Malaysia Airlines MH370

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