?

cos there's no way that happened

why?

bc when you hijack a plane it's generally bc you want everyone to know about it

xpost - what of what we know for sure would completely disprove that possibility?

daaavid

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/13/mh370_disappearance_could_the_missing_malaysia_airlines_plane_have_been.html

granted they could be in a place without reception or many of their batteries may have died but I would think someone would have been able to get in contact w/ someone if they had indeed landed elsewhere. Unless they were being held hostage, but being held hostage generally involves notifying the government that you have hostages in exchange for demands.

plus there's nothing to suggest it happened, and they're dealing with what is known, which is admittedly not much.

WSJ still sticking to its story that the plane was sending pings in real time for 5+ hours http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/14/malaysian-airlines-jet-left-data-trail-for-hours-after-disappearing/?mod=WSJBlog

xxxpost *generally* ...but we have no idea what would the people who did this (if it was the case) had in mind.

xpost - what of what we know for sure would completely disprove that possibility?

― daavid, Thursday, March 13, 2014 11:53 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the lack of any supporting proof that it happened! there's nothing, no evidence or anything, to support such a theory, currently. if and when there is, then it should be investigated.

evidence is they can't find the damn thing!

well nevermind, per dylann's article apparently they ARE looking into it! wow this case.

yeah but not being able to find it doesn't lend credence to any theory we think up, either!

I'm not saying there's evidence that it did happen. I'm saying there seems to be evidence against any other possible scenario.

I mean don't get me wrong, I want these folks to be alive as much as anyone. at this point, I don't even think I can surmise what is known and unknown, given all of the contradictory info.

BTW thanks for that link, dylann

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/malaysian-air-scale/

:/

I read the piece and the only thing that they're saying that would lead to contradicting evidence is that the engine transmission cannot be shut down by the pilot. But they could put the plane inside something that acts as a Faraday cage, right?

...but now looking at the map there seems to be a very good reason for them to not find the plane given the size of the area.

also, what if they purposely chose a flight path (and destination) with no cellphone reception?

so they flew to Wyoming?

Why is everyone looking down? "Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space"

Fallows: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/why-malaysia-airlines-370-remains-so-profoundly-mysterious-and-why-a-better-black-box-wouldnt-help/284407/

http://m.smh.com.au/world/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-may-have-been-deliberately-diverted-to-andaman-islands-20140314-34sp1.html

Smh.com

idk, it would be kinda seriously great if jarawas were behind all this

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00312/109220574_312697c.jpg

landing scenario

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/14/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

And a senior U.S. official on Thursday offered a conflicting account, telling CNN that "there is probably a significant likelihood" the plane is on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

Going out on a limb there, huh, senior U.S. official?

"there is probably a significant likelihood"

This whole thing is (as others have observed) kind of like a twilight zone episode come to life.

I know I know that the LOST references are of bad taste and disrespectful - but damn...

the fact that for a second i considered that this could be a viral marketing stunt gone wrong makes me hate capitalist society and myself

Yeah, that was the bad-taste thought in my head as well. "I hope this isn't some Geico stunt."

http://i.imgur.com/Uv7ZINL.png

wheres david copperfield @

waht

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/21/david-copperfield-s-magical-and-utterly-bizarre-caribbean-island.html

mr veg and I had the most ridiculous argument last night - he said that the plane was going to show up in two pieces on an island in hawaii or in a hollowed out volcano like blofeld's lair, and I said that maybe it went through a wormhole and was going to show up at Pearl Harbor in WWII like Final Countdown, and he was all that's ridiculous a jet would get shot down within minutes of getting there blah blah blah why would that even be a thing that was happened and I was all yeah and your Lost/Bond idea is so plausible

I'm not proud :/

**SPOILER ALERT**
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/410oTNCYf%2BL._SY344_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

**SPOILER ALERT**

http://reading.kingrat.biz/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/millennium.jpg

if we've moved on to the joeks phase of the thread surely this disappearance is langoliers related in some way

They've all been captured by a Japanese TV show and their escape attempts are being broadcast there.

http://chud.com/nextraimages/tzone4.jpg

Well now there's this:

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 experienced significant changes in altitude after it lost contact with ground control, and altered its course more than once as if still under the command of a pilot, American officials and others familiar with the investigation said Friday.

Radar signals recorded by the Malaysian military appear to show the missing airliner climbing to 45,000 feet, above the approved altitude limit for a Boeing 777-200, soon after it disappeared from civilian radar and made a sharp turn to the west, according to a preliminary assessment by a person familiar with the data.

The radar track, which the Malaysian government has not released but says it has provided to the United States and China, then shows the plane descending unevenly to 23,000 feet, below normal cruising levels, as it approached the densely populated island of Penang, one of the country’s largest. There, the plane turned from a southwest-bound course, climbed to a higher altitude and flew northwest over the Strait of Malacca toward the Indian Ocean.

Investigators have also examined data transmitted from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines that shows it descending 40,000 feet in the space of a minute, according to a senior American official briefed on the investigation. But investigators do not believe the readings are accurate because the aircraft would most likely have taken longer to fall such a distance.

“A lot of stock cannot be put in the altitude data” sent from the engines, one official said. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense.”

...

But the Malaysian military radar data, which local authorities have declined to provide to the public, added significant new information about the flight immediately after ground controllers lost contact with it. The combination of altitude changes and at least two significant course corrections could have a variety of explanations, including that a pilot or a hijacker intentionally diverted the plane, or that it flew unevenly without a pilot after the crew became disabled.

The erratic movements of the aircraft after it diverted course and flew over the country also raise questions about why the military did not respond to the flight emergency. Malaysian officials have acknowledged that military radar may have detected the plane, but have said they took no action because it did not appear hostile.

Seven days after the jet’s disappearance, Malaysian authorities have shared few details with American investigators, frustrating senior officials in Washington. “They’re keeping us at a distance,” one of the officials said.

...

Cengiz Turkoglu, a senior lecturer in aeronautical engineering at City University London who specializes in aviation safety, said a deliberate act in the cockpit could cause a radical change in altitude. “It is extremely difficult for an aircraft to physically, however heavy it might be, to free fall,” he said.

An Asia-based pilot of a Boeing 777-200, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to reporters, said an ascent above the plane’s service limit of 43,100 feet, along with a depressurized cabin, could have rendered the passengers and crew unconscious, and could be a deliberate maneuver by a pilot or a hijacker.

Other experts said that altitude changes would be expected if the pilots became disabled after the plane’s autopilot was disengaged. Changes in the weight distribution on the plane as fuel burned off would make the plane descend and climb repeatedly, though changes in course would be harder to explain.

this is such a stressful, weird situation. i can't imagine having a family member on that plane

"Everything so far makes it seem as though someone was controlling the airplane" and attempting to fly it somewhere other than its intended destination, said Robert Francis, another former NTSB member. The longer the search goes on, he said, the less it seems to be "what you would expect from a civil-aviation aircraft in trouble."

Don't you sometimes wish there was some kind of government organisation that secretly spied on everyone? I bet people like them could tell us where it is.

Maybe the pilot flew it into space?

shut the fuck up

Don't you sometimes wish there was some kind of government organisation that secretly spied on everyone? I bet people like them could tell us where it is.

― StanM, Saturday, 15 March 2014 01:24 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the rerouting theories seem to be predicated on someone with advanced avionics knowledge shutting down the systems that those orgs use so all that they have is an unlocated ping to rolls royce or whatever which is impossible to turn off in midair

i'm not really following this story (too horrible and scary to contemplate it; makes me never want to fly, or let my family fly, again). but no-one made cell calls from the plane during its distress? vaguely recall that people made cell calls from the plane on 09.11 when passengers overtook the al qaeda terrorists.

hope none of that sounds glib. not intended to sound that way at all.

there doesn't seem to be any public info about cellphone calls
even assuming they could get signals hundreds of miles from land, localized jamming isn't difficult to achieve

No cell phone reception over the ocean or above a certain height? Sudden decompression or loss of oxygen = no calls either.

