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

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the passport story is being published again and again because its all they have that could connect it to a crash (high jack/ suicide bomb) but i think its meaningless.

that is done on the daily to smuggle or try to enter a country illegally, i dont think they are terrorists. criminals yes.
 
f_399
the passport story is being published again and again because its all they have that could connect it to a crash (high jack/ suicide bomb) but i think its meaningless.

that is done on the daily to smuggle or try to enter a country illegally, i dont think they are terrorists. criminals yes.
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Wasn't the passport stuff just people trying to illegally immigrate?
 
axletramp
I think the Russians have stolen it to divert attention from the crisis in the Crimea.
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or divert the resources of multiple countries to 1 location as a part of a bigger plan

Agent_47
Wasn't the passport stuff just people trying to illegally immigrate?
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exactly

but its the only "real" fact and story they can lean on so they keep repeating it

there is no other news to break because there isn't any, the plane has not been found.
 
TenEightyOne
EDIT: Why are they searching the Malacca Straight? They must think it turned back quite some way, it should have exited to the top right of the map.

_73483790_china_malaysia_plane3_624.gif
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Update on THAT question... Reuters say the plane was tracked to there.

If you look at the map it should have exited to the top right of the picture (above the A of Vietnam). Instead it seems it was flying to the west, and was being tracked.

Given the story we heard the other day about one of the passengers Singaoporean cellphones being in contact, I wonder if the authorities are holding a lot more information from us.

I wonder if a dialogue had even taken place, or if air force jets had been sent to intercept. Certainly by the time it reached the Malacca straight it would have been clear that a potential hijacking was under way.

There's a lot more to this than we've been told, surely.
 
Agent_47
I'm starting to think that also.
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I was being stupid saying that the air force might have been present because then they'd know where the plane is.

A lot of this isn't adding up though.

To answer your question about visibility of the aircraft to tracking systems (and excluding military-capable ground, sea and satellite systems), it's on the previous page ;)

TenEightyOne
The thing with radar contact / vhf sight is that you can go to low altitude to evade that and therefore become 'invisible'. However, the plane is unlikely to have exceeded 2,500f/min descent and would have taken nearly 15 mins to achieve the required altitude.

Whatever altitude it was at the telemetry transmissions (via SATCOM, line-of-sight-to-ground not required) should have continued. They didn't, the logical conclusion seems to be that they were deliberately terminated (unlikely but not impossible) or that the aircraft was suddenly destroyed.
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Since I wrote that I'm starting to wonder how many of the auto transmissions were made and how complete the public information is. If it isn't complete then I'm sure that's for a very good reason.

One theory on Reuters and AP is that one of the passengers may have taken a large insurance policy or similar. I immediately thought they'd taken a leaf out of this thread's book and started working through mini-series/disaster-movies looking for clues...

EDIT: It's believed it was flying without emitting any transponder or otherwise and was spotted at around 30,000ft (5,000ft lower than its planned cruising altitude) by military radar over the straights of Malacca, about 150 miles off course.

That's not to say that it got much further than that, but this is becoming stranger and stranger.

The plane crossed back over Malaysia and headed out to sea without trying to make land or descend significantly, despite having an issue that rendered the transponder and radios inoperative. There must surely have been some human mal-intervention?
 
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Apparently the co-pilot of flight MH370 had invited a couple of hot chicks to the cockpit for the duration of a flight to KL in 2011, and even asked the girls to extend their stay in KL and join them on a night out... source. Not sure how common this kind of behaviour is, but it's pretty odd to say the least.
 
Touring Mars
Apparently the co-pilot of flight MH370 had invited a couple of hot chicks to the cockpit for the duration of a flight to KL in 2011, and even asked the girls to extend their stay in KL and join them on a night out... source. Not sure how common this kind of behaviour is, but it's pretty odd to say the least.
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Certainly very odd, and surely a dismissable offence.

What's more worrying is that it might go to the captain's "corruptibility".
 
