MH370: Malaysian Airlines Flight to Beijing carrying 239 people is lost over sea.

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Here's an article explaining the situation a bit more.

Something about steering the plane to avoid radar detection. Pretty sure I said something about that haha.

I spoke to one of the private jet captains here at work about it yesterday. He confirmed that the portion of the planned flight over sea would have indeed been done without radar contact, just like flights from North American to Europe. In that region of the world, you'd be lucky if there were any civilian radar stations at locations other than the major international airports. Because of the lack of radar and the use of radio position reports, the idea of military jets intercepting an unresponsive plane isn't practical and probably wouldn't happen as it would over land with better radar coverage. In fact, when at high altitude without a transponder signal a civilian radar operator might have mistaken the target as a military plane since there would be no ident information.

As it turns out, many private jets and airliners have automatic data gathering and/or reporting systems for the engines themselves, which report either to the engine manufacturer or the plane operator via satellite. In the case of this 777 it's a separate system that can't be turned off. Thank god for Rolls Royce's system or we may never have made a breakthrough.

Honestly, I'm annoyed by the fact that it took the participation of American investigators to put "sketchy business" at the top of the list of things that could've happened. This whole situation stunk of it from the beginning but Malaysia wasn't willing to admit it.
 
Found this ( the Pilot of MH370 - Zaharie Ahmad, home X-Sim rig ) :eek:

ZaharieMH370PilotXsimrig.jpg


This picture is a flight simulator system that was set up by the pilot of MH370, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah. He has been flying since 1981 with 18,365 hours clocked. He is certainly no beginner when it comes to piloting a Boeing 777 with Malaysia Airlines.

He once posted on x-sim forums before, and attached this picture. The x-sim forum is a DIY motion simulator community.


"Elo guys,
zaharie here.... pls to join x-sim. About a month ago I finish assembly of FSX and FS9 with
6 monitors .... with the latest graphic card ( 2 pieces of asus 7970) on one cpu awesome view on 3 panasonic 32 in. LCD HDMI
and 3 touchscreen Dell 21 inches for main (MCP) , center pedestal, overhead panel.
time to take to the next level of simulation.Motion! looking for buddies to share this passion.
Capt Zaharie Ahmad Shah"
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He's a pilot with close to 20,000 hours' experience. It would be more suspicious if he didn't have something like that.
Keef
Honestly, I'm annoyed by the fact that it took the participation of American investigators to put "sketchy business" at the top of the list of things that could've happened. This whole situation stunk of it from the beginning but Malaysia wasn't willing to admit it.
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The Americans were in the Andaman Sea two days after the flight vanished. And the Malaysians publicly admitted that they were looking at a hijacking by the crew as an avenue of investigation after four days. So they have dropped hints here and there.

I suspect they knew early on that the plane had been hijacked, but did not have enough information on where it might be, and so they made a show of the search to bait the hijackers into relaxing and doing something that would show their hand.
 
If the plane has been hijacked I wonder what the intentions are for the aircraft and the hostages. I doubt this is about money, there are better and less risky ways to hold people to ransom (as any Nigerian pirate will tell you).

Was the plane transporting someone or something of value?

Could the plane be used as a way to deliver explosives or some other chemical weapon? Seems unlikely considering that everyone is on the lookout for the aircraft. It it did take off again would it be tracked?

Was the plane stolen so that its inner workings could be examined possibly for a future hijacking?

I'm still leaning towards a possible suicide by the pilot but why would he turn off the transponders?

Could the plane have been hijacked but ultimately crashed in to a remote region by the pilot as a way of avoiding a terrorist incident?
 
Is it just me or is it quite obvious that the Malaysian government is holding back information or are they just acting like a bunch of complete tools?
 
playnthru
If the pilot practiced alternate routes on his simulator PC. Would that information still be stored in the PC itself?
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I think that's a bum steer, the pilot didn't need to "practice other routes". As I'm sure @Keef will agree; with a medium degree of skill you should be able to fly into any procedure-controlled field.

As a heavy pilot he'd be able to navigate wherever he was told to.

My money is on the recently-converted co-pilot (to 777, that is), if one of the flight crew are invovled.

I haven't seen any suggestion that the plane was hidden from radar? Does anyone have a source for that?
 
Keef
The article I posted mentioned that the plane was possibly flown on a path that avoided radar contact. All my mentions of actively being hidden from radar were my own speculation.
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Fair enough, there's so much info/disinfo around I'm only reading sources :D

I think hiding the plane on radar's too risky, I still like my hypotheses where they assume a new visible identity. I still can't think of a way that that wouldn't work. I'm pretty sure everyone's ruled out a crash now (unless it crashed after the deliberate departure, which is less likely to be due to accident than interference).
 
The ACARS was turned off before the final "all right, goodnight" was given, someone had to do this. Whoever's voice is on the recording is already taken control as a hostile. Odds are it's the pilot or co-pilot until otherwise proven(IMO).
 
Dennisch
Is it just me or is it quite obvious that the Malaysian government is holding back information or are they just acting like a bunch of complete tools?
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They may be holding back information on request of the US government (or anyone else) so as not to jeopardize a potential anti-terrorist investigation. Just a thought.
 
mattythedog
They may be holding back information on request of the US government (or anyone else) so as not to jeopardize a potential anti-terrorist investigation. Just a thought.
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That's kind of where we'd got to, I think a lot more early reports were genuine than the authorities are now admitting to. Certainly the consensus in here (and the only better-qualified thread seems to be at airliner net :) ) is that a lot of things that should have happened apparently did, except now we hear they didn't.

The only explanation for a didn't is that the plane was catastrophically lost on its intended flight path. It seems certain (within the normal boundaries of doubt) that the wreckage would have been found by now.