And those systems that were turned off at different times could be: first one was someone pushing buttons in a panic + second one was the moment of impact.

The amount of ridiculously uninformed speculation everywhere is baffling but typical of today's 24/7 news cycle.

yeah well everyone going public apart from the malaysian authorities and perhaps the anonymous us govt insider confiding to the associated press is uninformed, and even they seem alternately confused or untrustworthy

there are degrees of expertise in interpreting this freakishly sparse picture though, and the more knowledgable sources seem to be veering to some sort of nontypical human interference (which could include an unorthodox or incompetent pilot response as well as more nefarious things)

And those systems that were turned off at different times could be: first one was someone pushing buttons in a panic + second one was the moment of impact.

About an hour into the flight, the plane's transponders stopped functioning, making it much more difficult for air-traffic control personnel to track or identify it via radar.

The first loss of the jet's transponder, which communicates the jet's position, speed and call sign to air traffic control radar, would require disabling a circuit breaker above and behind an overhead panel.

(wsj)

I still find it so hard to believe that a plane can just vanish like this. Even assuming the tragic worst, you'd think there would be failsafes for the failsafes to ensure a scenario like this one does not occur. Between this and the apparent proliferation of stolen passports, it does not give me faith in international air travel.

how can you not "assume the tragic worst" at this point? i thought the only real issue now was how (and why) it happened.

During the Air France 447 disappearance, a lot of the ATC folks were making the point that when you're out over the open ocean radar coverage is spotty at best. I'm still hoping that between AF447 and MH370 we'll get some sort of real-time satellite telemetry system working.

That would cost a lot of money for what are, though tragic for all involved obv., still increasingly rare events.

Between this and the apparent proliferation of stolen passports, it does not give me faith in international air travel.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, March 15, 2014 9:59 AM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

This is just a really stupid thing to say

In Patrick Smith's updates on this, he's made sure to always stress the following:

And as I was saying in my last update, no matter who or what is to blame, we shouldn’t let this latest tragedy overshadow the fact that air travel remains remarkably safe. Worldwide, the trend over the past several years has been one of steady improvement, to the point where last year was the safest in the entire history of commercial aviation. Hopefully their number continues to diminish, but a certain number of accidents will always be inevitable. In some ways, the weirdness of this story speaks to how well we have engineered away what once were the most common causes of crashes. Those that still occur tend to be more mysterious and strange than in decades past (have a look at the year 1985 some time, for an idea of how frequent large-scale air disasters once were).

Yeah I'm gonna quote the swiss-cheese analogy from Fallows:

As I mentioned earlier, airline travel is now so amazingly safe that when something does go wrong, the cause usually turns out be some previously unforeseen triple-whammy combination of bad-luck factors. Air-safety experts refer to this as the "Swiss cheese" factor: the odd cases in which the holes in different slices of Swiss cheese happen to line up exactly, letting the improbable occur.

This is just a really stupid thing to say

Maybe. I just mean that the US is so psycho about this stuff, that I can't imagine a plane just vanishing. As for the passports, well, if that is a thing that often goes down elsewhere ...

US authorities said they were also looking whether lithium batteries in the cargo hold might have overheated and burned into the aircraft's frame

the spreading fire could explian the gradual shutdown of separate electrical systems, although not the 4/5 hours of pings

Flying is the safest way to travel, by far, but also the most spectacular when something goes wrong, hence the disproportionate attention and the success of the endless repeats of shows like Air Crash Investigation, which also seems to make everyone think this happens twice a day.

Fallows again: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/todays-malaysia-airlines-370-news-what-it-means-that-the-plane-apparently-kept-flying/284414/

Latest news sites over here have an anonymous Malaysian government official who says investigators are now certain it was hijacked and that the last received position was about 1600 km west of Australia, where no search is ongoing yet.

But he apparently isn't allowed to oficially speak to the press so this could just as well be more BS.

(over here = Belgium & the Netherlands)

Malaysian pm has now confirmed that based on verified radar data, the plane did indeed turn around back towards the Indian Ocean and that its movements were consistent with the deliberate actions of someone on the plane.

CANNOT imagine being a family member of the passengers right now

they're ending the search in the south china sea and refocusing all efforts on the west side. Plane could have gone two ways... towards the southern end of the indian ocean OR further northwest towards Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan (!!!!!!).

They also confirmed that ACARS was switched off just as the plane reached the Malaysian east coast and that the transponders were switched off shortly after near the border of Vietnam.

this is just so fucking insane

Mohd Najib Tun Razak ‏@NajibRazak 4m
According 2 d new data,the last confirmed communication between the plane&the satellite ws at 8:11AM Msian time on Saturday 8th March

this was exactly around the time I first heard about the plane going missing. it was still in the air...

Incredible. So what was the most implausible of paranoid scenarios is now the inescapable conclusion: this was no accident, but a hijacking, of an unprecedented kind.

The fact that no one has taken credit yet suggests there was or is (intended) to be an Act 2, whatever the fuck that might be. Terrifying mystery.

Maybe the perpetrator(s)' plan didn't count on those 'pings'-- maybe they wanted the world to conclude it was an accident, lost at sea.

But for days now, everyone's been looking for debris in the wrong place. Jesus. Now that plane *must* be found.

If it was hijacked the most plausible explanation is that there was a confrontation leading to a crash or the idiot hijackers accidentally flew it into the sea.

not nec a hijacking tho. coulda been pilot/second officer going nuts

Yeah - what I find most 'suspicious' is that everything happened in the narrow window between leaving Malaysian airspace and entering Vietnamese airspace. Whoever did it obviously also knew the best time to divert the plane, since the rest of the route would have been overland (mostly) through national airspaces

taking hostages/victims is not the only possible intention behind a hijacking btw, whatever the "inescapable conclusion" (please) turns out to be

taking hostages/victims is not the only possible intention behind a hijacking btw

True, at this point there's nothing to go on to conjecture who or why, motives or intentions. All we can conclude, has been concluded by authorities at this point (I believe) is that this was indeed intentional; the plane was intentionally diverted, its path meant to escape detection. All the rest is sheer speculation. Anything's possible-- maybe the pilot just went crazy. Maybe it's an elaborate terrorist plan. Maybe it's piracy.

This hardly seems like a real life event anymore, but a fictional plot. It's an uncanny mystery in a contemporary world that has come to seem, to us living in it, all too "known" (where we assume "everything" is in principle known to or detectable by technologically sophisticated intelligence-gathering powers, for ill and good, governmental and other).

Ok, so is there any chance at all that the plane did not crash?

langoliers

Ok, so is there any chance at all that the plane did not crash?

Don't know about likelihood, but believe that's possible, yes-- at least, nothing so far excludes it.

Last I heard, the plane was flying for 7 hours (!?) after losing contact with air traffic controllers. Could be anywhere.

Unless they landed in the literal middle of nowhere, it'd be amazing if a plane full of hundreds of people could be secretly/successfully landed anywhere, unnoticed. But I guess it's possible it ended up on land somewhere indeed in the middle of nowhere, where no one would even see signs of a crash.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/03/16/world/asia/16flight-map/16flight-map-articleLarge.jpg

The satellite communications box fitted on the plane is of an older generation and is not equipped with a global positioning system, the person said. But investigators have managed to calculate the distance between the “ping” from the plane and a stationary Inmarsat-3 satellite orbiting above the Equator and over the Indian Ocean. The satellite can “see” in an arc that stretches to the north and south of its fixed position, but without GPS it can only say how far away the ping is, not where it is coming from, the person said.

Satellite transmission data analyzed by U.S. investigators showed that the Malaysian Airline (MAS) System Bhd. jetliner’s most likely last-known position was in a zone about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) west of Perth, Australia, said two people in the U.S. government who are familiar with the readings. Razak was told that is the most promising lead on locating the plane, one of the people said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-15/malaysia-sets-new-search-zone-as-flight-deliberately-diverted.html

...I mean, of all places to go.

huh

that would place it somewhere between the periphery of diego garcia and australian military radar coverage, if the aim was to find the deepest and most remote place in the indian ocean to down the plane

those bloomberg quotes seem to based on discounting the northern route hypothesis because military radar coverage is that much denser there rather than anything that positively places it southwards

it sounds like this could have been an apolitical suicide mission. one wonders when the passengers realized something was up (assuming this was in fact something done intentionally by one of the pilots.)

that's a helluvan assumption; perhaps u shd write some speculative fanfiction?