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This whole thing is getting very odd, and I don't mean the "hot chicks in the cockpit" non-issue. Last time I remember a plane disappearing was 1983 and the cause was ... it was shot down. And of course the plane never disappeared. But those who knew what had happened didn't want to say what they had done.

Now, I'm not sure if there are any tensions in that area that might involve a trigger happy moron with a missile launcher, followed by a major cover up operation by the country he belongs to. But I just find it hard to believe that a plane went missing and nobody knows a thing about it.
 
Hun200kmh
But I just find it hard to believe that a plane went missing and nobody knows a thing about it.
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Sadly, we can't just monitor everything in the airspace all the time. Even in space we can see, we might not be able to completely identify what is being seen.

Rust disappeared from the Finnish air traffic control radar near Sipoo. Air traffic control presumed an emergency and a rescue effort was organized, including a Finnish Border Guard patrol boat. They found an oil patch near the place where Rust disappeared from radar and performed an underwater search with no results. Rust was later fined about €77,500 ($104,803 USD) for this effort. The origin of the oil patch remains unknown.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_B-47_disappearance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aerial_disappearances
 
Agent_47
Maybe it disintegrated under circumstances similar to the 1986 Challenger disaster.
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If it disintegrated or exploded at high altitude there should be wreckage across a wide area and someone should have found something by now.

If it remained intact until the crash (or even managed to pull off an emergency landing on the water?) and then sank most of the plane would be intact and wreckage would be spread over a small area, much harder to find.

If there was a hijack, they might have forced the plane off course and headed straight out on the ocean where it ran out of fuel and crashed. Like Ethiopa Flight 961.



Or there could be an instrument error where the autopilot got the plane into a stall due to incorrect airspeed data or something like that. Like Air France 447 that crashed in the Atlantic ocean a few years ago.
 
Exorcet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aerial_disappearances
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From your list, the peculiar case of the jet fighter vanished from radar while chasing a UFO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Moncla


Meanwhile, back on topic:
(Reuters) - Malaysia's military believes a jetliner missing for almost four days turned and flew hundreds of kilometers to the west after it last made contact with civilian air traffic control off the country's east coast, a senior officer told Reuters on Tuesday.

In one of the most baffling mysteries in recent aviation history, a massive search operation for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER has so far found no trace of the aircraft or the 239 passengers and crew.

Malaysian authorities have previously said flight MH370 disappeared about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur for the Chinese capital Beijing.

"It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait," the senior military officer, who has been briefed on investigations, told Reuters.

That would appear to rule out sudden catastrophic mechanical failure, as it would mean the plane flew around 500 km (350 miles) at least after its last contact with air traffic control, although its transponder and other tracking systems were off.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/11/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140311

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Moncla
 
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Blitz24
So then they should be looking towards the Andaman Sea?
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Exactly!

Why was a 40-ship, 35-airplane search mounted in the South China Sea when all the time the Malaysian military knew perfectly well that the flight was in the Straits of Malacca? This is weird. Does the right hand not speak with the left hand in Malaysia?
 
It's possible that the Malaysian military did not actually realise MH370 was on their radar. There is so much air traffic that it could have passed by unnoticed until someone went back and looked through the data. After all, they had no real reason to look towards the Strait of Malacca until just recently.
 
Dotini
Exactly!

Why was a 40-ship, 35-airplane search mounted in the South China Sea when all the time the Malaysian military knew perfectly well that the flight was in the Straits of Malacca? This is weird. Does the right hand not speak with the left hand in Malaysia?
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So Team Malaysia finds it first. It would look bad if lets say a crew from the Philippines found it first.

/sarcasm

That is a good question, how much time, money, equipment hours... were wasted looking at the wrong spot?

There is a huge 777 flying over your country off course... intruder alert?
 
f_399
So Team Malaysia finds it first. It would look bad if lets say a crew from the Philippines found it first.

/sarcasm
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Would sort of say a lot of things (all negative) about the capabilities of both Malaysia and Thailand.

I'm not sure if 350 miles would do anything but put it in Thai or even Myanmar airspace. I'm not even sure 350 miles would put it on land because there is no telling what direction it was flying after it left the Strait of Malacca.
 
