I am not enthusiastic about jumping into speculation land, but I would be interested in knowing if the possibility of this being a accident followed by auto pilot is possible or totally disproven
My default assumption was they took off, an accident occurred that damaged cockpit and forced a turnaround, the damage was so great that the crew were unable to survive and turned on autopilot to stop an immediate crash, which then flew for seven hours till fuel ended, presumably with passengers pounding on the locked and hardened cockpit door.
So whilst I am in wild speculation territory I would like to know if there are some experts who might be able to say "bird strikes cannot disable radios" or "oxygen canisters do not leak" or "stewardesses can open the cockpit door" or some such.
I tend towards cockup not conspiracy myself.
(I recognise I may have missed discussions covering this and apologise if it is obvious)
I'm not familiar with the inner workings of planes, but from what I've gathered, the timing of disabling the two tracking systems, which are on either end of the plane, is just about the same time it takes to get from one end of the plane to the other, and disable the 2nd tracking system (blackbox).
Therefore, it would be a great coincidence that both of these tracking systems would be disabled at the same time. It seems therefore that the most logical explanation is foul play.
I thought/hoped the same as you, that some sort of failure resulted in the tracking systems failing as well, and then the plane crashed, but it sadly doesn't seem as likely given the timing of events.
So you say the pilot does not have switches in the cockpit to turn equipment on or off? They have to WALK through the whole plane to turn devices on or off?! Bollocks.
The black box is in the tail of the plane, it doesn't make any sense to wire it through the whole plane so the pilot can switch it off from the cockpit.
I have no problem with your questioning my logic and my response, as I'm not expert, but keep your bollocks to yourself.
Wishful thinking. Aircraft are designed to be operated by professional crews -- not ex-convicts on work release. So, there are accessible circuit breakers to turn various things off.
I did some research on this, expecting to find a breaker labeled "CVR" on the diagram of 777 cockpit circuit breakers. Instead I found this: "the practicalities of isolating the power from the CVR fitted to the B777 are not
straightforward since the CVR circuit breaker is located
in the electronics bay of the arcraft instead of on the
flight deck. Access to the electronics bay from within
the aircraft is via a hatch in the cabin floor adjacent to the front left door of the aircraft"
@danford was asserting that he didn't think there would be switches in the cockpit that allowed all tracking devices to be turned off. Are you countering his statement? Can you provide a citation?
the pilots were shortly on the radio after the deactivation of ACARS (a signalling system). while this doesn't completely disprove your theory about the autopilot it still hints towards malicious intent.
There would have been calls/texts/tweets/facebook posts from the passengers if they were aware that something terrible was happening whether accidental or intentional.
If there was indication that something was awry the passengers would have had plenty of time before reaching the open ocean to use various forms of communication.
We are almost on the same page: here's my theory purely based on what I read!
1.Something happened like explosive decompression, Explosive decompression occurs at a rate swifter than that at which air can escape from the lungs, typically in less than 0.1 to 0.5 seconds.Everybody onboard(including pilots) would have died in less than a second due to castrophic mechanical failure which caused explosive decompression.
2.Plane was on autopilot there after ,nobody complained since nobody was alive.Fell silent into the ocean and rests there.
3.Plane blewup and disintegrated just like an endevaour....leaving only ash...nothing was left.
4.I dont know why boeing company is not talking about this much, they just are silent ....the biggest benefactor if pilot theory is right is boeing.Boeing benefits alot if its pilot error which caused the incident.
5.Boeing looses a lot if its mechanical or structural or some design failure...."The longer-range 777-300ER and 777-200LR variants entered service in 2004 and 2006 respectively"...they are relatively new...however malaysian airlines is boeing 777-200ER 1997 release...is it possible to have some structural or design or mechanical failure which caused explosive decompression...even pilots die in less than a second...if it occurs.
6.Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Cracks Found in the Wings of 40 New...this clearly shows even the latest 787 is not safe leave alone an old plane like boeing 777-200ER.
7.If its done deliberately by some pilot why nobody is claiming credit for it...ofcourse he wouldnt have done it for himself.
The whole media is trying to protect the company "boeing" by showing pilot has conspirators...I cannot see even 1% of people questioning boeing the company...
Latest Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Cracks Found in the Wings of 40 New....
Nearly half of your "theory" (which isn't based off of any sort of clinically proven fact, btw) is incorrect.
First, the 777 is not an "old" plane. It's a very reliable and advanced aircraft with tons of redundancy; things don't just fail nowadays like they used to. Despite its age, there is absolutely zero reason why there should be a structural or mechanical failure. These aircraft aren't Chevrolets, they're built to stand up to daily abuse that they will likely never experience during their lifetime. Tell that to UPS and FedEx, which are still using 727s from the 70s.
Explosive decompression, even if it did happen, does not kill instantly. See also: Aloha Flight 243. Again, the 777 has very advanced pressurization systems. No reason that it should have killed everyone immediately.
Disintegration should have left debris. There was none.
Also, your statement about the 787 is irrelevant and misleading. The cracks found in the wings are hairline, and are caused by its composite construction. Things like this occur during the birth of an aircraft and get ironed out over the years, just like software. The 787 has nothing to do with the 777, which is a tried-and-true metal aircraft, and as I've reiterated before, age is irrelevant in these types of things. There has not been a single 777 fatality to date except the SFO Asiana disaster last year, which was caused by pilot error. The 777 seems to be a fairly bulletproof aircraft.
Conspiracy theories aren't really the best approach to anything. Boeing has proven itself with the 777, and the 787 is a revolutionary design that will have some problems, just like the first jet engines did in the 50s.
Let's leave the speculation to the NTSB and just tell who we love we love them. It's no use twisting around old evidence or constructing conspiracy theories at this point.
Morbius: Thank you for accepting atleast 50% of my theory was wrong...may be u r conceding that 50% might be right.That's good enough for me.
Here's where I got it almost right: "2.Plane was on autopilot there after ,nobody complained since nobody was alive.Fell silent into the ocean and rests there"
The plane according to most was found near indian ocean some 2000 kms...it flew on autopilot for 7 hours.
>>Disintegration should have left debris. There was none.
Debris is found some 2500 kms away..now resting in the ocean.
Boeing is being sued by one law firm today:"4.I dont know why boeing company is not talking about this much, they just are silent ....the biggest benefactor if pilot theory is right is boeing.Boeing benefits alot if its pilot error which caused the incident."
>> No "consipracy theory here" its indeed looking more like mechanical failure and the pilots died due to depressurization...boeing should own responsibility.
I might be wrong abt 787 , it was too much stretch to bring two 787 and 777 together but they are from the same company, that is my point,boeing needs to own some responsibility for this kind of failure either mechanical or design failure. They have put an off switch for ACARS?..why did they have off switch in the first place? Is it not design failure?
Finally they have only 2 hours of recording of cockpit in blackbox for an international flight which might be flying 7 hours...?Explain that design failure...how can they only have 2 hour recording...even kid will tell 2 hours is not enough for 250 million price tag.
WRT 787, the cracks were a consequence of two things. The new(ish) production methods involved in the aircraft, and the absurdly aggressive outsourcing of the production. The 787 is (was?) in many ways at the bleeding edge of carbon fiber manufacture. Combine that with the stupid notion their management had of sending out 99% of manufacturing outside of final assembly to dozens of different companies (as a consequence of contractors sub-contracting work) meant that they didn't find the design flaws until late in the game. This particular 787 issue doesn't provide any evidence of potential issues with other aircraft.
I am off mark by bring 787 in this discussion may be but I must say 777 and 787 are same company, I cannot see not one time Boeing guys came out and spoke to media or press, its really disappointing.
We just have 2 companies monopoly of aircraft industry.....I am looking at young startups which will start in aircraft manufacturing industry and change the game.
The folks over at airliners.net have pointed out that the 777's collision avoidance system only works if both planes' transponders are turned on. That doesn't mean this scenario is impossible, but it does raise the level of sophistication required.
Sadly, I feel like whatever happened, the amount of sophistication involved increasingly points toward the involvement of one or more state actors. If that's the case, I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever find out what happened to this plane...
"points toward the involvement of one or more state actors"
I agree ... and so I think it's become useful to identify the skills and knowledge of each of the jet's passengers. You have to assume that, in this case, the plane was hijacked in order to obtain one of the passengers.
Or they were hijacking a plane to stuff it full of chemical weapons / radioactive material (think dirty bomb) with the intent of flying it over a major city and detonating it. It would be hard to do it in a western nation, but if you were aiming at a city near the "frontier" of India, Pakistan, etc. a bad actor could likely execute the plan before the jets they scramble could intercept the jet. There's a lot of bad stuff you could do with a flying metal tube capable of carrying 200,000 lbs of whatever you can get your hands on.
I don't think it was a state actor though. If it was a state actor, who would it have been? My bets are on Pakistan if it was a state actor; they're one of the only ones with a sophisticated enough intelligence organization to be able to hide a plane like this. In many cases, it's hard to tell where the ISI ends and the Taliban begins. Though the same could be said for Iran and Hezbollah, though the Iranian government has taken a reconciliatory tone with the west as of late and I don't think they'd risk it. It likely wasn't North Korea; the social engineering required would be too high and the North Koreans are largely incompetent at covert operations outside their borders due to their xenophobia. I don't think many other states with the capability to do something like this would risk it; the amount of publicity on this is too high.
If the plane was hijacked and successfully landed somewhere (and that's a big if -- IMO it's just as likely that it's at the bottom of the ocean and will never be found) it was probably a coordinated effort between a terrorist group and rogue elements within the Pakistani ISI. I don't think the older pilot was involved; there's been a lot made of his links to a controversial opposition leader in Malaysia, but his ideology doesn't align with any of the terror groups (Anwar Ibrahim is considered a liberal reformer) and all of the "controversy" around him is corruption-related -- not the type of thing that would cause someone to shift toward radical Islam.