I'm no "fan" of the person or persons who did this, imago

Speculation on how MH370 may have avoided detection by shadowing other airplanes:
http://theaviationist.com/2014/03/15/mh370-shadowed-other-planes/

cf. Miami Vice (2006)

I'm increasingly convinced this was no suicide plot. If, as the latest reports are saying, the pilots were involved, they must have being planning to land that plane somewhere. The only question is whether they succeeded or not.

... and if I had to put money on it, I'd say they did.

none of this makes sense. If this was a suicide mission driven by politics, it would have been faster and easier to just take off and crash the plane into Putrajaya, Malaysia's administrative capital, which is just a 15 min drive away from KLIA. it also doesn't explain why the pilot(s) chose to keep on flying for 7 hours instead of just downing the plane once they reached open ocean.

if it went up north, passing by the airspaces of at least four different countries, why didn't one of those countries notice or investigate an unidentified aircraft flying by? now you're talking about a multinational conspiracy... -someone- must have seen or heard something. it feels like every theory being explored has a counter-explanation rendering it moot.

So what ARE the possibilities if it didn't explode in mid air and crashed at the same spot?

- was hijacked or taken over by crew/captain/someone & crashed somewhere in water, everyone dead (possible survivors probably dead by now)
- was hijacked or taken over by crew/captain/someone & crashed somewhere over land, everyone dead instantly
- was hijacked or taken over by crew/captain/someone & crashed somewhere over land, some still alive
- accidentally shot down & covered up, never to be revealed until accidentally discovered, everyone dead
- purposefully shot down & covered up, never to be revealed until accidentally discovered, everyone dead
- was hijacked and landed somewhere safely, everyone now captured (plane to be sold/used for scrap parts/used for a future attack?)
- was hijacked and landed somewhere safely, everyone now executed (plane to be sold/used for scrap parts/used for a future attack?)

The last four seem to require some preplanning and help from an external party/country/organisation, the first three maybe less so.

Anything else?

Has hypoxia been ruled out? The crew getting confused through lack of oxygen and making strange decisions has been suggested. The fact that none of this makes sense any way you seem to look at it might point to a lack of rational actors.

Hypoxia doesn't explain ACARS and both transponders being turned off at different times, or the aircraft flying low enough to escape radar detection. the plane would have also crashed long before the last satellite contact time of 8.11am.

ok, those also exclude it being shot down imo

a plane flown by someone who is desperate/crazy is much more likely to crash just by accident

They didn't have to do it all manually, the auto pilot just needs to be given new waypoints (which a mere mortal without a pilot's training wouldn't know how to do) - source: a representative from our national airport said this in an interview a couple of days ago.

Yeah, given what we think we know, it seems unlikely whatever happened was the result of some impulsive/irrational hijacker. There's a degree of deliberateness to this, what with turning off the GPS system and whatnot.

And now there's this:

A signaling system was disabled on the missing Malaysia Airlines jet before a pilot spoke to Malaysian air traffic control without hinting at any trouble, a senior Malaysian official said Sunday

Patrick Smith on transponders:

Second, some clarity, please, on the topic of transponders. The media is throwing this term around without a full understanding of how the equipment works. For position reporting and traffic sequencing purposes, transponders only work in areas of typical ATC radar coverage. Most of the world, including the oceans, does not have ATC radar coverage. Transponders are relevant to this story only if and when the missing plane was very close to land. Once over the ocean, it didn’t matter anyway. Over oceans and non-radar areas, OTHER means are used for position reports and tracking/communicating (satcomm, datalink, etc.), not transponders.

Readers also have been asking why the capability exists to switch off a transponder. In fact very few of a plane’s components are hot-wired to be, as you might say, “always on.” In the interest of safety — namely, fire and electrical system protection — it’s important to have the ability to isolate a piece of equipment, either by a standard switch or, if need be, through a circuit breaker. Also transponders will occasionally malfunction and transmit erroneous or incomplete data, at which point a crew will recycle the device — switching it off, then on — or swap to another unit. Typically at least two transponders are onboard, and you can’t run both simultaneously. Bear in mind too that switching the unit “off” might refer to only one of the various subfunctions, or “modes” — for example, mode C, mode S — responsible for different data.

As long as it isn't found, every single news report/statement/interview regarding what might have happened should end in "unless..." I think. Unless...

A signaling system was disabled on the missing Malaysia Airlines jet before a pilot spoke to Malaysian air traffic control without hinting at any trouble, a senior Malaysian official said Sunday

yep our transport minister confirmed this in the press conference - ACARS was switched off before ATC received the last words from the cockpit ("Alright, goodnight").

a military source told us they believe the plane flew towards the Bay of Bengal, going as low as 5,000 ft. Over water that's fine, but it gets a lot more hazardous once it crosses into land, at night. plus, at that altitude, they'd lose about two hours of fuel (says my ex-pilot dad), which means they must have landed somewhere to refuel if the 8.11am satellite ping is correct.

Unless....

http://www.pisau.net/russia-puzzled-over-malaysia-airlines-mh370-capture-by-us-navy-prayformh370/

Wtf? Is this like fan fiction or something?

russian media been in overdrive anti-american propaganda of late. huge huge lol at description of nsf diego garcia as 'vast'.

Wow, I always get amazed when I see media that outright lies to its citizens like that, though I shouldnt in this day and age I suppose.

*cough*rupert murdoch*cough*

i love the passive agressiveness of it - 'malaysia airlines mh370: what happened? i'm confused'

The source is this:

http://www.whatdoesitmean.com

not Russian media, afaict.

http://www.boston.com/2014/03/14/potentially-legitimate-theories-the-missing-malaysia-airlines-flight/d8siKbMiJKfKhc1TvZjtrK/singlepage.html

Except that a meteor wouldn't have turned off transponders separately.

ah, just regular old conspiracy theorists. i'd seen some things from russian tv earlier today that were right in line w/ that craziness.

http://www.bigbreakingnews.com/2014/03/luggage-found-floating-at-sea-possibly.html ?

... but what about the satellite pings six hours later, then? Unless...

Every news link relating to this story should end in possibly.html

Definitely gonna trust "bigbreakingnews.com"

can anyone translate this - http://www.gazzetta.gr/plus/article/596555/kanena-ihnos-apo-boeing

it's greek to me

Bigbreakingnews do include their sources though: greek news sites (boat that was on its way is greek).

But floating luggage near where contact was lost wouldn't explain everything after. Can planes fly on if their luggage compartment is open or gone?

Twitter for latest news? -> Elka Athina is the ship's name. (But they should be there by now)

Yeah man I mean at this point I wouldn't be surprised if the big break came from BigBreakingNews.com

xp

http://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9249116

you have just doomed me to so much unproductivity

http://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=8987577

If they find the plane there that's south of KL, and makes a 'pilots suffering from hypoxia, try to turn the plane around back to KL, pass out before successful + plane overshoots KL and crashes into strait' scenario at least somewhat plausible

http://t.co/G2yhCrRFBZ

A+ british tabloiding there.

"outrageously funny stories"

"A plane can't just disappear" :

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1681260/thumbs/o-MISSING-PLANES-INFOGRAPHIC-900.jpg

Did this get posted? I thought it was pretty interesting speculation from a pilot:

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13cv1gohsmbv5jmy221vrfyiz3vdhbop04

More Patrick Smith:

If indeed this was a hijacking, did the plane land somewhere, as some are suggesting, possibly to be used later as an airborne weapon of some kind, perhaps loaded with a nuclear or biological weapon? I seriously doubt it. I suspect, instead, the plane crashed into the ocean, and will be found there eventually. Remote as some airports are, none are small or unwatched enough to accept a Boeing 777 without it being obvious. And I can’t imagine a terrorist cabal incompetent enough to attempt to steal a commercial jetliner full of people, drawing the entire world’s attention to their plans. There are hundreds if not thousands of business jets and cargo planes out there, traveling the world more or less anonymously, that would be equally suited to such a scheme.

