Malaysia Airlines MH370

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.

yeah same

On the question of why the pilot would turn back over land, I’ve read speculation that he wanted to fly over Penang his old hometown one last time. I agree it’s hard to believe anyone would be capable of this, especially someone so outwardly normal. However out of all the scenarios it seems the one most consistent with the otherwise bizarre sequence of events is that someone skilled and very knowledgeable wanted to make the plane disappear forever. The stigma against suicide would have been an incentive to preserve the mystery. We can’t rule out it was someone else on the plane but the pilot had many advantages that would have dramatically increased the difficulty of an already unlikely feat for anyone else.

Zaharie, a middle-aged, upper middle class, Muslim Malay family man, knew what it would do to his children if he was found to have committed not just suicide, but large-scale mass murder. I don't doubt that he was possibly troubled, lonely, depressed, maybe even suicidal. I just have strong doubts that this would have been the way he would have chosen to do it.

Langewiesche briefly mentions on SilkAir 185 and EgyptAir 990 in his article, but the investigations (and how they were attenuated by government/airline officials) are worth digging into. Again, the only conclusion you can reach is that we'll never find out.

Surprising number of commercial pilot-suicides:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Air_Maroc_Flight_630
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAM_Mozambique_Airlines_Flight_470
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_350
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

On the question of why the pilot would turn back over land, I’ve read speculation that he wanted to fly over Penang his old hometown one last time.

Other pilots have spoken about this - it's only a possibility if he was sitting and leaning over sharply in the co-pilot's seat. Otherwise, the way the plane curved and the height/speed it was at suggests he wouldn't even be able to see Penang, a tiny little island, in the dead of night. And again it begs the question, why not then fly out past Penang straight into the Indian Ocean? Why turn again, this time down south flying past the Malaysian peninsular, Singapore, and the northeastern tip of Indonesia?

Just to be clear, I don't disagree that pilot suicide is more common that you'd expect and that barring evidence of a hijacking or mechanical failure, a pilot error or intention is the likeliest cause of any flight accident. I also agree that airlines/governments can interpret the same set of facts in multiple ways, esp if they feel they have something to gain/lose. But it still makes little sense to me - MH370's erratic flight path is just not a route that anyone, especially an experienced pilot, would have taken if they were really intent on disappearing the way they did i.e. flying out for hours until fuel exhaustion.

To me, the real responsibility here lies with the air traffic controllers and military radar operators in Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and KL (mostly KL). Had any of them done their jobs properly that night, someone would have noticed the plane's turnaround much earlier. There was a four-hour delay in reaction that no one, certainly not a pilot on a mission to disappear, would have been able to foresee.

thats a really interesting thought though

assuming pilot intent, could we predict that *he* would have planned to have been discovered much sooner?

that the end path may have been a "i guess I'll do this, seeing as nobody has shown up" rather than a plan?

and what would have been his plan then, if he was caught? that's the thing with this story, it rewards conspiratorial thinking.

Anyway, the more I think about this piece the more upset I am with it. Langeweische devoted half of it on Blaine Gibson, who for sure deserves some credit for finding a lot of the plane debris, but is a known crank who isn't to be taken seriously (he shows up frequently at MH370 events in KL, often uninvited and looking around at reporters hopefully to be interviewed). And yet he's named in the piece over 40 times!

Langeweisch, rightfully, blames Malaysia's political culture but ignores the fact that the current government was not the one that handled the tragedy at the time - Najib's administration was thrown out last year. At the end of the piece, the only member of government named in the story is transport minister Anthony Loke, who was elected and appointed to the post in June 2018, more than four years after MH370.

He doesn't interview a single member of the Malaysian government or investigation team in charge at the time, nor does he reach out to anyone from Zaharie's family. His entire argument that the pilot did it relies on conversations with an unnamed colleague.

It's a brilliantly written summary of where things stand, but I don't think his conclusions stand up to scrutiny. And all of it just makes me think about that Atlantic editor who talked about how the only journalists he found who were willing to write 10,000-word pieces were white men.

and now i'm listening to the dutch press conference on MH17, that other never-ending aircraft tragedy. sigh.

Is there really a better flight path he could have taken if his intention was to avoid primary radar? It seems heading east into the Pacific would have taken him over areas with a bigger military presence, like the South China Sea, where chances of detection would be much higher.

To be fair, the impression I got from Langeweisch was that Gibson is a bit of a crank who latches vampirically onto the survivors, but a crank who also found a bunch of plane bits

The world of wreckchasers - especially the ones who latch onto a cause - is highly specific and obsessive.

just read this article, and appreciated roz's insights, but given the evidence presented I find it difficult to doubt the conclusion that zaharie was responsible

Six years gone.

time flies

maybe it will turn up after 8 years like the kid in Flight of the Navigator

they get around

Great overview article on where things are at with the search, what probably happened, etc.: Call of the Void - Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370?

Oof

Great overview article

otm

Yeah, its a good summary, although it seems not much new evidence has come to light since the last revive for the Atlantic article a couple of years ago. The most likely scenario is still the same.

It wasn’t until 30 minutes after that when someone finally told the operations department that Flight Explorer was not showing the real position of the plane, only a projected position.

Still reading this, but it seems insane to me that the airline didn't know this.

Yeah that jumped out. As did this which I guess I forgot was part of the chain of revelations at the time (that this was something pilots generally wouldn't know about):

Unbeknownst to him, the satellite communication unit starts to acknowledge the satellite again. This is his one mistake — but it’s a forgivable one, as hardly any airline pilots knew about this system feature before the disappearance of MH370.

Let's not forget Roz's posts a little earlier in the thread -- that's good context.

Coming to Netflix:

https://www.netflix.com/title/81307163

I swear, some people have too much free time

https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/15ot29v/psychic_remoteviewed_mh370_being_teleported_by

some of that references this : https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/15oi2qc/mh370_airliner_videos_part_iii_the_rabbit_hole/

Some sound advice in that first Reddit link: "I swear to fucking god if it comes out that a tin foil hat is the traditional method to fight greys I’m gonna shit my pants"

ten years gone today

I saw something about a new search being planned?

yeah Ocean Infinity, the company that did the last search in 2018 wants to keep looking and is willing to get paid only if they find it. maybe third time's a charm

the countries involved (Australia, Malaysia, China) haven't approved it yet though