Except your plan has one fatal flaw: assuming the plane was stolen to be used as a missile.
If this were ISI or a state level actor, the absolute riskiest part would be hijacking a plane in flight with passengers. You risk them uprising, getting the word out about the hijacking, and then you'd have to execute them once you land. Why not steal an empty plane at an airport or buy an older plane through an intermediary?
I don't think it was a state level actor. I think the most likely explanation in the event of a hijacking is rogue elements within the ISI (which is pretty common -- there are lots of factions within Pakistan, almost none of whose first loyalty is to the nation of Pakistan) providing cover and funding to a terrorist group. None of this would be unheard of; elements within the ISI protected bin Laden for years.
Stealing an empty plane from an airport would likely get you shot down before you made it 100 miles; air traffic is heavily controlled at passenger airports. If you want to break free of the air traffic system, you do it in the air over a sparsely populated and/or mountainous region. Older planes are expensive, especially large ones in working order with the range and cargo capabilities of a 777 (a working 777 would cost more than $200 million and be accompanied by a lot of paperwork.)
All of this is speculation anyway; we don't even know if it was hijacked or if it even landed if it was. It's just fun to play armchair intelligence analyst in the absence of good information.
Why steal a plane if you could just buy it (assuming state level actors can gain control over a shell company with an air operators' certificate; aircraft cost really isn't an issue when for scrap value you can get old 747s with plenty of range and capacity) or charter it (leaving you with only pilots to dispose of, probably on the ground, if you're looking to do something nefarious)?
The first rule of being an armchair intelligence analyst is to rule out the ridiculously silly, and "maybe they just wanted a 777-200" falls into that category along with "maybe those 9-11 planes were just a cover for a controlled demolition"
Why execute them when you can suffocate them at 45,000 feet? This is conspiracy theory gold even though I think it crashed.
My guess is that this bears the traits of the worst disasters, an unforeseeable and unique cascade of system failures that led to the pilots having some control of a crippled plane.
Stop creating FUD.
I don't really see why people have a way of connecting everything to Pakistan , To be honest you guys ISI more credit than it deserves. Their on ground "people intelligence" is good but they are not really that tech-savvy.
Also most of my family know about the aviation business ( father was a military Pilot then became a military ATCO now a Senior Civilian ATCO , Several relatives are Commercial Pilots for various Airlines) , And what they all think is that it was either {a fire and plane crashed in the ocean} or {the plane exploded in air} or {both}.
Seriously stop watching so much FOX.
If you steal a plane off the ground, it's a stolen plane. If you steal a plane out of the sky, it "obviously" crashed, just like we all thought for the first four or five days of this.
Anything they'd steal from within Pakistan is likely owned by people with strong ties to the Pakistani government. The kind of people who would have the connections to find out who did it and hold them personally accountable. You don't shit where you eat.
If you're trying to get one individual or even a group, STEALING A PLANE out of the air and drawing international scrutiny seems like a terrifically inefficient way of doing it.
But you'd have to know that cargo was going to be on board beforehand. From the sounds of it, the pilots were well prepared to execute this plan. Assuming of course this is even remotely what really happened.
Passenger lists would be known in advance. My guess is if they wanted some piece of material/cargo enough to pull off an operation like this, they would have just taken the cargo itself. It would presumably be something so valuable/unique that the owner wasn't going to just file a "missing baggage" claim. If it was about cargo, it would also seem that it would be more efficient to steal the cargo, and then blow up the plane. That would make the original owner of the item believe it was permanently lost/destroyed vs. being in this unknown state, and possibly giving the owner time to react or inform other governments.
Provided that the plane was deliberately flown in-tact to an unknown location, my personal guess would be that this was about 1 or more individuals on the plane specifically.
I also doubt it's about the plane itself. This specific plane is now a highly visible piece of equipment, and it would be fairly easy to obtain planes with similar load-bearing capacity in less obvious means.
Good point ... so someone should be going through the cargo manifests. If it was travelling with a person but as luggage, there's no guarantee the airline would know about it.
And so "they" hijack a plane to get these guys? Wouldn't it be easier to just kidnap them at gunpoint from their hotel?
The freescale connection is a total red herring. Either they intended to land/crash the plane somewhere and failed, or the plane was the target and it's now sitting in some deserted desert airstrip getting retrofitted for whatever mission it is intended for.
All that effort, and still no guarantee that they will actually work with you. Some may be willing to die, others might stealthily sabotage the product, etc. And if you can provide 20 freescale engineers with what they need to actually make something, you can probably just hire people normally.
Would an embargoed country like Iran consider them worth the risk? It would be a pretty serious international incident if they were found out. And if you hold the passengers too long, you can't claim "some crazy terrorist/spy/actor" was working without authorization and here are your people back.
"UPDATE - Monday, March 17, 2014 - 12:15 PM EST
Some have raised the statement that TCAS doesn’t work if the transponder is disabled… this is only partially correct. Other planes TCAS would NOT see MH370 at all. MH370 would not actively query other planes as it’s transponder is off HOWEVER it could still listen to any transponder output from other planes that are actively transmitting. SQ68 would have been actively transmitting while in-range of Subang ATC center.
Even if TCAS on MH370 wasn’t working for some reason, an in-expensive portable ADS-B receiver paired with an iPad and Foreflight app would allow a pilot to receive the ADS-B output being transmitted by SQ68 at that time."
> Even if TCAS on MH370 wasn’t working for some reason, an in-expensive portable ADS-B receiver paired with an iPad and Foreflight app would allow a pilot to receive the ADS-B output being transmitted by SQ68 at that time."
why do people underestimate what terrorist groups are capable of? Some have training from various countries and quite a few have financial and material backing.
If anything, the common theme on this site was to find every possible explanation other than terrorism. Sorry to be the party pooper, but there are people out there who operate without regard to our beliefs and at times love to exploit the stories we tell ourselves.
Yes, but I think what Herbig is saying is that the increased sophistication of assumptions means decreased likelihood that this was a deliberate hijacking. We get further away from Occam's razor in order to satisfy that.
As of yet we haven't seen any group take responsibility, no claims of hostages or anything remotely indicative of this. So if it was taken by a terrorist group, where is the terrorism they plan to conduct with it?
This is the kind of target that would have someone claiming responsibility. The plane wasn't from a country that's known for disproportionate responses to attacks(i.e. the US or Russia). I would figure that if any group actually did pull this off, they'd be making public announcements that they took down the plane, or were holding it for ransom.
Brace yourself, I'm going to go further into conspiracy land, but there's the possibility the end goal wasn't just to steal a plane for scrap metal, or to use it as a ride for the local fair. If that's the case, you'd want the world to continue thinking it disappeared in the ocean, and you don't want to raise any alarms by taking credit.
The 777 is a fairly common long distance aircraft. Would it be possible to give it a new paint job, and then in similar fashion to the OP, fly in the shadow of an existing flight?
For example, you paint it up like a Lufthansa 777, and then try to follow one of those flight paths at some point between London and New York. If anyone gets a visual on the mystery plane flying into US airspace, it looks like a commercial flight simply not responding. Not quite as suspicious as a jet or military aircraft. Would they shoot down a commercial 777 that's flying a standard route, with no indication of it being hijacked, or a threat?
I'll admit, the above idea is absurd, but this entire situation is making little sense. I hope we get some answers one day.
Edit: A lot of people are saying in other comments that hijacking a plane isn't an effective method of acquiring a 777, or stealing cargo, or kidnapping people. However, it's been 10 days, and we simply know the plane disappeared. That seems pretty effective, a 777, 230 passengers, and cargo, all gone, and no one even knows if they were targeted, or if the plane malfunctioned and crashed in the ocean. If any of the above were of value to someone, it wasn't only effective, it was near perfect.
I've had a feeling for several days, but I don't know if it is technically possible. After reading your post I wonder if it is possible to fly as high as possible until you reach the target and then you nose dive to the ground. I can't help thinking that the summit in The Hague next week would be a perfect opportunity if someone was planning such an act.
Aum Shinrikyo aerosolised and released anthrax for a week. They were caught. They didn't make any announcement about it. Announcing it a few days afterwards would have caused significant panic and distress.
(Luckily they used the "wrong" anthrax, so not much harm done).
The same organisation also did odd things in Australia. They made sarin and VX gas, tested that on sheep, and the. Used the gases in several assassinations.
They released sarin in Matsumoto, killing 8 people and harming 200. They didn't claim that attack.
Aum Shinrikyo are well funded, have smart people working for them, and are happy to murder people.
You mean "was", "had", and "were", since everybody connected with the sarin attacks is now arrested or dead. The rump "Aleph" group is a shadow of its former self, has renounced their predecessor's tactics, and is very heavily monitored.
Also, IIRC Aum never used anthrax (although they did stockpile it), only sarin and VX, which are chemical agents, not biological.
Well if anything, we are certainly doing a good job of telling future whack jobs just what to do if they want to try it.
China isn't exactly a country I would mess with, I think they would be about as restrained as Russia. Terrorist would expect a big response from them, or do they see them the same as pre-Bush US?
Even if they got the plane for later use, just trying to use it would be amazingly difficult. However we did tell them how we knew it flew so they do know what to knock out to fly it again.
As for claiming responsibility, disappearing a plane and not claiming it is simply amazing, do it twice and aviation will shut down in that part of the world, do it three times, well hell.
What would be the point in stealing a 777? There are not that many of them, really, and their history is usually recorded in extensive detail. I think it's unlikely in the extreme that anybody could successfully pass off the aircraft as their own without anybody noticing any inconsistencies.