Did this get posted? I thought it was pretty interesting speculation from a pilot:

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13cv1gohsmbv5jmy221vrfyiz3vdhbop04

― polyphonic, Monday, March 17, 2014 11:56 AM (2 hours ago)

That blogger's views/experience seems dated as 777 comms are quad redundant to prevent total comms shutdown as he describes.

Also, the ACARS/transponders were shut off prior to the last comms with KL ATC, not after (contrary to his major reveal).

Comic relief or finally an answer:
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/has_courtney_love_found_flight_370

came here to post that. it's just too good

xxp my understanding as of now is that the acars last transmitted before the "good night" message, and then stopped sometime within half an hour of that transmission (as it automatically broadcasts at 30 min intervals). whether that happened before or after the voice message is not known.
or did i miss something?

and i believe the transponder shut off was after the last voice message.

^^^I think that I've been confused by the shifting timeline provided by the Malaysian govt.

Newest breaking tidbit:

Senior U.S. officials said Monday that the first diversion that the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 made toward the west before it went missing on March 8 was initiated by someone from inside the cockpit through a computer program, the New York Times reported.

Citing senior American officials involved in the investigation of the missing plane, the Times reported that a person inside the cockpit typed several keystrokes into the plane's computer between the captain and the first officer. This computer directs the plane from one point to another according to the flight plan, which is submitted before take-off. But, it is still not clear if the plane’s flight plan was reprogrammed before it left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board.

I should have just linked to the real source (good article):

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight.html

Another good detailed article breaking the news that Zaharie's flight simulator had underwater practice runways near the Indian Ocean:

http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/cops-find-five-indian-ocean-practice-runways-in-mh370-pilots-simulator-bh-r

If that's true & it was an intentional hijacking by Zaharie then that's pretty sloppy of him

I still dont get why a hijacking would be an option if no one at all has come fwd and owned this. Whats the point?

If it's just one guy who wants to move to North Korea/run away from his problems/sell the plane/etc it wouldn't be claimed by an organisation?

bit of an over elaborate way to do such a thing!

Another good detailed article breaking the news that Zaharie's flight simulator had underwater practice runways near the Indian Ocean:

http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/cops-find-five-indian-ocean-practice-runways-in-mh370-pilots-simulator-bh-r

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Tuesday, March 18, 2014 1:00 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf.

i wonder if some of the seeming contradictory evidence might suggest a cockpit struggle--not necessarily a literal physical struggle but one of the pilots attempting to regain control after the other had clearly diverted from intended course.

<-- pointless speculation dep't

supposedly the ELTs have a failure rate of around 15% but I don't know if that's for all of them as a set or individually.

Wait, underwater?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/malaysia-370-day-10-one-fanciful-hypothesis-and-another-that-begins-to-make-sense/284468/

http://www.quora.com/Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-MH370-Incident-March-2014/What-happened-to-Malaysian-Airlines-flight-MH370

Another good detailed article breaking the news that Zaharie's flight simulator had underwater practice runways near the Indian Ocean:

http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/cops-find-five-indian-ocean-practice-runways-in-mh370-pilots-simulator-bh-r

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Tuesday, March 18, 2014 1:00 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf.

The word "underwater" appears nowhere in that article. It refers to runways in the Indian Ocean region, not in the Indian Ocean.

lol

albert broccoli between this and the beer thread you have to get your facts straight

lol underwater runways

It all comes back to SPECTRE

The word "underwater" appears nowhere in that article. It refers to runways in the Indian Ocean region, not in the Indian Ocean.

― bi-polar uncle (its OK-he's dead) (Phil D.), Tuesday, March 18, 2014 2:16 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'd already read the article and then was like wait did i miss

underwater runways was an awesome psychambient disc imo

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0f/Airport_77_movie_poster.jpg/220px-Airport_77_movie_poster.jpg

Secret Boeing Duckboat Project

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9d/The_Soft_Boys-Underwater_Moonlight_%28album_cover%29.jpg

I swear to dog it said underwater when I linked to it (I did note the article was 8 minutes old when I c/p'd it)!

...but then again it was like 2am after a long day.

I'm in your message board distorting your facts!

Hello Down There

Maledives residents see low flying plane with blue and red stripes: http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/54062

https://goo.gl/maps/egXlU

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjCC-ILCAAAX3TC.jpg

good idea, check lake superior

these graphics are supposed to convey the enormity of the area it could be but i don't find them convincing. it's 2014. it's very hard for me to believe that you can just lose an airplane for this long in 2014 no matter how large the search area for the flight (unless maybe it doesn't want to be found?)

how is that hard for you to believe? that's a huge area.

It's a pretty small circle, not even 500px by 500 px

http://news.yahoo.com/thailand-gives-radar-data-10-days-plane-lost-124915659.html

a circle that size only holds about forty 777s so I'm with mordy here

lol are you talking about the text, '777'?

well you clearly are so congrats

maybe they ran away

in 2014 I find it hard to believe that the plane hasn't checked in on foursquare AT ALL in this time I mean cmon

how long would it take to find a downed airplane in that area in the united states? 2 hours max? ok, so obv the issue isn't the size of the area at all but the kind of technology we have available in that area to track these things. a large body of water in the indian ocean poses different problems than the continental united states + bc of coverage issues different problems than maybe the atlantic ocean. so the question isn't whether the area is too big to search - it's about our capacity to search it. politics for sure plays a role, but it's hard to imagine knowing the little i do about the state of first world military technology that it couldn't be found in this long period of time unless a) it didn't want to be found or b) <tinfoil> it has been found and for whatever reason it's being kept out of the news? </tinfoil>

Mordy did you not see the infographic about the tens of aircraft disappeared over the last few decades?

i did not miss this lede:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-17/australia-to-lead-hunt-for-jet-in-southern-indian-ocean.html

Malaysian Air Flight 370’s disappearance became the longest in modern commercial aviation as investigators lacking new information to back other theories explored the possibility of pilot suicide.

mysteries are exciting, it's true

i mean that if your point is that this is precedented, that lede should indicate that it is actually unprecedented.

nah, the lede says it's the longest disappearance in modern commercial aviation, that's a statistical truth perhaps but doesn't give any sense that this is uniquely inexplicable

i didn't say the disappearance was inexplicable! what would that mean? magic? divine intervention?

idk it feels like all kinds of hubris to say that technology CAN find this plane, but the govmint or military or whoever WON'T find this plane or won't reveal it to we sheeple

the whole 'we live in 2014' thing kinda bugs me. like ok we have cool phone and google glasses and there's drones delivering amazon packages but that doesn't rule out shit going pearshaped. technology fucks up ALL the time, the sheer fact of 'having' technology isn't a guarantee of anything

I mean, there's a lot of assumptions you have to get past to even cross over into the conspiracy tinfoil theme park...

if you're cool making that leap then have fun on the rollercoaster but yr hittin the pipe a little hard imo

/end rant

this: it's hard to imagine knowing the little i do about the state of first world military technology that it couldn't be found in this long period of time etc, i'm saying i don't think it's "hard to imagine" at all because i think the difficulties are probably greater than you realise

i say this as somebody who's absolutely not any kind of expert but feels like lots of journalists and other people who are not any kind of expert are making a bunch of over-confident assertions

^^^

well, i did acknowledge that there is a political component. i'm sure jurisdiction + information sharing is a huge clusterfuck. maybe the countries who could find it don't care enough to do so.

that said, we can bug Merkel's private cell phone, we have drone coverage over remote tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen, we have all kinds of tracking + radar equipment. i don't think the problem is lack of technological sophistication available worldwide. i guess there's a remote chance it fell into some deep abyss where the passengers are now chilling w/ a civilization of sea aliens and we just can't get down there (nb maybe no sea aliens)

you're not comparing like for like - Merkel's phone, selected military targets, those things' locations are already known

As far as I know searches are still done via the human eye (no transmitters except the black box ping, which isn't strong enough to carry much distance), and in that vast of an area, where the big pieces are surely out of sight by now, it is next to impossible. Other wreckage gets found because the searchers know the direction and last know position, speed, etc and can therefore extrapolate to a relatively small area.

jesus christ mordy this is the dumbest i've ever seen you

lol

these graphics are supposed to convey the enormity of the area it could be but i don't find them convincing

That is not what "enormity" means jftr.

