Malaysia Airlines MH370

According to the Malaysian Air Force official, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media

777 Passenger Oxygen masks do not deploy until cabin altitude reaches 13,500. Passengers were likely already unconscious by then, if it was a slow decompression

uh, no. you might get oxygen sickness but you are not unconscious. la paz is at 13,300 ft.

ha i meant altitude sickness

Okay the NYT story right now suggests MASS confusion:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/world/asia/malaysia-jet.html

Which Roz has already mentioned, but now, even more so?

people making LOST jokes about this are the worst.

is this perhaps another instance of a pilot intentionally downing a plane? though generally when that happens it's more sudden because the crew offers interference. terrorism seems to be out. this is seriously crazy. the hypoxia theory did seem good but doesn't seem to jive with the course correction they did make.

my guess is now that the territories are expanding they'll find out soon. the contradictions, while not exactly unusual in a disaster situation, are so numerous that it's hard to have a handle of what is and isn't.

all the different agencies working on this seem to have contradicting information but none of them are communicating to each other about it. :/

Just read something that said the slow decompression theory could not have happened because the plane was not fitted with the "SATCOM antenna adapter" mentioned in the Tumblr piece.

This is starting to seem a lot more like hijacking - either by passengers or with collusion of one or more of the crew. Turning off the transponder, flying below radar in the opposite direction of planned route...

― o. nate, Tuesday, March 11, 2014 11:17 AM (1 hour ago)

:-(

This is starting to seem a lot more like hijacking - either by passengers or with collusion of one or more of the crew. Turning off the transponder, flying below radar in the opposite direction of planned route...
― o. nate, Tuesday, March 11, 2014 11:17 AM (1 hour ago)

just playing devil's advocate here but if you hijacked a plane, you wouldn't actually have to do any of this stuff right? you could just take over the plane and crash it into the sea immediately. why bother going thru the hassle of making the plane undetectable and flying miles off course

it would seem odd to just hijack and plane and intentionally crash it immediately, right? i feel like if it was a political hijacking they'd be trying for a 9/11 repeat. possible outlandish theory: it was hijacked and it was turning around to head back to kuala lumpur but didn't make it and in fact went way off course (either by crew interference/misdirection or by hijacker incompetence?)

Most hijackers don't try to crash planes.

I mean, hijacking is rare these days but it's usually people wanting to be flown somewhere weird, claim asylum or extort money.

Crashing a plane usually indicates a failed hijacking. Using planes as missiles is... not common.

Yeah, the hijacking scenario only seems to work if you imagine the hijacker(s) had some intention other than immediately crashing the plane and then something happened to interrupt their plans, either an accident or some kind of struggle.

if this is terrorism the group responsible needs a new publicist

The redirected flightpath shown in the NYT graphic suggests that MH370 would have passed very close to the Royal Malaysian Air Force Academy and Training Centers near Aloh Setar & Ipoh on it's way into the Strait of Malacca.

Also, that flight path suggests the 777 would have entered Hat Yai's airspace, a major international airport in southern Thailand.

It was reported that the last communication with the plane was by a private pilot deep into Vietnam airspace on his way to Japan? (ie, extremely far from the Strait of Malacca).

The hypoxia-related Helios #522 crash in 2005 is super-unsettling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

Air Crash Investigations episode on the crash: http://youtu.be/HLN5D4lOlos

Yeah terrorism doesnt jibe with me. Whats the point if no one knows what happened, and (it seems) no one's claimed responsibility?

As to:
Meanwhile this sounds weird.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/Airline-probing-report-2-visited-cockpit-in-2011-5306680.php

I'd suggest ignoring this. A Current Affair is a trashbloid show with about as much rigor as Fox News.

Still, there is the photo.

lol we had (maybe have?) a current affair here. alot of this stuff - passports, passengers that didn't board - seems like real blind alleys. at some point something about some of the passengers will become known and ppl will give it significance only cuz it's a new piece of information where information is lacking. airplane crashes can take forever to get figured out even when they know pretty quickly what happened on a basic level to the plane (even when it crashes on land) and ppl hate not knowing everything and knowing it immediately so there's gonna be theories conspiracy and otherwise for years to come no matter what sad simple explanation it does ultimately turn out to be. ppl still have theories about the mary celeste.

Man that Helios info is tough to take. They just had to switch the cabin pressurization to auto.

i always wonder about that person they thought they saw trying to regain control of the aircraft just when it became too late

I'm pretty sure all the hypoxic flights listed in this thread:
A) remained at cruising altitude...
B) in an auto-piloted vector (and some into holding patterns at destination!) until crashing...
C) with a constant presence of ATC surveillance and/or scrambled jet pursuit.

MH370 is 0/3 of those criteria as it:
A) descended under civilian radar ceiling of 30k feet ~1 hour into flight
B) took a nearly 180 degree reverse turn just prior to transponders being disabled (manually or via malfunction), travelling several hundred miles off course for ~1 hour
C) went radio silent

A small Malaysian news outlet ran a story that people on the EAST* coast of Malayasiar Peninsula heard jet screaming in the middle of the night:
http://www.thesundaily.my/news/983037

*the opposite side of the Malaysiar Peninsula that current search is being performed.

It is unclear why the contact from the west coast, if correct, was not made public until now. Asked on Monday why crews were searching the strait, the country's civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, told reporters: "There are some things that I can tell you and some things that I can't."