Not sure if your question is rhethorical, but… a hijacking is when what you are stealing moves on its own (and you use that ability in the process of getting it). If you ask: When does a hi-jacking becomes a theft? as in: it still was a hijacking, but actually should be understood as a theft? Well, depending on what you mean: either when what is being carried inside is more valuable than the carrier (i.e. the hijacking was just a convenient way to get the thing) or, when, oppositely, the carrier is more valuable that what is being carried (and the hijacking was actually the theft of the vehicle, not its content).
In other words: Yes. I’m not sure what you meant, but the answer is yes.
Spot on, why would a terrorist guy hijack a plane, fly under the radar following another planes just to hide itself? They could just hijack the plane and fly straight to the target and crash into it 911 style...
Why do terrorists only get to be guys in caves? What was the difference between a pirate and a privateer in the 19th century? A government endorsement?
I think it's scary to think about the terrorist plots. If terrorist are capable of such feats as an undetected hijacking of an airliner, what else are they capable of? Putting their hands on some amount of nuclear waste? What kind of future plans other then the hijacking itself may include the airliner?
For two reasons: simplicity doesn’t really have a good metric to be minimised, not when it comes to unexpected, seemingly daring or irrational behaviour. Batman’s Jocker character provides tons of example of that, but more to the point at stake: some might see a plane cashing without a trace as complex, while others think hiding is hard. Some might see a highly normalised Relational table as simple, because it can be safely explored it it’s entire possibility space, while others prefer to have no norm, and one long list of untyped events, because its assumed structure is straightforward.
When it comes to likelihood and explanations, Dan Ariely has done tremendous work on explaining how a more detailed story, especially one pandering to our anecdotal prejudice, seems more likely: He commonly gives the example of how a shy person seems more likely to become a librarian than a factory worker but… ‘shy’ isn’t very specific trait, and the less glamorous option is ten times more likely overall, making the likelihood for a shy person to be screwing bolts far higher, dozens of times actually, than lending books.
There you have both: Are they terrorists? Are they skilled? Can pilots make mistakes? Both are unlikely events that may or may not match our experience, actually our mediated experience: few people have met active terrorist and lived (well, the same Dan Ariely is a known exception) or been flown by a bad pilot and been able to tell the story.
It's not complexity that they like, as much as a comfortable prejudice, that either Hollywood-grade airplane-acrobatics are common, or that horrible people are very cunning. You can quote statistics, but then again I don’t recommend it: you’ll become tedious, dull and insensitive before you are even done explaining your methodology about average-end-of-quality-of-life (death is too… binary) and how airplane catastrophies are actually generally positive.
I, for one, can’t get out of my head that there is an increasing disparity in every industry, especially all cultural ones, leading to PR becoming overly sophisticated, and that promoting a movie requires connexion to up to News casters (obviously, see all ‘promo’ segments) that might have been upped to pirates (for documenting Captain Philipps) therefore… this must be Liam Neeson promoting his latest action flick. That’s like, such a good idea I can’t believe no one has tried it earlier.
I'm looking at Russia, and thinking that it would be very convenient for them for Ukraine to drop off the news... which it largely did when this broke.
Now what could cause that - perhaps a good mystery. Everyone likes a good mystery.
Baikonur is a pretty f'ing good place to hide something like a 777, and is very proximal to the last possible position. Been there. Middle of nowhere. Airstrip is high security, remote, and has underground hangers. Local populace are very well versed in "I see nothing". It's also jurisdictionally weird, being a bit of Kaz rented to Russia as sovereign territory, meaning that any legal search would be very tricky to arrange to say the least.
Wait, you don't seriously think that Russia disappeared a Malaysian airliner (and hundreds of international citizens) to distract the world (?) from Crimea. That's just fucking absurd.
Oh, it's totally absurd - but what about this situation isn't?
It's pretty unlikely, though, given that it was loaded with Chinese nationals, and if they got rumbled... that'd be some fallout, hopefully just diplomatic.
The USA bombed Yugoslavia to distract the world from Bill Clinton fooling around with an intern. Putin plays to win and if he doesn't get caught, what's a couple hundred airline passengers to him?
Phil the Lewinsky affair (investigation/media sensation) went on literally for months and months (years?). Sit around long enough and the President of the US will do something that you can say "Look! A big decision. Clearly that's a distracting event!!" It's pretty intellectually weak buddy.
> The USA bombed Yugoslavia to distract the world from Bill Clinton fooling around with an intern.
That's a rather controversial claim. You could probably make the case that, instead, the Clinton Administration exploited the Right's obsession with the Lewinsky affair to drown out any serious domestic criticsm of its policy in Yugoslavia.
I don't hold much value to this theory for now, but it's not totally absurd given how many truthers think 9/11 was run by the US itself. This isn't as bad as that.
> Sadly, I feel like whatever happened, the amount of sophistication involved increasingly points toward the involvement of one or more state actors. If that's the case, I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever find out what happened to this plane...
Indeed. And not just the "what", but the "why" as well.
If you want to kill yourself - you just fly the plane into the ground during landing or takeoff. It is way too elaborate to get to the no mans land and then fly 5 hours and crash somewhere.
Lookup Silk Air 185. Pilot went to lengths to disable CVR and FDR so that there was no record of him incapacitating the FO and directing the plane into the ground. He had an insurance policy he took out that day. Some people don't want to have a wikipedia article saying they murdered 238 people. So, fly it into the middle of no where and no one will ever know. It's working so far.
I'm not at all an expert on the topic but I would guess that people who are willing to commit suicide are emotionally troubled and may not act in predictable or rational ways.
The current administration wants a reason to increase the military budget, so they would tell people. Aside from that, if it likely got out that US officials knew, it would be a scandal of epic proportions.
I don't understand what the twenty Freescale employees have to do with anything and I keep seeing this fact mentioned in every discussion about MH370.
How could they be important/valuable/dangerous enough to justify the hijacking or destruction of a commercial airliner containing hundreds of passengers? That sounds completely insane to me.
It would be much much easier to get to any of the passengers while they were still on the ground. Hijacking the aircraft and stealthily landing it somewhere is such a complex plan that it's just too ridiculous.
Really? I don't see any sign yet that the flight 370 hijacking involved unusual danger, difficulty or expense for the culprits: so far, as best we can see, it looks like stealing candy from a baby. Obviously to get people off it alive you'd need manpower and infrastructure, but either a dusty old Soviet-era airbase in metaphorical or literal Kazakhstan, or a ship to pick people up after a ditching in calm water somewhere, would be sufficient. Many state actors could arrange one or both of those without serious difficulty (some non-state actors too). I can't think of a way to kidnap a handful of Freescale engineers all at once from urban China or urban Malaysia that could be described as much much easier.
That said, I think it's highly improbable that the Freescale guys were targeted like this, but mainly because the political consequences of being caught doing something like this would probably be much too painful for most of the states who might really benefit from debriefing those engineers at length.
Yes, really. You are looking at it after the fact. Paying off a pilot who is skilled enough to fly the aircraft evading all radar and land it unassisted at night or early dawn on some remote airbase would be a major expense. Paying someone to kill off the rest of the 220 passengers would be a big challenge as well. And everybody involved would know that and the additional risk and thus demand much more money. You would have to find such an airbase. And you would have people at the airbase to take care of everything, including hiding the jet from satellites. And the airbase would have to be unused and remote. Ditching the aircraft safely into calm waters is even more unrealistic. First of all AFAIK it has never been successfully done with a wide-body aircraft and even in a small-body aircraft it would be a major risk. It would require perfect weather and calm ocean. And it would have happened at night!
There are a ton of risks involved in all of this. How could they hijackers have known that the Malaysian air force wasn't properly looking at its radar? They could have scrambled jets at that point and all of this complicated plan would have been for nothing. What if the flight they allegedly used for the radar shadow would have been delayed or they would have been delayed? What if there had been a military ship with their own radar on an exercise or patrol? After all they flew over one of the busiest water lanes in the world with an active piracy problem. What if ...
You are looking at it after the fact and not from the perspective of someone who had to come up with the plan and evaluate all the risks.
I'm not saying that kidnapping or killing a handful of people on the ground would be easy. But compared to such an unprecedented and skilled aircraft hijacking plan it seems like a piece of cake. Not to forget all the attention that MH370 gets.
> What if the flight they allegedly used for the radar shadow would have been delayed or they would have been delayed?
A ground contact could easily watch for the shadow plane's takeoff and indicate via radio that the operation was a go. It's quite possible that they had multiple windows of opportunity if all they wanted was the plane. Of course if it had to be that particular flight due to passengers or cargo it would be a different story.
> Paying off a pilot who is skilled enough to fly the aircraft evading all radar and land it unassisted at night or early dawn on some remote airbase would be a major expense. Paying someone to kill off the rest of the 220 passengers would be a big challenge as well. And everybody involved would know that and the additional risk and thus demand much more money. You would have to find such an airbase. And you would have people at the airbase to take care of everything, including hiding the jet from satellites. And the airbase would have to be unused and remote.
If you wanted to use one of the actual Malaysian Airlines pilots to divert the plane, I expect you might have great difficulty being confident about approaching the right guy (if any) without first being turned down and reported. Likely nothing else in the above is unduly difficult for a number of state actors. The rest of the passengers might not be killed either.
> Ditching the aircraft safely into calm waters is even more unrealistic. First of all AFAIK it has never been successfully done with a wide-body aircraft and even in a small-body aircraft it would be a major risk. It would require perfect weather and calm ocean. And it would have happened at night!
Perhaps, though if the plane went south to the Indian Ocean SATCOM arc it would apparently have been daylight when it was last pinged. (Source: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re... ) The primary radar reports seem to suggest otherwise though.
> There are a ton of risks involved in all of this. How could they hijackers have known that the Malaysian air force wasn't properly looking at its radar? They could have scrambled jets at that point and all of this complicated plan would have been for nothing. What if the flight they allegedly used for the radar shadow would have been delayed or they would have been delayed? What if there had been a military ship with their own radar on an exercise or patrol? After all they flew over one of the busiest water lanes in the world with an active piracy problem. What if ...