Seems like searching for a needle in a haystack to me. I hope they do find it, for the sake of the families of those aboard.

Figure all we need to do is to tap the underwater sea aliens' seashell phone and we can find the plane... should be pretty easy for the US military to do in 2014!!

"But enormity is also frequently used interchangeably with enormousness, which means the quality of being great in size, number, or degree. This is not wrong, nor is it a new development; the OED lists examples of enormity used this way from as far back as the late 18th century, and plenty more examples are easily found in historical searches."

i axed the website grammarist- they said don't worry, its' cool.

xp

enmordyty

Biggitude

Gave up the enormity fight long ago

Ginormity

Interestingly énormité in French means both enormousness and something smaller than enormity, more like bad fuck-up or glaring mistake.

If it flew over the Maledives, isn't that towards Somalia, where pirates like to hijack oil tankers for money? Maybe they're diversifying into planes now?

the so-called "occam's razor" theory of an electrical fire that incapacitates the pilots while the plane continues on autopilot (after that sharp turn) brings to mind a horrifying scenario: is there any chance the plane carried on pilot-less for 7 freaking hours with alive/conscious passengers? please say no.

see the info on helios 522 above. it has happened before.

^ This scenario is similar to the one that was proposed in the first few days, of a hole in the front of the plane disabling the transponder / causing hypoxia in the cockpit / causing the plane to fly for 7 hours into the Sea of Japan

missed that. thanks. also: jfc

I keep thinking about Payne Stewart's hypoxia-related crash, where everyone on board was out and yet the plane stayed on autopilot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash

Coincidentally, the plane continued on autopilot roughly the length of one huge circle drawn over the eastern us.

I think the problem is each new lead seems to embiggen the search area

Wouldn't hypoxia affect passengers also? I didn't think there was an airtight seal between the cockpit and the passenger area? In the Greek flight a non-cockpit crew member was seen going into the cockpit after the pilots were out, but he was soon overcome, which I took to mean he was already affected, but had more stamina than the pilots.

I keep on thinking of the ship of fools, though it is totally not fair to the passengers or to what has happened

I watched an ACI episode about that ill-fated Greek flight that was doomed by hypoxia. It was a horror show, literally more horrifying than some of the more dramatic crashes.

"embiggen the search area"

i believe you mean "enormen the search area"
xp

that hores was breathing i swear

At this point most inclined to believe the version of scenario that there was some kind of cabin fire which led to the electronics going off either directly or as some sort of procedure, then crew turned the plane around to point at nearest landing strip but then what, immediately lost oxygen along with all the passengers so nobody radioed or cellphoned status. Some seem to say this with debunked because why I don't get exactly: Keystroke course change instead of manual? Should have radioed first?

If it landed anywhere near Perth our navy will have picked everyone up and locked them up on Nauru so you know, maybe look there.

/sorrycrudehumour

One thing I keep coming back to (and why I'm not buying into the whole "this retired pilot from the 70s says there's one simple explanation for MH370's behavior!!!1" angle):

777 communication radios are quadruple redundant. 4 different types of communication powered by 4 separate/unlinked power sources located in 4 entirely different parts of the plane. Why would Boeing design that? Exactly because of emergency scenarios when part(s) of the aircraft is/are disabled mechanically, electrically or electronically. There is basically no chance that a 777 could lose power to all 4 methods of communication unless the entire plane was vaporized (which we know it wasn't as the engines continued pinging and it was picked up on radar for quite some time later).

Whomever would not be flying the plane (pilot or copilot) would be on the radio, in the very worst case scenario sending out a mayday/distress call on whichever comms method was available (I believe you can choose all available in the 777). But that of course is if both pilots were still piloting the plane.

It was leaked yesterday that the plane diverted from its intended course via a programmed code into the flight computer shortly after turning off the transponders/ACARS. That form of piloting is not an action taken out of desperate distress and speaks volumes about the why the investigation has been focusing on the pilot/copilot and anyone on the plane who has advanced knowledge of flying.

yeah, the only thing i feel certain about is that this was intentional.

It is certainly quite plausible that it was intentional. Think that some part of me wants to believe the hypoxia version because at least then there is some minimal closure to the story, whereas in the other version there are so many questions about why it was done and how did it play out.

Programming a code into the flight computer can be as simple as entering the call letters of the desired airport and pressing a git-r-done button. I think if the crew wanted to devote their time to fighting a fire (for example) this is what they'd do. No need to manually steer the plane while things are falling apart around you.

lol mordy fyi they can land a man on the moon but they can't cure the common cold

but that's because curing the common cold is more difficult

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Fantasticvoyageposter.jpg

I think you meant to post this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3QAHZicSjQ

man we 20 yrs deep on coolio's dream, needs a remake.

Programming a code into the flight computer can be as simple as entering the call letters of the desired airport and pressing a git-r-done button. I think if the crew wanted to devote their time to fighting a fire (for example) this is what they'd do. No need to manually steer the plane while things are falling apart around you.

― nickn, Tuesday, March 18, 2014 6:15 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

looks like according to some new info the route change was programmed n 12 min before their final verbal communication.

It was leaked yesterday that the plane diverted from its intended course via a programmed code into the flight computer

is how this is known explained anywhere?

Following yesterday's revelation that the plane's altered flight path had been programmed through a computer in the cockpit, it has been revealed today that those new coordinates were already in motion when co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid made the final radio contact – "All right, good night" – before the jet vanished.

The "new piece of the puzzle" was revealed by former Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Scott Brenner on Fox News, who said it was understood MH370 had turned and was heading west at 1.07am, 12 minutes before Mr Hamid's final words at 1.19am, at which time he would have been aware he had gone off course.

"One of the pilots clearly had the intention that he was going to take (the plane) in a different direction," Mr Brenner said.

"It was 100 percent clear that this pilot or co-pilot was going to take this plane with the intent of doing something bad."

former spokesman, eh?

http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20140308-902237.html

I was also wondering how they would know about any flight path change, unless they actually tracked it when the plane was still communicating its position.

i feel like nothing i read about this whole situation is true

it seems every story about the flight management system computer is citing the nyt who have no details about exactly how this detail is known.

The details are laid out pretty clearly in the article that you just linked:

Flight 370’s Flight Management System reported its status to the Acars, which in turn transmitted information back to a maintenance base, according to an American official. This shows that the reprogramming happened before the Acars stopped working. The Acars ceased to function about the same time that oral radio contact was lost and the airplane’s transponder also stopped, fueling suspicions that foul play was involved in the plane’s disappearance.

ah ok... i wonder why the reprogramming went unknown until now then.

i mean, the status of the acars has been known for days.

Strange twist: political-family ties connect pilot Zaharie to Malaysia oppostion leader Anwar Ibrihim.

Zaharie attended Ibrihim's sodomy trial hours before MH370 took off.

Ibrihim has denied knowing Zaharie previously, but today admitted that he is related to his son-in-law and they've met on several occasions, underwater.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/flight-mh370-pilot-anwar-ibrahims-sodomy-trial-hours-before-take-off-1440736

LOL

Mordy you are high. Finding stuff in the fucking ocean will never not be extremely, extremely hard. Even airplanes.

no shit i mean we've had a few thousand years to work with and we still haven't identified all of the species that live in the ocean

Has this Wired piece been discussed/debunked yet? I'd like so very much for the conspiracy nonsense to be just that.

pilots: one startlingly simple trick to make your passenger plane vanish

Tin-hatty, but there is a chance, if there is a suspected or confirmed hijacking and the plane is safe somewhere, or even not safe, that authorities might be letting on less than they know as they track down people behind it. But it seems pretty unlikely they would keep everyone, including the families, in the dark for so long.

