Malaysia Airlines MH370

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 :/

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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.