Flight 370 in all probability was pinged several times by primary radar without any decisive response. Someone whose job was to be well-informed about these things a) might well choose to take the calculated risk that Malaysia would do nothing effective and b) would likely have been right.
> You are looking at it after the fact and not from the perspective of someone who had to come up with the plan and evaluate all the risks.
> I'm not saying that kidnapping or killing a handful of people on the ground would be easy. But compared to such an unprecedented and skilled aircraft hijacking plan it seems like a piece of cake.
On the contrary, I think that any such alternative plan to kidnap and interrogate a handful of the Freescale guys would probably seem at least as risky if you described it in some detail, then looked at it with as much scepticism as you've directed at the flight-370 version.
I think the real primary reason to discount it at the moment is indeed the attention: the political blowback for being caught would be too painful, even if you'd had the minimal good sense not to deliberately kill the Chinese or US citizens on board. It would be a huge causus belli, more or less a second 9/11. Any attempt to misdirect the blame would likely not hold up long. (And a few secondary ones: China is the #1 usual suspect for military-industrial espionage on the US at present, and there are several additional reasons it wouldn't want to, or have to, pull something like this. A state hijacker would presumably be well informed enough not to be caught out by the disabling-ACARS-doesn't-shut-down-SATCOM gotcha. And probably if you pull a random airliner off its course in SE Asia you're quite likely to catch a significant number of interesting-looking people like the Freescale group.)
> On the contrary, I think that any such alternative plan to kidnap and interrogate a handful of the Freescale guys would probably seem at least as risky if you described it in some detail, then looked at it with as much scepticism as you've directed at the flight-370 version.
I doubt it because the aircraft simply adds a huge amount of risk and has little benefit. The only two benefits are that they are all in one place and that they are on a vehicle which can bring them out of the country. But the former could certainly be achieved in another way. Where they on a business trip in Malaysia? That would simplify it a lot because you could get them easily in the hotel or even better on the transfer to the airport.
The latter is almost perfect. You hijack the minibusses used by the transfer company. You load up the unsuspecting employees. Drive them to a hideout and either force them with weapons or by using knock-out gas. Wait a few hours until it's night. And then you can drive them to the coast, load them into a small boat, and bring them to a larger vessel waiting off the coast. There are of course risks, like a random police encounter or someone noticing you loading people onto a small boat. But to me it seems they pale in comparison to successfully hijacking an aircraft, flying it unassisted while evading radar to a hidden location, which is far away from any civilians or foreign military infrastructure, getting rid of 220 people, getting rid of a huge aircraft.
But in the end who would be worth all this attention and money? I guess buying off the person you want would be cheaper. If some country wanted to hire the Freescale guys then promising each $1m/yr would probably be cheaper and significantly less risky.
This is a very important point. I haven't yet seen a satisfactory conspiracy theory that explains why anybody would pursue this sort of action in the full glare of international publicity, and it's hard to imagine someone being good enough to pull this off, yet not realize this would happen. There aren't many conspiracies that benefit from continuous, sustained attention of this scale, or that could plan on absolutely no incriminating piece of evidence being turned up anywhere, by anyone, on such a large scale.
>If they wanted to get rid of these guys stealthily this is not the way. //
Isn't it a "hidden in plain site" sort of stealth though.
Everyone assumes that the plane was lost naturally and so there is no-one looking to find those you've taken. Meanwhile you can have the plane melted down, dispose of bodies and cargo and keep whatever it was you wanted without any one (or country) knowing you've got it.
it's making a come-back. especially since the Malaysians have revised their timing on the comm-system shutdowns and there are no terror links to the passengers/crew.
Hijacking airplanes after 9/11 is much more risky. Until 9/11, there was never a plot that involved intentionally hijacking an airliner with the intent of using it as a weapon and killing everyone on board. The assumption was "Oh, if we just give them what they want they'll let us all live."
Post-9/11, if anyone tries to hijack an airplane they're going to have every able-bodied male between the ages of 18 and 40 come at them with the expectation that they're fighting for their life. I know I personally would take my chances that they don't have a bomb: if I do nothing, I would assume I am definitely going to die. If I do something, the passengers collectively could overpower them and hope were bluffing about the bomb. If they weren't, it's the same outcome as doing nothing.
>Until 9/11, there was never a plot that involved intentionally hijacking an airliner with the intent of using it as a weapon and killing everyone on board.
Fedex Flight 705 (7 April 1994), before 9/11. Pilot tried to kill other pilots so he could crash plane into FedEx hub and destroy it and employees. Was subdued, barely, by a pilot with cracked skull that then managed to land the plane.
Egypt Air 990 (31 October 1999), before 9/11. Pilot deliberately killed everyone on board, thought it wasn't a weapon.
True, but not necessarily decisive. If you're the pilot, or someone else with a way past that new-and-improved post-9/11 cockpit door, you can likely make it work for you. Or if you have some way of getting an automatic weapon or some other useful tool on board (far from easy of course!) you can still hold off large numbers of desperate, but unarmed, passengers.
Assuming the hijackers weren't already in the cockpit. It seems to me that the most likely people taking control of the plane in the situation stipulated were the people already in control of the plane when it left the ground.
The majority of hijackings have the original pilot at the controls under duress. In 9/11, it was unusual that the hijackers had done flight training and piloted the planes. That was because the pilots wouldn't have done what those hijackers wanted.
Because a lot of the people talking about the Freescale engineers are themselves one kind of engineer or another, and THEY are important, so ergo the Freescale employees have to be important.
It's like in other disasters where lots of people get killed but the news focuses on the two Americans standing nearby.
I also doubt that the employees had anything to do with it, but the most likely scenario I can think of that would involve the engineers is a country with sanctions imposed wanting to fabricate chips. On the other hand, any country capable of this probably could manage to get hold of as many chips as they wanted without kidnapping Freescale employees.
If you were a nation-state you could just create a start-up 'front' company, seeded with laundered money, and hire the best of those that apply.
And if you didn't have the money to actually continue funding a start-up, you could create the front, offer to fly all the employees to some destination-team-building exercise and kidnap them from there.
It's a bit Bond/cyberpunk-esque, but one could imagine a scenario where an evil villain could short a company's stock and then kill off 20 extremely valuable employees of said company. Not saying that's what happened here, but 20 of the right employees of a company could be very significant.
Probably not these employees, this company, or this time. NYSE:FSL peaked around $23 and is still around $22. There are 300 million shares, and from the chart it looks like recent volume of a few million, so the potential profit is probably less than what you could simply sell the 777 to the bad guys for.
Most companies with hundreds of billions in market cap would not send many important people on a single plane together. Freescale, not quite that large, arguably made a significant business mistake here, but the market impact so far seems limited.
It's a bit Bond/cyberpunk-esque, but one could imagine a scenario where an evil villain could short a company's stock and then kill off 20 extremely valuable employees of said company
When was the last time you heard of 20 employees of a company being murdered?
To do so by killing 220+ other people makes such a theory even more absurd.
It happened to 13 separate companies on September 11, 2001 (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/twintowers/). It was sort of not targeted at those companies, but on the other hand it sort of was. And it certainly had huge market impact.
It happened to 13 separate companies on September 11, 2001 (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/twintowers/). It was sort of not targeted at those companies, but on the other hand it sort of was. And it certainly had huge market impact.
I knew I should have specified something along the lines of "and as part of a criminal fraud or theft or deliberate talent destroying act, or..."
As you say, the sole purpose of 9/11 wasn't to target those specific companies.
Also, the answer might well be "what" instead of who. Many people have pointed out that the cargo manifest hasn't been published, and that the airline declared 50 less seats as available for boarding than the plane had. This means it had several tons of cargo on board.
totally agree. it must be a what/who scenario by merit of the lengths to which they went to get the entire plane. this is surely a state-level intelligence action.
the blocking off of passenger seats often indicates an especially heavy or oddly weighted cargo.
something else that is notable is that you know several large world governments have continuous satellite tracking of this flight but are not sharing any information about it.
(Not to join in on the conspiracy theories, but...)
If you were part of the plan to hide this plan, surely you'd go along with the ruse and send some search teams to go look at some empty water somewhere else.
I'd guess the crews on the ships and planes would have to do so many hours of training a year anyway, so them circling about for a while would probably count towards that.
Reportedly some 50 seats were blocked off to save weight for extra cargo. Suppose each person plus their baggage weighs 80 kg, that's 4000 kg. Let's say 50% of that is taken up by containers, packing, and security devices, yielding 2000 kg of gold. It comes out to 90MM USD at today's prices. A lot of money, but probably not enough to go to so much trouble.
I don't think gold is valuable enough for stealing a whole plane and killing 220 passengers.
Gold, for it's weight, is very expensive. Transporting gold of high enough volumes for it to be worth killing so many people, steal a plane as well as making all of that possible wouldn't be worth it, I would say.
2 tons of gold are something that a reasonable person can actually expect to be able to convert into money without undue risk to his person. A stolen airplane isn't.
People keep talking about how this needs so much sophistication that it's probably a state action.
All I can see is something that one person with good planning could have done. That is, the pilot or the co-pilot waits until the other guy visits bathroom, climbs high enough and disables pressurization to knock out/kill the passengers and the rest of the crew, then disable communications, turn off transponder, sneak out of controlled airspace behind another plane, land anywhere with an unused strip with a truck waiting, abscond with the cargo.
That requires sophistication and careful planning, but is not beyond the realm of the possible.
a reasonable person can convert 2 tons of gold to cash without undue risk?
Given that 2 tons of stolen gold can't be legally sold, I'd suspect that anyone with that kind of cash on hand might be the kind it would be risky to do business with...