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f_399
That is a good question, how much time, money, equipment hours... were wasted looking at the wrong spot?
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Everyone has 20/20 hindsight.

The plane's transponder cut out just south of Vietnam. It is generally agreed that one of the only things that could have caused that to happen is a total catastrophe mid-flight. Therefore, the logical conclusion is to search the area south of Vietnam, until evidence comes to light that suggests the contrary.

To suggest that the Malaysians have known for days that they were searching the wrong area is misleading and irresponsible. They are currently looking in the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea, which is getting towards Bangladeshi, Indian and even Sri Lankan territorial waters - over a thousand kilometers away.
 
CNN just had an interview with a US Navy commander, who said that the US Navy started searching for the missing plane in the Straits of Malacca two days ago. The Navy commander said that they were informed by the Malaysians that there was a good chance that the plane had turned and headed in that direction and therefore their search should include the Straits of Malacca.

GTsail
 
See? So it's not as if the Malaysians decided "well, hey, we've got this evidence, so maybe we should think about perhaps doing something about it if we have the time".
 
CNN are reporting that the loss of ACAS and transponders would have had to be either catastrophic or intentional.
The plane was radar tracked to the Malacca Strait and the transponders and ACAS were lost near the Vietnam coast.

On the surface it might seem that intention could well be in play. But maybe the catastrophe involved loss of electrical power but rudimentary flight control were maintained.
 
Dotini
Why was a 40-ship, 35-airplane search mounted in the South China Sea when all the time the Malaysian military knew perfectly well that the flight was in the Straits of Malacca? This is weird. Does the right hand not speak with the left hand in Malaysia?
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Not quite, if you notice a couple of days ago I asked why they were searching that side of Malaysia, not the side where the plane went missing.

It turns out that Malaysia's in a difficult legal position; they can't assume command of the inquiry until it's known whose jurisdiction the aircraft has ended up in. Either there are some problems moving the data or, because the 'Malaccan' track is from a military source, they didn't want to say too much.

@eran0004 the Air France flight continued to broadcast normal SATCOM feed all the way to the sea. The 777 hasn't done this since last contact, which is very very strange, particularly given the length of controlled flight it subsequently made. Even with no instruments the pilots shouldn't have had too much trouble navigating

@Hun200kmh they were at 35,000 feet over sea. Never say never... but it wasn't a stray missile launcher, unless it was on a fighter jet ;)

@AGENT47 more likely to be similar to Columbia than Challenger, the Challenger accident was caused by the failure of a one-time component on the SRB just after launch. Columbia broke up due to airframe heating caused by damage to the ram shield. That kind of event just doesn't happen on normal service aircraft, Columbia was an edge-of-the-art prototype.

@Dotini CNN should read this thread, seems there are enough aircraft nuts/pilots/engineers to get to the news two days before them :D
 
A lightning strike from a strong thunderstorm, previously reported in the area, could conceivably have overloaded and fried the 777's electrics and so disabled the transponder. With fried electrics the 777 is still flyable, and could have made it back to Malacca Straits, and maybe well beyond. That's my guess.

The Chinese are not happy with the performance of the Malaysian search for the plane. CNN is expressing open frustration and skepticism with officials there, and our esteemed Congressman Peter King has said the Malaysians have dropped the ball at every level, and should have scrambled fighter jets.
 
Dotini
A lightning strike from a strong thunderstorm, previously reported in the area, could conceivably have overloaded and fried the 777's electrics and so disabled the transponder. With fried electrics the 777 is still flyable, and could have made it back to Malacca Straits, and maybe well beyond. That's my guess.

The Chinese are not happy with the performance of the Malaysian search for the plane. CNN is expressing open frustration and skepticism with officials there, and our esteemed Congressman Peter King has said the Malaysians have dropped the ball at every level, and should have scrambled fighter jets.
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It's hard to think of many circumstances that fit what we know now, I think the main theories have to be hijacking or some kind of super-frying of all the electronics... and of the two the first is still the more plausible to me. All very weird, still doesn't add up.