My theory; The Malaysians are playing patsy while the Chinese and US (two countries with publicly anti-Islaamic agendae) desperately try to find the aircraft that may target one of their financial centres.

playnthru
The ACARS was turned off before the final "all right, goodnight" was given, someone had to do this. Whoever's voice is on the recording is already taken control as a hostile. Odds are it's the pilot or co-pilot until otherwise proven(IMO).
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ACARS wouldn't normally carry voice, it's a predefined set of data packets that hold telemetry data. Voice packets wouldn't usually be part of that. An ACARS transmission is under a second long an only occurs every n minutes (usually 15 or 30).
 
eran0004
As a thought-experiment: How do you land a Boeing 777 without anyone noticing?
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Find an airfield, if you want to take off again you'll need a heavy. If you're prepared to trash the plane (weaken airframe, overspool engines, crush the gear) then you can land pretty much anywhere that'll take the tyres.

The best bet is a cargo field, these are everywhere across Asia, no passengers, just hangars, runways and truck terminals.

Fly the plane to one of these with a new transponder code on a flight plan you already filed. Put it in a hangar, change the appearance, fly it out.

As I said before; ATC never eyeball the plane, and at a busy cargo hub (on your follow-on flights) noone looks at the planes, it's just a sky-yard.
 
TenEightyOne
Find an airfield, if you want to take off again you'll need a heavy. If you're prepared to trash the plane (weaken airframe, overspool engines, crush the gear) then you can land pretty much anywhere that'll take the tyres.

The best bet is a cargo field, these are everywhere across Asia, no passengers, just hangars, runways and truck terminals.

Fly the plane to one of these with a new transponder code on a flight plan you already filed. Put it in a hangar, change the appearance, fly it out.

As I said before; ATC never eyeball the plane, and at a busy cargo hub (on your follow-on flights) noone looks at the planes, it's just a sky-yard.
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The cargo field sounds plausible I suppose. But it would require some nerve! Wouldn't the risk of being detected be too big to gamble?

I feel like I want to write a novel now...
 
eran0004
Wouldn't the risk of being detected be too big to gamble?
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A plot like this takes money. You or I could hire a hangar at a cargo field, fly a plane in. Remember that we can make it all seem legit by having a plan, announcing ourselves to ATC and squawking their code.

If you choose to land with all transmissions off then that's doable because ILS, VOR and GPS are all passive - you receive the signal and don't have to send anything back.

Here's one problem with the plan... why not just take a cargo plane? Hmmm...
 
According to CNN and other reports, the flight must have been on either a northern corridor to, roughly, Kazakhstan, or else on southerly corridor to vast, open reaches of the Indian Ocean.

If to the south, the plane must surely be underwater at this time. Unless US/Australia has facilitated a landing on the Australian mainland.

If to the north, the flight path will have been over the Tibetan Plateau and Xinjiang region of China. This implies the plane will have appeared on Chinese military radars, and therefore China, by holding its peace, is complicit in the commandeering of the aircraft.
 
TenEightyOne
A plot like this takes money. You or I could hire a hangar at a cargo field, fly a plane in. Remember that we can make it all seem legit by having a plan, announcing ourselves to ATC and squawking their code.

If you choose to land with all transmissions off then that's doable because ILS, VOR and GPS are all passive - you receive the signal and don't have to send anything back.

Here's one problem with the plan... why not just take a cargo plane? Hmmm...
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Well, if you hijack a plane it's not the actual plane that you want. It's usually because you want publicity and because you want a hostage. With a cargo plane you don't get any hostage and as a result you get less publicity as well.

Of course, it wouldn't make any sense to just disappear, if you want publicity you want people to know that you hijacked the plane. Unless they want to create a mystery and then show up two weeks later with all the hostage for maximum dramatic effect. But there is no Oscar award for most dramatic hijack of the year, and just a standard hijack would get you worldwide publicity as it is, so I don't really understand that strategy.
 
One thing that's bugging me about a map on the Beeb... it shows an orange line showing the "potential position from last-known satellite data". But if that's satellite data then why isn't it an x/y position rather than simply a range?

I dressed it up in Photoshop just to get a better feel for where the center of the circle was, looks like the data could actually actually be a range-to-plane from one of the islands there?

From that I presume they worked out the range of the aircraft and retained the part of the range-from-monitoring-device that it could have physically reached.


Satellite.jpg



Original map at Beeb;

_73602229_possible_plane_area3_624(3).jpg
 
TenEightyOne
One thing that's bugging me about a map on the Beeb... it shows an orange line showing the "potential position from last-known satellite data". But if that's satellite data then why isn't it an x/y position rather than simply a range?
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It's a range from a satellite to the Rolls-Royce engine sending out a handshake signal. No x/y coordinate is possible without another satellite also ranging the RR. These coordinates may well be known, but currently held classified.
 
Dotini
It's a range from a satellite to the Rolls-Royce engine sending out a handshake signal. No x/y coordinate is possible without another satellite also ranging the RR.
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Conical looking-down range, this must be the Inmarsat signal... I see now. Cool, brain de-fuddled again, thank you :D

I'd love to know what data was really being carried, the 'ping' is actually a normal transmission with just the ID packet in it. If you're sending that then you may as well send some base data... but I guess it depends on the different Service Level Agreements for the airlines (and their cost).

I've never ever seen Lost so I might have to do some catch-up :D
 
Dotini
If to the north, the flight path will have been over the Tibetan Plateau and Xinjiang region of China. This implies the plane will have appeared on Chinese military radars, and therefore China, by holding its peace, is complicit in the commandeering of the aircraft.
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Famine
Or Chinese intelligence wanting someone to disappear without overtly killing them.

Anyway. Langoliers. I've solved it, we can all go home.
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Imagine if the plane could reach an highly militarised, low population density region of China...
 

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