It would be much easier to get a person on the ground instead of hijacking a large aircraft and then magically landing it somewhere without being noticed.
>You think that such acts of criminal mass murder are common enough that this is a reasonable question to ask?
When the evidence you have stops fitting the (previously) most likely hypotheses, you have to consider the (previously) less likely hypotheses.
>An as aside: I don't know why reading such flippant comments about possibly murdering 240+ people upsets me so much.
It's not really flippant, it's speculation on the motive. Everyone wants to know why those 240 people were killed, or if they are possibly still alive.
I remember when the first passenger list came out, one was obscured (passenger 84). I thought it may have been because they were unable to contact the family before releasing the name.
Looking into it again, this page [0] seems to suggest it is a Uyghur name?
As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are literally thousands of disused airframes nestled in various out of the way corners of the globe. If your goal is really to fly an explosive laden jet into something, absconding with a loaded passenger jet is about the least clandestine method imaginable.
And if you decide to go down the route of hijacking a passenger jet, why not hijack one near your intended target?
Chances are there are hundreds of aircraft flying right next to your target everyday, simply hijack one of those on the day and fly it right into your target. 9/11 already proved the viability of this tactic.
This whole affair is taking such a conspiracy laden turn that it makes me miss Tom Clancy.
Russians building up rhetoric and pushing tensions to a high not seen since the cold war? An airliner that mysteriously disappears with some evidence pointing toward an elaborate hijacking scheme? Tell me that doesn't sound like an outline for one of his books.
I'm not trying to be flippant with the fact that hundreds of people lost their lives or that friends and families are being crushed by the uncertainty. It's just a thought that springs to mind.
Nations (and other organizations) have been carrying out false flag operations since forever. In the 1960s there was Operation Northwoods - a plan by the US government to bomb US civilian aircraft and plant evidence it was Cuba who did it to justify invading Cuba. The Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on it and it would have been implemented except JFK wouldn't sign off on it.
So even if this had nation state involvement, it is about the same danger to get on an aircraft as it always has been, or go out in a crowded event, or theater, school, etc... which are also targets for terrorism. Example would be the failed Lavon Affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
Did you even read what I wrote? I don't believe either. I don't claim to know anything about the plane. I can't even fathom a guess as to what happened to it.
>what makes you think that you can figure it out by yourself?
I don't think I can figure it out myself, nor did I ever claim to or make any attempt to figure it out myself.
I was replying specifically to "If a state was involved that would mean that boarding a plane is extremely dangerous from now on." I was saying if and that is a big if nation states were involved that boarding a plane would not be extremely dangerous from now on. Not any more dangerous that it currently is, as there has always been a history of nation state involvement in aircraft disaster, it just doesn't happen very often.
>and that the plane is fine and parked somewhere, perhaps it never took off
If this was a false flag operation, the plane and its passengers would almost certainly not be fine. They are generally designed to create death.
> If a state was involved that would mean that boarding a plane is extremely dangerous from now on.
Why, it wouldn't be the first either destruction or hijacking or both of a plane with nation-state involvement, so I don't see how it would change anything?
Googled "Neal Stephenson README" expecting a thriller involving a government agency plot to inject malicious code into a open-source crypto-library, and the final commmit to the github project made by a hacker found murdered in front of the computer in his basement.
Wow, you're absolutely correct. I read REAMDE about 2 months ago so the plot is still pretty fresh in my mind. It's a great, so consider this a recommendation.
More likely like a modern William Gibson plot. Mystery and modern technology in the same place. Objects that do not want to be tracked. Definitively Gibson style.
No, you misunderstand. Stephenson actually had a hijacked 747 in one of his books shadowing another to avoid radar detection in the same way as described by this article.
The story also had the jet ‘disappear’ on the boundary between ATC zones. This was actually the first thing that came to my mind when I heard the first reports about MH370.
There is a realistic possibility that those piloting the plane used this and/or other stealth techniques and landed intact. There are lots of groups around the world that would love to have a working $250M aircraft. Maybe there is a massive airplane chop shop that this went to, or someone wants to load it up with explosives and fly it to some country they disagree with.
Unfortunately, whether it landed or not, the odds that the passengers are alive are very small. A ransom demand would have been made by now.
I think it's highly unrealistic. The plan simply involves too many risks. First of all how could the potential hijackers know that the Malaysian military wasn't properly monitoring the radar? There would have been a huge risk of the Malaysian military discovering it and scrambling jets.
The collision avoidance system only works when the transponder is enabled. So flying in the radar shadow of another aircraft would take some extreme skill. And wouldn't they have to adjust their position according to the position of the several radar antennas? What about potential mobile radar systems, e.g., on military ships? It would have also all depended on perfectly finding SIA68. What if it had a two hour delay? Not unlikely on international flights.
Where would they secretly land the aircraft? It takes a more than 1km straight and wide runway. And it has to be remote enough from any town or military installation. But they would have to bring large amount of supplies like jet fuel. (Which they would secretly get where?) They would have to deal with 240 people on board. Someone who would steal such an aircraft is certainly ruthless but ruthless enough to murder 240 people? They would have to hide the aircraft from satellite surveillance. It would take a ground crew to refuel and maintain the aircraft.
All in all there are so many things which could go wrong. And it's very unlikely that a bunch of amateurs could pull it off.
...it's very unlikely that a bunch of amateurs could pull it off.
The pilot had decades of experience and a flight simulator in his home where he could practice such things. If he was involved, he probably could have pulled it off.
...how could the potential hijackers know that the Malaysian military wasn't properly monitoring the radar?...
We don't know what the contingency plan was, because fighters weren't dispatched. Maybe pulling off this plan was a million to one shot, and they just got lucky.
IMO, the only reason that one would try for stealth in this situation is if their intention was to land the plane somewhere. If their intention was to crash, they didn't need stealth or 7 hours of flying time. They could have pushed forward on the stick for a few seconds and dove the plane into the ocean.
Flying the aircraft isn't the only problem in such a complicated plan. So even if the pilot was exceptional it would still require many other highly skilled people. And there would be huge risks at every step. It would be thousands of details to get right. Maybe they were just lucky. But it's far more likely that they crashed somewhere, maybe as the result of the hijacking.
Personally, I find the whole military radar thing to be extremely suspicious. The fact that this plane flew over the whole country without being noticed even though it was tracked on military radar is just too implausible. Yet it happened.
Personally, I think perhaps somebody on duty was involved somehow. Perhaps bribed, perhaps threatened, maybe both, or just a co-conspirator.
It's a crazy idea and pretty unlikely. But to me it seems like the least unlikely scenario, for now.
I don't think it would take too much skill to merge your radar blip with another airliner. Just pull up behind it and slightly above it (to avoid the wake turbulence) and get close. Radar doesn't have superb spatial resolution, so you don't have to pull perfectly in line with the other plane. As long as you're fairly close to it (within a couple of plane-lengths, I would imagine) then the two planes will show up as a single radar contact. Sitting right behind another plane like that while it's cruising would not be too difficult.
Why would you need a 777 when you can probably pick up old Russian cargo planes much easier and for a fraction of the cost and without needing super skilled pilots?
Trust me, you can get an aircraft with enough range to get anywhere in the world in a couple of hops for much less than the cost of organizing a highly sophisticated hijacking operation. And your range is much longer when your aircraft is operated by an apparently legitimate charter service that has permission to fly into most countries and don't have to worry about hiding from radar.
By contrast, the effective range of a suspicious phantom plane against fighter jets on high alert is zero.
If we assume that there is some level of outside planning here, with maybe a state actor involved, then getting the plane secretly fuelled up beyond the assumed 7.5 hour range would perhaps not be too difficult.
That's why I find it difficult to believe that anyone would steal that plane with the goal of attacking the US (or any country with a well developed air defense system).
Until that plane is found I suspect people will be keeping a very close eye on wide body jets approaching and within their airspaces.
Depends. If it had been done in the "Huh, that's strange" stage of this mystery, then I'd say the odds are pretty good. But with no communication for this many days, the odds are that whatever the plan was, it didn't work, and the plane is crashed or unable to fly, wherever it is, and that the US, especially, is looking out for an attack.
The fact that the plane was taken up to 45,000, far above it's recommended limit, bothers me in this regard. What would the effects be on the passengers? Would this have been orchestrated in order to somehow incapacitate them?
I have no idea if the cockpit is pressurized separately from the rest of the plane, or if there's any way to tamper with the deployment of the plane's oxygen masks. It's all speculation on my part.
The cockpit isn't airtight - it would be at the same pressure as the rest of the cabin.
The recommended limit around 43,100 ft. 45,000 ft isn't that far above it so it's possible that there may be no impact on passengers at that level (if you're saying 43,100ft is safe, you're going to have a margin for error, it's not going to depressurize at 43,101 ft).
Certainly if it was part of your plan to incapacitate the passengers it seems overly complex, risky and uncertain.
That said, given what happened on Flight 77, if you were hijacking a plane, a plan to deal with the passengers would make a lot of sense. I'm just not sure this plan to do so does.
The cockpit isn't pressurised separately. It's possible to alter oxygen masks deployment, I know for sure it must be done landing at some altitude airports like Quito which are higher up than normal cabin altitude.
De pressurizing the plane would be extremely dangerous anyway, even with your oxygen mask on. Among other things the cabin temperature would drop to -50°C or so, the low pressure could induce fatal embolism, loss of consciousness, etc.
The hijackers would probably want to make it public. It's an insurance for their safety right now. A government might simply bomb the parked aircraft and blame it on a crash or the hijackers.
There are ways to cover that - not all the hijackers will be with the plane. All they've got to do is keep some proof of the negotiation for the survivors to publish and that would be easily disprovable.
Besides, if they knew where the plane is to bomb it this would be a hostage situation right now. They might be in a country which wouldn't welcome the incursion but I can't see the Chinese being overly bothered about that given the number of their citizens on-board.