It does seems significant that the pilot was more closely involved in the political opposition than previously known and that he had attended the sentencing of its leader just hours before the flight. It does give a possible motive for trying to make the plane "disappear" - ie., in order to cause maximum embarrassment for the government.

On the last two posts, no on both counts. I've covered the transport minister a lot and can usually tell when he's trying to hide something. Either he's had better coaching lately, or he genuinely does not know that much more than he's let on.

Also the Msian government is not above character assassination (see exhibit a: Anwar Ibrahim) and you can be sure that if there was any evidence at all that the pilot was more than your average opposition supporter, the govt-aligned news orgs (including the one I work for) would be going all out on that front.

Family members of some of the Chinese passengers caused a small riot before the press conference today... Crying and wailing and accusing the govt of wasting time and withholding info. Felt really terrible for them but I genuinely think there's not much we can do unless other countries involved are willing to share vital military radar and satellite data, which most of them are not giving up right now.

They were obvs rattled by it, the pc was cut short... Only 20 mins compared to the usual 40. It's a pretty shitty situation for everyone involved. :(

The Wired piece wasn't debunked but was dismissed as unlikely because the plane made multiple turns after it passed the landing strip that piece speculates they were heading towards. Why wouldn't it land then? Why did it zig-zag to 2 different way points? Like the nutty conspiracies, that Wired piece ignores many facts.

Here's Slate debunking Wired: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/18/mh370_disappearance_chris_goodfellow_s_theory_about_a_fire_and_langkawi.html

thx bld

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/world/asia/experts-see-robust-radar-along-missing-jets-potential-path.html

Investigators say that automated signals from the jet, a Boeing 777, that were picked up by a satellite more than seven hours after the plane took off indicate that by then it must have been somewhere near one of two broad arcs on the map. One arc stretches from northern Thailand and Laos through China to Kazakhstan in Central Asia; the other extends from western Indonesia into the Indian Ocean west of Australia.

The northern arc crosses some of the most closely defended borders in the world. Experts on the radar systems in use in the area say that a Boeing 777, which has a large radar profile, would more likely than not have been detected by Chinese and Indian air defense forces and by American forces in Afghanistan.

China, the original destination for the flight, is guarded by military radar systems at high elevations in its border areas and even in its interior, where the People’s Liberation Army controls most of the country’s airspace. The border between India and Pakistan is highly militarized, and radar experts and Indian military officials discounted the possibility that a jetliner could pass through the area undetected. Farther northwest, the United States Air Force has its own radar installations in Afghanistan to protect air bases there from intruders.

Quite liked this one: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/18/mh370_airliner_mystery_the_iel_regi_pubdinnerparty_guide/

you can be sure that if there was any evidence at all that the pilot was more than your average opposition supporter, the govt-aligned news orgs (including the one I work for) would be going all out on that front

I'm not saying they're withholding damning evidence - most likely they don't have any conclusive evidence yet. I'm just saying that based on the evidence we do have, the pilot so far is the only one with possible motive (embarrass the government) and means (flight simulator which would allow him to practice unusual sequences of operations).

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/03/18/malaysia-flight-promo/37bd51c35dac7197eab121fbdbbcb7880a0e4584/australia-artboard_1.png

^^^weird the text must be on a different layer.

Basically: Australian authorities identified 2 radar tracks that may have belonged to MH370 and believe the plane may have crashed off the coast of Perth and have set up a search plot in the white area.

pretty loose application of "off the coast of perth," but...yeah. why does the red arc become dotted there?

i take it that is the time extrapolation from the last satellite ping?

The plane probably ran out of ink. xpost

better scan for runways when they do a flyover

lol

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26659951

Two objects have been seen that could possibly relate to the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, Australian PM Tony Abbott has announced.

also, that goodfellow theory has been debunked: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-26640114

Press conference re: Abbott's announcement happening now

lol. i wouldn't be too bothered, it's a deflection ploy

Abbott's still a cunt, whether or not his military find the thing.

Well, yeah, that goes without saying

http://1.standaardcdn.be/Assets/Images_Upload/2014/03/20/wrakstukken.jpg.h380.jpg

Inclement weather was an issue on the search and retrieval, low clouds and rain impaired visibility and ocean conditions were rough.

https://twitter.com/AMSA_News/status/446583054002171904

Maybe they should have looked underwater?

what part of the plane that is that BIG could float for so long? is the fuselage foam injected carbon fiber or somthing?

could float for so long

bodies?

they said the images were possibly from four days ago. Malaysian authorities here couldn't confirm when they were taken, but probably the Aussies will clear it up tomorrow. xpost

pretty convinced at this point that malaysian authorities can't confirm jack shit, though nobody is actually tearing it up on confirmation front.

maybe it's type to enlist the services of Lorax

psh, and you guys said i was high:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnns-don-lemon-is-it-preposterous-to-think-a-black-hole-caused-flight-370-to-go-missing/

Does anyone know the ocean's approximate depth in the region that they're looking?

Yes, underwater. That is 100% correct.

Was thinking, seems like it could be some James Cameron-type deep water.

13k ft ocean depths in the Indian Ocean but there are large ridges.

I bet Abbott has a massive chub over being able to say WE DID THIS, the little shit.

IOW lol. i wouldn't be too bothered, it's a deflection ploy

OTM.

I bet Abbott has a massive chub over being able to say WE DID THIS, the little shit.

cross post with too much time on ilx thread (not knowing, I assume, Australian politics?)

y

yeah I was really confused for a minute there

OMG yes sorry I meant Tones Abbott not our beloved Abb!

cross post with too much time on ilx thread

lol same here

The 2 large pieces of debris ID'd on satellite were nowhere to be seen by sea and air after 2 days of searching. Officials believe they may have sunk.

or landed on an underwater runway

underwater runway lands on you :(

really thought we had something there with the underwater runways.

that's a very mellifluous phrase, "underwater runways"

it's the twin assonances, "un/run" and "wa/wa"

tell your favorite rapper

oh great now I have "oh well I feel so good today / we touched ground on an underwater runway" in my head

oh god is this thread the reason why i've been singing underwater moonlight to myself all week?

Just in: Chinese satellites received images of a floating object in the southern corridor, measuring about 22.5m x 13m. Chinese govt to announce more details in a couple of hours.

thank you for all the excellent updates, roz. i'm very sorry you have friends on the plane.

satellite photos quite close to where the debris was sighted
if they find the flight data recorder in that ocean it will be quite an achievement

thanks for the kind words, estela. it's part of my job anyway... I've been covering this for 13 days straight now.

Chinese govt didn't release much info in the end (no surprises there) - there was supposed to be a press briefing but it was too late, so they just issued a short statement. basically the usual... we found a thing, we're sending ships to the thing, but the thing probably sunk or drifted away already. :/

:/

Our PM Najib Razak will be holding a last minute press conference at 10 pm (a little less than an hour from now).

Actual news, I hope. Can't imagine him announcing something this late unless it's important.

PM Najib: New satellite data concludes that MH370's journey ended in the southern Indian Ocean, west of Perth, away from any landing points. Assumed to be no survivors.

Of course we knew this already, but I'm still incredibly sad right now.

sorry roz. :/

I still kind of can't believe this entire horrible story.

Fucking hell

does the now-presumed crash area tie in with the previous evidence of deliberate course change? i've lost track

Yes.

damn

sorry

They seriously broke this to the families by text message?

Classy

brutal :(

yeah, I have no idea what the fuck is wrong with MAS' communications team. I know some of the families wanted to be informed of any developments by text, but for this, you would think they'd have been better prepared. like how difficult would it have been to assemble their caregivers and given them a quick script to call families with? jfc

well then, the Internet strikes again.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjgMmFBCAAAewmb.jpg

What are the chances of finding the blackbox/data recorder? Should still be pinging.

How far away can floating debris drift in 2 weeks?

A long long LONG way

What are the chances of finding the blackbox/data recorder? Should still be pinging.

