Malaysia Airlines MH370

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/

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