Because publicly people don't negotiate with terrorists.
Now we all know that that isn't true so it may be they felt that keeping it quiet (for now at least) would give them a better chance of getting what they want.
That is exactly what I am scared of. That the intent was never to demand a ransom. Obviously they were after the plane - to use it as a weapon. Or use it as a carrier of some weapon.
Neither of which are requirements to do serious damage, and as has been said numerous times before, there are plenty of other planes that meet that criteria that could have been obtained much more easily and not in full view of the public eye.
"Neither of which are requirements to do serious damage"
777-200-er has the range of a tu with hunreds of thousands of pounds more payload and it hold 20x the fuel of a citation x with 10x the mass. It also has double the range of a 777 freighter, with a similar maximum takeoff weight. So these are not interchangeble, but yes they are options.
But they are still not requirements to do serious damage. Do you understand? Someone seeking to do serious damage has much less conspicuous options at their disposal.
Can you expand on what groups might be able to orchestrate such a complicated hijacking?
A rogue state like North Korea would have the capability, but they don't really have the motive since they can acquire passenger airplanes by other means. (North Korea's national airline has 27 planes -- if they wanted to make a nuclear kamikaze plane, they'd just use one of those.)
Maybe they didn't want the plane, but someone on the plane. For example, those 20 Freescale Semiconductor employees. North Korea has a history of abducting foreigners, including a South Korean movie director kidnapped by Kim Jong-il to produce films for him.
There's an easier way of getting people. If you want 20 people taking an additional 200 people and an airliner with them seems overly complex compared to, say, hitting them on the back of the head as they're walking home and bundling them in a van.
How is it easier to go around hitting 20 people on the back the the head and then figuring out how to drive them to North Korea at the back of a van without being detected? If your goal is to get a large team of semiconductor engineers against their will, I can hardly think of a more efficient way than simply flying the plane they are on to your country.
It is a lot easier. Of course you would use a ship or even the official Air Koyo flight from KL instead of a van...
The hijacking and stealthily flying it to North Korea are so complex it's beyond ridiculous. There are so many more details which could go wrong and a much bigger international backlash especially from China. And why would they fly back across Malaysia if they wanted to go to North Korea?
How many would come to NK for $1m a year? If I were building a team of engineers in NK that's what I'd be offering rather than an incredibly risky and difficult manuver like this...
And that way you probably get better work out of them than if you're holding them hostage.
On the upside if they are holding a bunch of really smart guys hostage and giving them stuff to build things with then a real Iron Man suit is surely inevitable.
Deniability would have been a very likely outcome if a convincing crash scenario had been engineered. I suspect that the pilot was supposed to turn off the satcom link at the same time as the transponder. Now that we know that it kept flying for 7 hours and may have been shadowing this other plane, it looks clearly like deliberate theft.
If the last contact of any sort had been the 'good night message', then we would never have known.
Totally unnecessary and melodramatic, in this hypothetical situation all you need is a plane that has no attachment to the nation in question.
Imagine I wanted to kill a person, and I've decided to use a car to do so. I can't use my own car for obvious reasons, so any stolen car will do as long as it doesn't connect to me.
It doesn't make any sense to kill 240 people, including babies and kids. Especially if this is a terrorist act, they could not religiously justify that, especially since these are mainly Chinese people rather than American.
First, before you make statements like that, you need to understand the motivation of the people doing this.
And since we have no idea who did what, where, why and how, its far to early to judge if it made any sense or not.
That is not to say that I condone senseless violence. However to prevent further incidents you must understand the motivations of the perpetrators and understand from their world view. Just saying they are evil isn't going to help you understand why they did it.
After all if you don't understand how desperate they are, you don't know to what level they will stoop.
Note that there was a 'terrorist attack' in China a week or two earlier, in which five Uighur separatists with knives killed 30 random people and wounded hundreds in a crowded train station, before being shot by police. This shows that there are definitely 'terrorists' (not using the scare quotes because I necessarily disagree that they're terrorists, only because I honestly don't know what they are) who are interested in killing large numbers of Chinese people in the name of their cause.
did you just use killing of innocent children as a justification against the possibility of this being a terrorist act? Of all the arguments against potential terrorist foundations, and there are many, the action off killing of innocent women and children appears to be the exact thesis for such an action. check, history.
Terrorists' rationales are often bizarre to non-indoctrinated: witness Oklahoma city bombing or Utøya. Besides if that was a doing of national separatist group in China, they'd have little problem with that.
This theory keeps coming up, but it doesn't make much sense.
If your goal is to acquire a working Boeing 777, on a secret airfield somewhere in Western China or Eastern Kazakhstan (see this map for orientation: http://www.airliners.net/uf/109874/phpnIOEWi.jpeg), then you don't have to be particularly smart or rational to realize that hijacking a commercial flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 240 people on board, and then attempting to stealthily cross both India and Pakistan, as proposed in the OP, is not your best option.
This leads me to wonder if maybe the cargo was the target. We already heard that the manifest has not been released and that they left 50 seats empty to compensate for the weight.
This seems the most likely in my opinion. I wonder if the fate of Flight 961 would have been known if the captain hadn't deliberately mislead the hijackers about the direction they were flying in and landed close to a beach?
What i don't get:
The aforementioned link to the Ethiopian water landing says: "The incident is the only true water landing of a widebody airliner with survivors."
> There are too many oddities in this whole story that don’t make sense if this theory isn’t the answer in my opinion.
Confirmation bias?
Slow burn fire randomly taking out communications systems and electronics undetected over a long period of time. Pilots freak out and head West for the coast, program way points on autopilot. Fire then cracks the hull, leading to a slow depressurization, incapacitating crew. Plane heads into the Indian ocean with all onboard unconscious or dead, until it runs out of fuel, and crashes into the ocean.
1. Zig Zaging flight path between legitimate waypoints after transponders were turned off, plus some pronounced altitude changes suggest that Autopilot was not engaged.
2. Pilots turned off transponders before their last communication.
"Snuck" is a strange American word, the same as "dove" instead of "dived", eg. "he dove into the pool" instead of "he dived into the pool". I would read "snuck" as "sneaked". Another weird word is "gotten".
And another strange and irritating phrase that is sneaking its way into English over here is "for free", but "free" is not a price so instead of "buy 3 eggs for £2.00", you get weird phrases "sign up now and get this egg for free", whereas it should be "sign up now and get this egg free" or "sign up now and get this egg for nothing".
Always interesting the difference between the languages over time.
With reference to the flight, I truly hope they find it somewhere safe.
Good theory. Yours is as good as anyone's at this point in time. Incredible, how we think that our tech is so advanced yet a commercial jet can go completely missing.
I think this whole thing could have been prevented if only the tracking systems could not have been turned off manually.
Why is that even possible? An oversight? If you think about just how many liberties we passengers had to give up after 9/11 worldwide, why was this still there? We can't take any liquids on board anymore but if the pilot wants, he can make the plane disappear at will? Yeah, the liquid thing was really the only security risk here...
Imho, tracking of planes should never be able to be turned off. Why should it? Could there ever be a situation were it would be vital to have these systems not running?
>>but if the pilot wants, he can make the plane disappear at will?
The pilot is the captain of the airship and can take any decision deemed necessary for the safety of the aircraft and its passengers and that decision is final(this is actually defined in the airspace law, would need to look for a quote). That means that the pilot has to have the ability to turn off any and all electrical parts of the aircraft if that would ensure its safety(in case of a fire). That power cannot and should not be taken away from the pilot - you don't want a plane crash due to a fire which couldn't have been put out because the burning thing was always-on due to some regulations.
I don't know about international aviation law, but in the U.S. the text is:
91.3 Responsibility and authority of the pilot in command.
(a) The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft.
(b) In an in-flight emergency requiring immediate action, the pilot in command may deviate from any rule of this part to the extent required to meet that emergency.
This does not mean pilots can break rules as long as they make sure to do so safely, but if a situation is unsafe they may break all rules necessary to make it safe again. Furthermore, pilots are required to inform ATC of any deviations they made from the regs or ATC instructions (of course this is one of the rules they're allowed to break if making such a radio call would be unsafe). Again, this is only for the U.S., but other countries do tend to look us for how to do aviation safety.
> I think this whole thing could have been prevented if only the tracking systems could not have been turned off manually.
This was already answered several days ago. All electrical equipment has to be able to be switched off - there were cases where fires started in planes because electrical circuits could not be cut.
In the case of the radar transponder there is the very prosaic reason that ATC doesn't want their screen filled with all the aircraft sitting at gates.
Could missiles ever be targeted on the transponder beacon? I could imagine that it is preferable to turn off such beacons when landing/taking off from near war zones or when the terrorist threat is very high.
I guess it is also a little bit uncertain if the plane is actually totally missing or if those who know just don't want to share their information with public.
Yes, it would indeed be totally incredible if the plane was actually lost...
However, it is already evident that there is much more going on - that the forces involved are far from benign, that the events are far from random and that whatever is at stake is of a Very High Value to someone.
agree, something very valuable was on that flight, whether it was a person/people or the cargo.
the 50 blocked-out seats indicate a heavy and/or oddly distributed cargo.
let's get real here - this is definitely not the work of hijackers, this is some intelligence service stealing a plane with something _very_ valuable on it. there are far too many what-ifs for even a large criminal or terrorist organization.
1. Do you have any idea how many seats are typically blocked out on this route for Malaysia to China flights? This might happen on dozens of flights every day, so please provide some proof if 50 blocked-out seats is unusual.
2. If it is unusual, the cargo might be more prone to error. Is it possible the cargo shifted back, causing the flight to quickly rise to 45,000ft before stalling and crashing down?
It does happen, security by obscurity is actually quite prevalent outside of Infosec: if nobody knows it's there how can it be stolen?