― Jeff, Monday, March 24, 2014 11:34 AM (17 minutes ago)

I believe the black box has a powersource to ping for 30 days after losing power after an "event", #underwater.

wikipedia appears to indicate that current speeds in the hundreds of km/day are reasonable. so Tom D. otm.

So, not trying to detract or anything but in a way:

http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/we_aint_found_shit.gif ?

I'm still so confused as to how the aircraft could have ended up that far south west of Perth.

if you look at the flight path that they're now speculating, the thing made a U turn, flew over loads of actual land, straight into the ocean and crashed. it's fucking bizarre.

My paper's frontpage today got me a little choked up:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/t1.0-9/1480593_10152335611023466_1629762008_n.jpg

:(

Aviation experts: is it possible for the pilots or anyone else onboard to disable the voice or flight-data recorders as the transponders were?

on silkair 185 the the pilot disabled the voice recorder

roz that cover is ;_;

fitting tribute

damn this whole thing is so sad and weird

i couldn't stop crying after the press conference yesterday. It wasn't just the families - a lot of reporters, some who have covered much bigger disasters, broke down. Part of it was the exhaustion, but mostly I think everyone had held on to that tiny bit of hope that there might be survivors. even though we knew there couldn't have been any. :(

it IS weird... so many unanswered questions still. How the fuck did the plane end up so far away from where it was going, for one.

Did they actually find pieces of the the plane or are they just sick of speculation? It seems they don't have any real evidence that it went down, unless i've missed something.

It's what you'd call an informed assumption, I guess.

Calculate the distance between the plane and the satellite, and using the strength of the pings received, trace its trajectory all the way to its last known point - a remote location where there's no place to land, and no land in between where they could have stopped and refueled. combine it with the satellite sightings of possible debris...

yeah, nothing has actually been found yet.

I accept that the plane is in the ocean but there has been information released and either contradicted or redacted for the last two weeks so without finding the tail or some identifiable debris, I think this is going to spark conspiracy theories and not satisfy the families who are desperate to hang on to hope.

i agree with the last bit - i think there will always be something about this case that will feed the conspiracy theorists, simply because so many things still don't add up.

but otoh i don't know... there's been a lot of information released quoting unnamed sources or officials, and which were then repeated over and over as fact, even when they were never confirmed by the people in charge. It's easy to say then that there's been contradictory information, but more often than not, the authorities are being forced to contradict bad journalism/speculation that's based on misleading or inaccurate intel.

if you look at all the official statements released from the minister's office, they actually tell a pretty consistent story.

Roz :(

I'm not quite sure if I can follow anymore: have we found anything that is 100% certainly part of this plane? (getting headlines like "all the search for MH370 has found is that the oceans are way more polluted than we thought" and "boeing debris turns out to be garbage" over here now)

No. They're no longer having daily press conferences and there's been no new data to look at either. Basically, the only thing left is to keep searching until they find -something-. Anything.

"show me" could be good but chris' vocals on that are particularly wretched AND IT'S ALSO A SONG THAT FEATURES THE LINE "YOU REMIND ME OF SOMETHING / BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS RIGHT NOW"

demand more from your songwriters
--le goon (J0rdan S.)

err something must have happened with zing and my pocket sorry...

Unfortunate side effect of the MH370 search is bringing this issue to light:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2014/0401/Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-MH370-Search-reveals-extent-of-ocean-garbage-video

Assuming the plane did break into small pieces, the debris field is probably spreading wider and thinner with each passing day. Ebbsmeyer estimates that the debris patch is probably more than 20 miles in diameter and spreading, based on his studies of container spills.

“The debris is going to become less concentrated and harder to spot,” he says. “There’s no doubt that pieces of plastic from this wreck will float for decades, but they’ll become just part of all the other plastic which is not identifiable.”

This is incredibly moving: http://www.raischstudios.com/malaysia-airlines-flight-370/2014/3/30/wqupf9xsv2emht1x020isa25b2wlg0?fb_action_ids=10202818129148470&fb_action_types=og.likes

CNN.com:

It it Flight 370's data recorder?

the blackbox is giving off a sound wave, right? so many places are reporting an "electronic pulse" which I imagine would be highly attenuated in salt water, i.e. it's a waste of blackbox battery.

the australian navy dudes actually term it as an "acoustic event".

Brief summary of today's presser: US towed pinger locator detects signals consistent with those emitted by aircraft black boxes yesterday, in area of about 4,500m in depth. First signal lasted about 2 hours, the second about 13 mins. However, still cannot confirm that the signals were from MH370. Focus today is to reacquire signals before deploying the autonomous underwater vehicle (which has a depth limitation of exactly 4,500m) to map the ocean floor and search for signs of wreckage.

Indeed, according to one highly placed oceanic scientist to whom I spoke recently, it is truly unbelievable: he believes, as do other independent scientists, that the Americans have known exactly where the flight crashed ever since it fell out of the skies; to reveal that they do so would be to endanger covert military information and the operation of underwater sonic arrays whose primary purpose is to detect such large objects in the oceans – in the shape of enemy submarines.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/08/mh370-bleeps-vast-depth-ocean-secrets-americans

These underwater mountains and trenches remain the least unexplored places on earth

guess they don't have editors any more

the underwater mountains and trenches are so gentrified these days

Yeah, I know exactly where the plane is too, but I'll only tell you if you know the secret masonic handshake.

your mom's mountains and trenches remain the least, etc

perspective:
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/the-depth-of-the-problem/931/

What a mess...

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/11/malaysian-military-withheld-radar-data-on-flight-mh370-as-nations-searched-wrong-area-sources-say

Some strange developments:

The Co-pilot attempted to make a mobile phone call shortly after the course redirection near Penang.

Citing new radar data, Malaysia military investigators are convinced the plane was flown deliberately low and fast over the Malaysian peninsula and carefully skirted Sumatra Indonesia's coastlines to evade radar detection.

Authorities believe acoustic pings from the black boxes have stopped due to battery fatigue.

Malaysian authorities deny the co-pilot tried to use his phone. They're mainly looking into the possible involvement of one or more passengers.

The government denies the call, but this leak of a lot of detail suggests otherwise:

http://www.nst.com.my/nation/general/call-traced-to-co-pilot-s-phone-1.562612

This is nuts:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-georesonance-wreckage-of-a-commercial-airliner-found/

Yeah, pretty crazy. Though, if it ends up being the missing plane, just another instance where private industry is usurping reliability of natl govts.

cmon how could that wreckage present distribution patterns that so closely mimic the intact plane unless it was gently lowered into the water? that makes no sense to me as an ignorant layperson.

you can't be ignorant of a subject and have a trustworthy intuition for it at the same time. so you shouldn't be too worried I guess. I certainly don't know what to expect. Everything is complicated.

Doubtful. For everything to be intact like that, MH370's captain would have had to pull off a Sullenberger-grade ditching. In the open ocean. In a much bigger plane. At night/early morning.

Good summary saying we know nothing. Registration required

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/analysis-the-theories-and-fantasies-about-mh370-398704/

Privacy and Cookies

Search
Privacy & Cookies
d✧✧✧@zerointegr✧✧✧.c✧.u✧ My Services Sign Out
Home News Aircraft Jobs Airspace Images Cutaways Historic Air Shows Products
NewsAviationRegulatory
ANALYSIS: The theories and fantasies about MH370
By: DAVID LEARMOUNTLONDON
Source: Flightglobal.com 16 hours ago
The least unlikely cause for the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, based on what little is known about the final flight, is that a person with a sharp mind and a plan, but who was emotionally unbalanced, took control of the aircraft.

It could have been one of the pilots, or someone else on board who had the means to persuade the pilots, quietly, to depart from official cockpit security procedures. The best way of doing that would be for the individual to be known by – even friendly with – the pilots.

Cabin crew? Nobody knows, and there is certainly no direct evidence.