Malaysian officials have given ambiguous, inaccurate and at times directly contradictory information since the aircraft's disappearance, raising concerns among families of the passengers.

Adding to the confusion, Tengku Sariffuddin Tengku Ahmad, a spokesman for the prime minister's office, said in a telephone interview that he had checked with senior military officials, who told him there was no evidence that the plane had recrossed the Malaysian peninsula, only that it may have attempted to turn back.

If that report from Mangar is true, then the plane would have been traveling due east to cross the Peninsular from Marang and end up in Pulau Perak (where the RMAF admitted today they tracked the plane to).

It would have been radically off course to be heading back to KL as some have theorized and instead more in line with Northern Sumatra, Indonesia or even Sri Lanka... and who knows how low the plane would have to be flying to have audible jet screaming noise but it is estimated the plane traveled 350miles/600km after losing contact with ATC.

I know that's a stretch as there could be alternate reasons for loud jet like noises in Marang that happened to coincide with the timeline... nor has the RMAF been upfront with their information.

re: conspiracy theories, yeah, check this part of the Helios wikiw:

Suspicions that the aircraft had been hijacked were ruled out by Greece's foreign ministry. Initial claims that the aircraft was shot down by the fighter jets have been refuted by eyewitnesses and the government.[citation needed]

Malaysia's air force chief has denied an earlier media report that the military last tracked a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner over the Strait of Malacca, far west from where it last made contact with civilian air traffic control when it disappeared four days ago.

I've been following the sprawling flyertalk thread on this and it's crazy that we still have almost no confirmed information of any kind about what might have happened.

An updated version of the last link I posted, which takes into account the latest developments:

http://www.lowyat.net/2014/03/was-there-a-problem-with-the-mh370-boeing-777-200-aircraft/

Possible life raft from missing plane found off of Port Dickson, 100km SOUTH of Kuala Lumpur.

http://www.nst.com.my/latest/font-color-red-missing-mh370-font-hopes-as-fishermen-find-life-raft-near-pd-1.509222

yeah and they lost it, dumbasses. -_- no info yet, but hopefully they'll send divers down to retrieve it soon (that's the paper I work for btw, and our reporter there has already got on a boat out to the location.)

the straits of malacca are notorious for having all kinds of weird crap in it though - won't be surprised if it was a life raft from a boat or a ship. I asked a flight attendant friend and he said he couldn't tell from the pic whether it was something that could have come from a plane.

another dead end :( :(

MALACCA: The life raft found 10 nautical miles from Port Dickson town on Tuesday is not from the missing MH370 aircraft said Kuala Linggi Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) enforcement head, Captain Abu Bakar Idris.

They've clarified the conflicting reports about the east and west coast signals detected:

1. Plane disappeared from air traffic control over the Gulf of Thailand at 1.30 am.
2. An unidentified aircraft, that they believe but can't confirm was MH370, was detected by the military's primary radar at 2.15 am, 200miles north of Penang, indicating the possibility of a turn back. They're currently comparing notes with other agencies including NTSB to determine the aircraft's identification, and continuing the search in the Malacca Straits based on that possibility.

Since nobody knows fuckall about anything I guess it doesn't hurt to post some rumors

http://i.imgur.com/CTuTaCo.jpg

Everyone loves a good yarn

It seems like the Gulf of Thailand has been searched pretty thoroughly by now. Makes it seem more likely that it did veer off course and continued (perhaps on autopilot) for some distance before crashing.

could make sense if it *did* pass through some controlled airspace or another and out of pride or embarrassment the slip up isn't being revealed

Think I found it. Can you?

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-xlarge/18k34qxd52d21jpg.jpg

My understanding is that most commercial traffic control systems by default just display the transponder blips. They have to be manually switched to show raw radar blips. If that's the case and the transponder was switched off, then it wouldn't show up on most commercial flight tracking systems, although presumably military systems should have still caught it.

Apparently Vietnam sent a crew to check out that Vung Tau email lead and didn't find anything:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-11/malaysia-probes-hijack-to-sabotage-terror-not-ruled-out.html

Day 5.

How hard would it be to subpoena the cellular carriers' databases for last pings from the passenger's phones?

i feel like that info would be readily given up by everyone involved if it was deemed worthwhile?

I can't remember, do other countries insist you turn your phone off or put it in airplane mode? Not that everyone does, but that'd mean the last tower contact would be on the runway.

but there's a bunch of repeats of passenger's phones ringing while the plane was in the air, then not ringing a little later. Anecdotal, but still.

I saw an article that suggested only 25% of people turn their phone off or put it in flight mode. The plane may have been fitted with inflight cell service, although that makes it less likely that we're connecting to ground stations. It's worth a try and one might hope the authorities are doing so, but who knows.

I hadn't heard of this. There's an online crowdsourced campaign to tag satellite imagery of the area, though apparently the system is overloaded currently:

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_25327037/tomnod-campaign-missing-malaysian-jet?source=inthenews

A new update but...who knows?

http://gawker.com/the-chinese-government-has-released-satellite-images-sh-1542506193

The Chinese government has released satellite images of three floating pieces of debris that are believed to be from the missing Malaysian Airlines flight. The photos, taken on March 9, show the suspected wreckage in the South China Sea, just southeast of where Flight 370's transponder turned off.

There was a similar crowdsourced search set up on Amazon's Mechanical Turk for Steve Fossett's small plane when he disappeared in the eastern Sierras.