Search for "Heathrow Runway Robberies", etc. There were a number of documentaries on the subject, IIRC there were several gangs that specialized in jacking crap off planes in airports. It's possible (however unlikely) that some graduated beyond the airport.
Good analysis, but I'm skeptical that this is not already accounted for in the military radars. Given that so many flights fly everyday in almost every route, it becomes really easy for any country to sneak an aircraft anywhere. Such a glaring loop hole should not exist. And we are talking about crossing the borders monitored by multiple countries here.
I really wonder how much of this rampant speculation is just people desperately wanting 300 people not to have died, either at all or just for no reason at all. Secret terrorist masterminds secretly hijacking a plane is more comforting than "sometimes shit happens and people die and there's nothing anyone can do".
Except for the fact that multiple communications systems were deliberately turned off, and the place continued to fly for hours after that fact. I don't think anyone would have been particularly suprised if the place crashed into the ocean off the coast of Malaysia. In fact, that is what most people assumed at first, and that is why all the search and rescue efforts were focused in that area for the first 3 or 4 days. If you have been paying attention to what has come out after then, or read this article, I think you will see that does not appear to be the case.
Great, except where are the dead people? And how did the plane keep flying for 7 hours after they were "dead"? Too many unanswered questions, me thinks.
My understanding is that it was the Rolls Royce jet engines that were reporting to satellites for several hours, and that they were reporting some basic maintenance data about themselves (such as whether they were on and functioning). So if the engine had sat in the ocean for five hours and still somehow reported home, it would not have reported that they were still on and functioning.
Civilian flight control and radar is designed and optimized for a fully cooperative system, extremely so. It's not designed for filtering through data to track down inconsistencies and identify potential bad actors, it's not a military air defense system.
It's likely that this could be detected by looking at recorded radar-data as a above-average number of "glitches" at this particular track.
But then, I also assume that modern radar systems have some way to automatically filter displayed tracks for "glitches" or temporary loss of contact to a airplane signal to avoid distracting or tiring out airspace controllers.
It is indeed, in the 40's they had this issue, when planes were a ~mile apart they become a mush on the screen.
However thats not the case nowadays. Even if you had a nasty radar from the 80's you see that the trace is twice the size it should be. (We'll I'd hope)
I'd assume that military radar ops would be looking for this, as this is a great way to sneak assets about.
From what I read elsewhere, synchronization problems between different radar systems and other effects can also cause echoes or "ghosting" to appear, so it's not uncommon to see more than one trace for a particular object. Depending on the sophistication of the radar system, these traces could be ignored either by software or by operators.
When they say they put national security second to investigating the flight, what they're saying is that they're now exposing a lot of information about these radar systems with other countries in order to figure out what happened.
An interesting theory and article, but I can't help but feel like this reads too much like one of the classic conspiracy theory articles about 9-11/lizards/aliens/Area 51, etc.
Finding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is a problem google could solve by crowdsourcing the search on the google doodle
They could use an algorithm to generate different satellite images through the possible search images as the google doodle, they could put a toggle button, 'anything look like a plane or wreckage here?' Yes/no. For every yes, show it to more people, see if they agree
I’m sure google has better algorithm experts to figure out what the best images to show are than I can figure out,
I suspect there are people on HN who are fewer degrees of seperation from who figures out the google doodle than I am though
If you happen to be one of those people, who might be able to send a personal email, or send a text, or make a phone call to someone who could advocate for that being the google doodle, I would appreciate that
needless to say, if google was able to help solve this mystery, I would imagine that would be pretty good publicity for the company
Interesting idea, but is there really up-to-date satellite imagery of the huge area to search for? I always thought sats can only make high-res pictures of narrow strips, which are then assembled by flying around the earth multiple times, which probably takes a few days/weeks. Anyone knows how this actually works?
If Tomnod updates to include the latest areas, couldn't Google just link to Tomnod on their home page? It doesn't make sense to duplicate the effort IMO.
Of course, they'd need to talk to Tomnod first to make sure they're ready for that kind of traffic, as it seems they've already had scaling issues, but hopefully this doesn't pose too many problems.
It may be seen as heartless for the victims, but I still find comforting that in this day and age of widespread surveillance technology, one of the most tracked thing on earth can still disappear and leave everybody clueless.
It gives me hope that there will be still a chance for a resistance movement when the time will come.
I remember reading that when the Israelis mounted their daring rescue mission at Entebbe in Uganda their three aircraft flew in formation so that it would appear as a single airplane on radar.
Much as with the maximum altitude ceiling, the numbers the media reports are generally best-practice recommendations that give you a high enough factor of safety.
If you don't plan on taking off again, and don't care much about the landing gear, a skilled pilot could land the plane on a runway shorter than 5000ft.
If it was really hijacked then where are all of the calls from frantic passengers calling family members like on 9/11. I am calling BS on the hijack landing scenario. Do we really live in a word where our first thoughts are always terrorism.
I guess the government propaganda machine is really working when our only conclusion to things is it must be terrorism. More funding for the spooks!
I'd really like to hear another knowledgeable person's analysis of this theory. At least its different than the endless hijackers/bombing/suicide/aliens run around.
I didn't say it wasn't either a) interesting; or b) plausible. "Interesting" also doesn't really do anybody any favours here; 'plausible' is the only really relevant qualifier at play here. In fact, I'm well aware there are many plausible (that are simultaneously interesting) theories. But they're just that: theories. Crowd-sourcing theories may be helpful. Crowd-sourcing actual data is probably a lot more helpful.
Not really. Occam's razor says that it's more likely there was just one 777. Assuming this analysis is correct, that would lead me to suspect that the radar just picked up a different plane, and the accident plane is somewhere else completely. Either it flew for hours with the pilots unconscious, or they managed to land somewhere (gently enough so that the power to the satellite transceiver stayed on).
What surprises me the most: In today's world, doesn't someone have access to global, real-time satellite data that goes down to 1-3m resolution? I thought we already accepted this as fact. Wouldn't such data provide visuals?
They probably do, but what is the coverage like? They aren't streaming and storing every square meter of the earth all at once, such that they can just roll back several days and start poking around, meter by meter, minute by minute. Real time high resolution satellite streams are undoubtedly something that need to be scheduled in advanced for particular times and places.
surely so, but in the odd case that even one single image might have a plane on it, on the path the OP currently discusses here, might be enough to confirm further travel. the full step-by-step transition of the plan wouldn't even be necessary. just one shot with that plane. from somewhere.
Global? Likely. Realtime? We're not quite that far into the future. Just try and estimate the bandwidth for the biggest security camera of all times: at 1-3 meters resolution per pixel, worldwide, that's a lot of pixels (about 510 072 000 000 000 per frame, give or take - that comes out at about half an exabyte per frame, if I'm not mistaken). Take ten of these, and you've generated as much data as the whole Internet does in a day. Oh, and you also need to store it somewhere, but this is a minor issue (in comparison to the above).
You have to consider whether or not someone with access to that data would want to reveal it exists. If the US says they located the plane in the ocean, in a location that no one expected, everyone will be wondering how they came to that conclusion. You can't say it was a lucky guess.
Interesting, but this would seem to chiefly expand the space of possible explanations for what went wrong by showing how the plain could have gotten into central Asia. It explains some of the bizarre behavior of the plane, but not all of it. So it's eliminated some of the burdensome details about the flight behavior at the cost of introducing burdensome details about complicated, secret, and successful planning. As a result, I'm even less sure about what happened to the plane now, but of course if that reflects my actual state of knowledge it's a good thing.
If the plane has flown following most of that 777 trail, then it should at least narrow down a little where it went... but it's very unsure we even find out where it went. If this was planned from the very beginning, it would be well hidden by now.
I wonder what happened to the passengers - and if anyone realized what was happening after several hours.
Sadly, I find it hard to believe that passengers wouldn't have tried to use cellphones, and I'm inclined to think that the cabin became depressurized before the last report of contact (a ping off of an inmarsat sattelite) which is reported as 7.5 hours after takeoff.
I think Keith is on the right track (excuse the pun).
1. The weather. Check on that. On a clear night it is possible to sneak up behind and tail an aircraft. Night Fighters did it all the time in WW2. And they had to get close enough and hang on and to check "friend or foe"!
2. Not sure where the FIR boundary was, but if it was close to their westward track (last radio call was a handover) more doubt on the ground.
3. They could have listened in to the radio calls of SIA68 with their radio. That would have given them height and position info too. So long as they did not transmit, nobody could have picked up anything from that.
4. If they had also switched off all the navigation lights nobody on the ground, or in SIA would be likely to have seen anything - rear view from a commercial aircraft is nil! Two aircraft at 35000 feet sound the same as one.
5. Timing on one other score was perfect. Night flight when radar operators are dozy, landing just before dawn - time to camouflage the plane from satellites, and a diversion of a China sea crash to confuse everyone.
Good thinking, keep it up. Looking forward to more insights!
This is not an hijack terrorism. Terrorism is all about showing off, theatrics, fear. No one would make a plane disappear for the sake of terrorism. I have only two theories
1. China or some other country shot it down by mistake and trying to cover up.
2. Something of immense importance was present on that plane or may be a person.
In either cases substantial involvement of some state needs to be there.
That is not necessarily true. If it is terrorism, it's possible this isn't over, and that the plane will be used in a future high-profile attack. And if the target was passengers, cargo, or something else entirely I don't think that logically leads to it being state-sponsored.
If the plane is stolen for a future attack they have unnecessarily taken too much of trouble
- First plan a theft which is incredibly difficult that hijacking and then ramming it somewhere
- Then actually keep it hidden while half the world is searching for it.
- Get rid of those passengers
- Hiding a Boeing 777 is not same as hiding a cookie jar. The plane will need a runway, fuel etc. which needs to be provided for and can be easily tracked.
