Malaysia Airlines MH370

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