There is some circumstantial evidence for the Malaysian authorities’ belief that MH370’s ­disappearance was the result of “deliberate action by someone on board”. The most publicised bits of circumstantial evidence are the switching off of the ACARS ­technical datalink and then the transponder, followed immediately by a marked departure from the aircraft’s planned route ­combined with a sudden radio silence.

The “emotionally unbalanced person” theory is based on the fact that no one can imagine the motivation for masterminding what has happened, because no obvious purpose appears to have been served by it. But somebody who is suicidal or otherwise in a disturbed emotional state is not bound by normal logic.

Another argument for this theory is historical. There have been many cases in which pilots of aircraft carrying passengers have committed suicide by deliberately crashing the aircraft: a Silk Air Boeing 737 pilot, an EgyptAir 767 pilot, a Royal Air Maroc ATR 42 pilot, and last year a LAM ­Mozambique Embraer 190 pilot.

asset image
Rex Features
An Ethiopian 767 was deliberately crashed in 1996
There is also a history of persons – other than the pilots – bringing aircraft down because they had a grudge against the airline or society: a Pacific Southwest ­Airlines BAe 146 in 1987 and an Ethiopian Airlines 767 in 1996. Then there was 9/11, where the perpetrators had a grudge against an entire country.

There is no record – yet – of someone sabotaging an ordinary airline flight for the purpose of killing a specific person or group on board, but the possibility – in a case as unusual as MH370 – must be a part of the investigation.

A conspirator with such a ­motive would have had a reason to want no one ever to find out what really happened, so the southerly flight path believed to have been followed by MH370 to an oceanic grave would have been a brilliant plan. The only trouble with this theory is that, like all the others, there is no direct evidence for it.

Sabotage, frequently invoked as a possible cause for an aircraft accident when no immediate explanation is available, has been mentioned less by the theorists in the MH370 case, on the grounds that, if it had been bombed, it would not have flown on for so long. Well, it might have done if the damage was limited to, say, ­creating a hole in the hull that would have caused a sudden decompression – and that could be a reason why everything went quiet over the Gulf of Thailand.

Returning to the theory of deliberate action, commentators have advanced many ideas as to how the perpetrator kept everyone on board quiet while carrying out his plan, including incapacitating them by deliberately depressurising the aircraft at high altitude.

These theories are guesses, but the deliberate decompression theory cannot be ruled out. Yet there is another less spectacular reason why the passengers would have been passive. If the pilots were the perpetrators or if the means of taking control was indeed quietly achieved, at 02:00 the passengers would have been sleeping or trying to sleep, not worrying about which way the aircraft was heading, and most would stay that way until dawn or beyond.

During the early part of the flight, while the aircraft was within range of land, the passengers would not have chosen to use their mobile phones unless they were aware of a risk to their lives, simply because they would have known their families would also have been asleep.

The theories invoking progressive damage by an onboard electrical fire are difficult to stand up, because fires are not sudden.

The existence of a fire is known by smoke, fumes or an alarm before it disables the ­aircraft, and pilot reaction in such a case would have been to put out an instant emergency call, which they did not do. ­Finally, a spreading fire would not have taken six hours to bring the aircraft down.

The theories – mostly involving conspiracy – about the aircraft having landed safely somewhere can be ruled out. Those who believe that it landed at the US base at Diego Garcia have clearly not used Google Earth to see how visible the aircraft would be if it were there – or indeed at the old UK Royal Air Force base on Gan in the Maldives, or other islands in the Indian Ocean.

If the calculated search position is wrong and the aircraft could have crashed on land, a jungle location anywhere within range of Kuala Lumpur remains implausible but possible. The question then would be why no country’s military radar detected such a penetration of their ­airspace, or why they are not ­declaring it.

Will MH370 ever be found? If it went into the southern Indian Ocean, probably not.

The facts are these: no floating wreckage had been found six weeks later. The accuracy of the satellite information on which the search area has been calculated is far from guaranteed, so the search team may not be looking in the right place.

It is hard enough finding wreckage in the deep ocean when the position where the aircraft went missing was accurately known, like Air France 447. In that case, floating wreckage was discovered within a couple of days, but it took two years to find the wreck on the sea floor even when the last known position of the aircraft was a fact in which the search teams knew they could have confidence, so the huge financial investment in looking for it was considered worthwhile.

But even if the search teams are looking in the right place, AF447 belly-flopped into the water at a vertical speed of about 120kt (220km/h), with very low forward speed, so the wreckage parts were quite large and thus easy to detect on the surface and on the seabed. Fortunately for the searchers, the main wreckage came to rest on a firm, flat plain on the seabed, among sub-sea ­mountains.

There is no evidence of how MH370 impacted the water, but if it hit the surface much faster than AF447 and with a nose-down ­attitude, the pieces would be smaller and thus more difficult to detect.

To add to the searchers’ ­difficulties, oceanographers ­report that the area of the seabed currently being scanned is very silty. ­Aircraft parts, ­especially heavy ones like ­engines, could sink into the silt, making detection by sonar even more difficult.

If parts from MH370 are ever found, it may be when seat cushions or other lightweight ­debris washes up on the shore of Australia or Antarctica.

Unfortunately, it looks as if this is the most probable scenario.

Meanwhile, airlines across the world may be facing a new regulatory mandate based on the lessons learned from the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Rockwell Collins’ chief executive Kelly Ortberg says.

The ongoing, six-week-old search for the missing Boeing 777-200ER in the South Indian Ocean has already prompted IATA to form an expert task force to consider options for tracking commercial aircraft.

“The task force will vet potential solutions to this problem and come up with some recommendation,” said Ortberg, speaking to analysts on 18 April. “So I do see a move upward to some sort of a mandated change here.”

Ortberg says he wants Collins – one of the world’s largest avionics and aircraft connectivity suppliers ­– to play a role in the IATA task force’s deliberations.

“We certainly have to think we’ve got some good things to offer,” Ortberg says.

The task force is planning to meet in May for the first time.

The task force is intended to take a comprehensive, global approach to responding to the MH370 disappearance, IATA director general and chief executive Tony Tyler said on 1 April.

“This is not the time for ­hastily prepared sales pitches or regional solutions,” says Tyler.

Flight MH370 – carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew – went missing on 8 March over the South China Sea between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The aircraft’s radios, transponder and automated datalink all stopped transmitting a few minutes after the crew bid farewell to Malaysia air traffic control coverage and before it was picked up by Vietnamese controllers.

Despite a confusing series of announcements by Malaysian officials, it was discovered by Inmarsat that a communications antenna on board the aircraft continued “pinging” a satellite although it passed no data.

That georesonance link is pretty wild, can't help but notice the location aligns with the arc of pinging from the Inmarsat satellite. Also vector of flying towards civilization lends more cred to hijacking theory.

the georesonance image is almost a little too otm, like the shroud of Turin or something. More inclined to believe it'll never be found but I suppose anything might occur.

man, the anguish the victims' families must feel... my heart goes out to them.

(CNN) - A Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur has crashed in eastern Ukraine, Russian news agency Interfax reported Thursday.

god how awful. interfax reporting it was shot down.

what the fuck

http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/17/world/europe/ukraine-malaysia-airlines-crash/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

oh sorry

Hoping to god this is just a coincidence.

this is a fucking nightmare

a 777, 290+ onboard

jesus :(

I know we're all numb to war, but this is the 4th plane shot down over the Ukraine today... it just happened to be a passenger plane.

Why the fuck any ATC would route commercial flights over a warzone is beyond me.

According to the BBC the Ukranian interior minister's office have confirmed the plane was shot down.

sending good vibes to you and yours Roz

yep

Definitely.

Dreadful

thanks all, still trying to come to grips with this. Not getting any sleep tonight... can see a long couple of weeks and a very subdued Eid ahead.

http://i.imgur.com/Om9UHfX.jpg

A Dutch passenger of the plane posted this on his Facebook just before take off. The caption says: "In case it goes missing, this is what it looks like." Heartbreaking.

Why the fuck any ATC would route commercial flights over a warzone is beyond me

^^^

europe - asia flights pass over iran, afghanistan, iraq, etc.

that facebook post is just too much ..

this is so f*cked up