- Terrorism is all about surprise. There is no surprise involved here. All the countries will now be much more cautious with any object that appears on their radar.
That's the default expectation in this kind of situation, but in this case it's actually slightly hard to see how it could have happened. The evidence suggests that when it first "disappeared", and likely for hours afterwards, the plane was under controlled flight by someone with at least some idea of what they were doing. Whoever was flying the plane could easily deliberately crash it at any time while flying over the ocean, of course, but if their intention was just to crash the plane somewhere non-specific, why not just do it right away or soon afterwards? So they very probably had other intentions.
And an airplane in a controlled cruise over the ocean is unlikely to just happen to crash into it by accident. It will obviously run out of fuel at some point, but the people flying the plane almost certainly planned to do something interesting with it before that happened: the likely candidates are a) land it or b) crash it into something notable. They probably had the ability to read the fuel gauge and/or an a priori idea of what the available range was, too. Now there are all sorts of ways their plan could have gone wrong, or could have succeeded by crashing the plane, but they nearly all involve the plane landing and/or crashing on land, or relatively near a coastline on the approach to land instead of the deep ocean. AFAICS it's easier to list ways in which the plane could be lost in the deep ocean:
1) A Flight 93-style battle for the cockpit erupts while 370 is over the ocean
2) The person flying the plane is a terrorist/hijacker/pirate who lacks real airliner flying expertise but has been equipped with a cheat sheet telling him in detail exactly what to do. Everything goes fairly well for a long time until something unexpected happens and/or he messes up one of his scheduled actions. At this point he likely panics and maybe does something rash
3) The people in control attempt a controlled ditch somewhere in the ocean, probably in order to rendezvous with one or more speedboats and transfer themselves and some or all passengers. This could very easily go wrong, but succeed or fail the plane will probably end up sinking either way
4) The people in control attempt to strike out across the ocean for some distant target which they guess is near the limit of their range. But they miscalculate, and by the time they realise it they're trapped over the ocean with no path back near land in time
Scenarios 3 and 4 are fairly unlikely if you believe the radar interpretations suggesting that the plane went west across Malaysia and then north, though.
> 1. Is unlikely as door is very secure now. Passengers can't get in.
The passengers and aircrew would have had seven solid hours to try to break through that door, though, unless the plane landed somewhere first. Alternatively, hijackers (if hijackers there were) might have damaged the door or disabled its locking mechanism on their own way into the cockpit. Some desperate passengers might even deliberately start a fire in the fuselage, I suppose, as dangerous as that would be.
One big problem with 4 is that to believe this you probably have to discount the primary radar reports of the airplane heading west over Malaysia/Thailand and then north up the Malacca Strait and Andaman Sea. It's hard to imagine the plane getting feet-dry on that northern SATCOM arc, at about the end of its fuel endurance, and then then heading far out to sea again. (Unless it landed and refuelled somewhere...)
(EDIT: On second thoughts, I suppose you could turn east after the last radar contact and then go south, past the west of Indonesia, to the southern arc.)
But even if you do that, where would you be headed if you were on that southern Indian Ocean arc after 7 hours in flight? It's not exactly an efficient route to Australia or Indonesia, and everywhere else is either hopelessly far or in the wrong direction.
(2) is the most plausible. Given the amount of computer control and automation in a modern plane, it's likely the whole thing would've been put on autopilot when it was hijacked.
It could've easily kept going for a long time and even been redirected in that mode. Once you run out of fuel of course, game over.
This assumes 5000ft of stopping distance and a high density runway, which is far more than really needed. Especially considering that the operators of this flight are willing to take more risks than usual commercial flights.
There are probably thousands of additional landing strips, even more if the hijackers don't require keeping the plane in perfect flying condition.
I understand there will always be crackpot theories but why are they getting up-voted.
State sponsored? WTF. This would be an act of war. If you want to go to war why wouldn't you just attack the other countries. Why screw around stealing 300 international citizens first?
Pretty simple stuff, most likely an accident.
Or possibly a political/mental act by a very small group/one person that got lucky.
This notion that mh370 was flying behind the Singapore jet to avoid radar is far fetched. Is the simple explanation much more likely that primary and secondary radar were both tracking the Singapore jet and the data wasn't matched properly? If the two jets were flying in tandem as you suggest, wouldn't you expect two hits on primary radar?
In theory if one plane ghosted the other by staying quite literally behind it (in relation to the radar, not behind it front to back) there would only be one blip.
Difficult to the point of high improbability? Methinks yes.
If they shut off the transponder, which we know they did, how would they get the traffic information on their NDs? It goes away when you turn off the transponder. To the best of my knowledge that applies to both Mode-S interrogations and ADS/B ones.
The flights through that area are scheduled, it would be trivial to figure out which flights go in the direction you want to go and thus can hide behind. After that, you precalculate the intercept to a plane that works timing-wise before you take off. Non-trivial, but simple enough to do - on ground ahead of time you can get a computer to do all the work.
Once you go dark, you fly the traditional way with GPS and nav aides (GPS, VORs, etc, are broadcast, so you can use them passively) backed up by manual nav with time, speed, and bearings. Note that handheld (throw it on the dash) pilot grade GPSes are readily available and relatively cheap.
Intercepting the target aircraft is do-able via visual contact if your navigation is reasonably good and the target aircraft is on time.
If you have help on the ground, they could use FlightAware to update the hijacking crew via something like HF radio, again a passive receive on the hijacked aircraft. This would be very helpful for the hijacking crew to improve their intercept by adjusting their speed so that they sneak up under and behind the target aircraft.
Edit: As thekevan points out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7416153), the hijackers could use a ADS/B receiver (SDR and laptop or equivalent) to receive the position data from the target aircraft. This would make it pretty easy to form up on them. Again, this is passive (the target aircraft broadcasts its ADS/B information).
How secure is the 777s flight management system? Could you hijack the controls (remotely or with temporary physical access) and prevent manual overrides when the change is noticed?
First of all, hijackers would have threatened passengers to give them their mobile phones.
If the plane indeed was landed on a remote airport with the passengers alive, the hijackers would have stripped the passengers of their clothes to ensure nobody could bring weapons or devices with them.
By now, most mobile phones (even the Nokia developing world ones) would have been out of battery.
You dont know Asian culture then. Standing up to an Authority FigureIts is almost unheard of in Asia.
People get yelled at and lied to on a daily basis in Asia by everyone above their station and they take it up the ass like a little yellow troopers. Mianzi is more important than truth.
There could still have been a phone in a checked bag. They may have also gone the route of suffocating everyone by climbing to 45,000 depressurized instead of threatening passengers and risking a hero.
Sure the batteries would be dead now but what about connection that were made before they landed? I though that data is stored by most phone companies upto at least 6 months.
The fuel would have gone out before most of the phones I would think. If they landed and passed any tower while doing so there is a chance something was picked up.
Cell phone signals can be jammed fairly easily. It's illegal to do-so in the states, but the devices are pretty easily obtained from what I've read. I'd imagine even easier in other countries.
A very popular Chinese online shopping site has $50 GSM/WCDMA/HSDPA/LTE jammers that fit into your pocket and they offer free shipping all over the world. I imagine that getting one sent to the US would be very easy and since only 1% of all parcels are opened for inspection it would be unlikely to be ever found out.
FYI CNN just discussed this theory on-air, of course didn't discuss any technical details, just called it "outlandish" and didn't give any credit to OP.
Doing this is sure cheaper and easier than building a bomber capable of deploying a nuclear weapon or another type of WMD. Definitely cheaper than building an ICBM.
Apparently the rolls royce engines have a remote debugging ability that was not enabled on this flight, however it was still pinging home which is how they first noticed the course change. They had disabled all the other trackers, so if they were watching the news the chances are they have disabled these too.
If the plane is parked in working condition somewhere on this planet, thanks to the media coverage the hijackers now know that the jet engines will phone home the moment they start them.
But then again, this is hypothetical nonsense. The plane most probably crashed into the ocean.
Why are we still looking for this damn plane? Thirty countries involved? Thirty nation's worth of ships, planes and satellite analysts, flying and sailing around and for what, some debris and a box? To buy the families closure of some sort? Maybe a defect in the 777? To keep hope alive that the passengers might be alive and safe somewhere captured by reasonable terrorists with a lot of food?
Doesn't seem worth the fuel.
These black boxes from what I heard stop pinging after a month. Can we stop then, and just move on in life until one day some seat cushion washes up in California and have a moment if silence? Without it pinging, just how wide an area can a ship in substantial depth detect a wingtip?
I realize you didn't, but if you ask me, they should just frame that copilot, say they found on his flight simulator evidence that he intended to make that "deliberate" turn every night, disabling the transponder with the ctrl+shift+T combination and purposefully crashing hours later each time in a different location, with known Islamic terrorists on his WhatsApp and Skype, or a suicide note, then call off the hunt, pay the families off for failing to screen this guy effectively, bam, there's your closure, problem solved.
I don't know, maybe to make aviation safer so it doesn't happen again, whatever "it" may be.
Why should Twitter bother debugging outages? Why should Facebook bother issuing post-mortems when bad things take their systems out? Just chalk it up to solar flares or blame some rogue developer and shrug your shoulders.
My default assumption was they took off, an accident occurred that damaged cockpit and forced a turnaround, the damage was so great that the crew were unable to survive and turned on autopilot to stop an immediate crash, which then flew for seven hours till fuel ended, presumably with passengers pounding on the locked and hardened cockpit door.
So whilst I am in wild speculation territory I would like to know if there are some experts who might be able to say "bird strikes cannot disable radios" or "oxygen canisters do not leak" or "stewardesses can open the cockpit door" or some such.
I tend towards cockup not conspiracy myself.
(I recognise I may have missed discussions covering this and apologise if it is obvious)