I saw some footage of the Vietnamese navy search, it was an old man squinting out of the most derelict helicopter I've ever seen in my life. This search could end up being very bad for the local area's crash stats.
 
Agent_47
Maybe it disintegrated under circumstances similar to the 1986 Challenger disaster.
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A manufacturing error, that just pops up 16 years after the thing had been flying, if only the challenger could have been so lucky...sadly that's not how those type of things work and if it did those great adventurers wouldn't have lost their lives perhaps.

Anyways the chances of a plane doing what the challenger did 2 hours into flight compared to 70+ seconds, is unlikely and different situations really.

Dotini
A lightning strike from a strong thunderstorm, previously reported in the area, could conceivably have overloaded and fried the 777's electrics and so disabled the transponder. With fried electrics the 777 is still flyable, and could have made it back to Malacca Straits, and maybe well beyond. That's my guess.

The Chinese are not happy with the performance of the Malaysian search for the plane. CNN is expressing open frustration and skepticism with officials there, and our esteemed Congressman Peter King has said the Malaysians have dropped the ball at every level, and should have scrambled fighter jets.
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What would fighter jets have done??? What the hell is that congressman smoking...
 
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Dotini
With fried electrics the 777 is still flyable, and could have made it back to Malacca Straits, and maybe well beyond. That's my guess.
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Then why make for Malacca? That's a major deviation, a thousand kilometres out of their way. Why not go back to Kuala Lumpur, or divert to Bangkok or Phuket or Saigon or Hong Kong or Phnom Penh or Singapore? MH370 had no reason to be over the Strait of Malacca, least of all in the event of an incident that caused damage to the plane. Standard operating procedure would be to put the plane down at the nearest available runway.

As for beyond the Strait of Malacca, you have Indonesia's Aceh province and then the Indian Ocean to the south and west; to the north, you wind up over the Andaman Sea and start heading out towards India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

A map:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/linkableblob/5314954/data/missing-plane-map-malaysia-airlines-data.png
 
Presuming that all the electronics somehow failed (the radio can be manually patched to any power source, so presumably there are none in this scenario) the pilots are flying the aircraft 'blind', presuming that they have sufficient control authority. They wouldn't make it 350miles without, so they have some system control.

They would have been able to see cities on land very easily and would know that flying in without radio contact should launch investigative fighters who would guide them in once the situation was made apparent.

They should be also be able to see enough stars to navigate by (Nautical Lesson #1) - providing that the windshield was clear. In the BA ash-cloud flight the windshield was rendered opaque by the "sandblast" effect. There has been significant volcanic activity in Java, which is only about 8 centimetres away on Google Maps. That said, I can't imagine the ash cloud has stayed up for three weeks, hidden unseen on a major airway and then just dropped on one plane.

The flight towards Malacca was surely deliberate, as the cessation of the aircraft's transponders and transmitters must have been.

If there was a total accidental failure of the aircraft systems that still left it able to fly 350m they would have made landfall. They crossed land to get to their last known position.
 
How can we be sure that the blip identified over the Strait of Malacca was this particular flight if the transponder wasn't sending the usual 'Polo' to the secondary radar's 'Marco'?
This particular airship over the Strait was only identified with primary radar - which means the plane, AFAIK, wasn't factually identified as the flight itself. Not that I've heard so far anyway.

It seems from whatever evidence (or lack thereof) we have that the plane must be still intact; but where? There is a crowdsourced global satellite-search on - hope something comes of this.

We will find it. Eventually. I am confident of that.
I have many books in my library that detail missing craft including several volumes on the Bermuda Triangle. However - times have changed; we have the kind of technology now that is far superior to locating 'missing things' than during the time the Triangle was always in the news about the latest missing craft in that area to make the list of 'ghost' ship or airplane.

My sympathies to the many people who are suffering the anxiety of missing friends and family - and, I suppose somewhat childlike, I can only hope for the best.
 

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