Exactly. They ought to be searching for undiscovered islands in the Pacific.
Which I guess goes even more to my point. If they found evidence of Air France 447 that quickly, a plane that has broken apart at altitude should be easy to find. Ergo, they must be searching in the wrong places.
Interesting info in that Stross article about unusual flight arrangements on those stolen passports. It seems like the takeaway about the stolen passports has been that it’s hardly unusual. But I suppose the idea here is that the flight was taken over and forced down.
-Tom
The thing that is super, super odd - is where the plane lost contact is a shallow sea area with very heavy boat traffic. You have thousands and thousands of boats in that entire 200km corridor and no one saw a single thing? Things I was thinking further up-thread quickly lost their relevance the longer no one sees a thing and this continues.
About the debris sinking? No way would that be the cause of nothing being found. There’s a lot of parts, including every seat cushion that would be floating and a lot of small and large parts of the plane. The only way the flotsam would be so low it could possibly go this long in such a heavily trafficked area is if the plane was blown to smithereens or sharks ate all the lightweight stuff.
So here’s an outlandish theory… Pilot hijacks his own plane, descends to ~150 ft (below radar detection), and was flying to an Australian city to escape Malaysia with some refugees who wanted to start a new life down under. But they realize their plan sucks, decide to try and land in the bush, not an an Australian airport since they would never get away with it, runout of fuel and end up ditching in boonies somewhere. This would be why they turned around and everyone has been focused on the wrong area this entire time.
Yes, that is a nutty theory, and right now all serious theories are centered on the non-Asians who were using the stolen passports. The world police have pictures of those two. Wonder how long before they release them to the public? And what does non-Asian mean to the FBI? Would they consider native Indonesian or Indian people non-Asian? Would they consider Pakistani people Asian looking, so kind of insinuating the stolen passportees were specifically white or black?
Anyone remember after 9-11 how long it was before pictures of the suspects were released? It seemed like just a day or two, but that was a long time ago, and of course in the case of the Boston Marathon Bombing, news agencies were posting pictures of many innocent people until the police/FBI set them straight. But still we had those pictures shortly after.
I saw someone point out (I believe in the Stross post’s comments that I linked above) that Uighurs could pass for European (and perhaps it would be easier to fool someone, say a Malaysian security agent, who comes from a region with very different appearance markers). I GISed it and was surprised…I had previously thought Uighurs had Mongolian/Siberian features, for some reason, but the pictures I found looked more Turkish/Caucasian (as in the actual Caucasus) and could definitely pass as Mediterranean.
I’m also starting to favor the “plane crashed far from where it was supposed to be” scenario, either that or
That actually sounds more plausible than the searchers looking in the wrong place. And there’s a precedent for it with the Egyptian pilot who hijacked his own plane.
-Tom
I heard something on the BBC about the Malaysian military believing they may have tracked the plain over the Straits of Malacca, a long way from where it was supposed to be. If that’s true, then clearly either the plane was 1) really, really lost, like me driving in Boston, or 2) had been diverted somehow and was going…somewhere. But this report, too, could be bogus.
All in all, very puzzling. Further proof that if God had intended us to fly, he’d have given us personal jetpacks.
And the AP is reporting that one of the people using a stolen passport aboard the plane was an Iranian teenager who’d bought the passport and was seeking asylum in Germany. No terrorist connections with him.
Try telling that to Fox News viewers. Their minds are made up at “Iranian.”
Yeah, I saw the new expanded search area and it blew my mind. It’s like a plane flying from NYC to Seattle disappeared, and they’re searching around Georgia.
More people (credible folks with good credentials) seem to be venting frustration at the Malaysian’s search efforts, with accusations ranging from “incompetent” to “covering something up.”
The fact that they were (apparently) over heavily trafficked waters, that are relatively shallow, puzzles me. If the plane exploded over those waters, you would have expected at least some people to have come across debris of some kind. If the plane had flown into the waters, same thing. So it leads you to think the plane ended up flying somewhere else before crashing, but if they had time to do that, you would have expected A. They would not have chosen to fly over deeper waters, and B. they would have issued a distress call.
If something totally bizarre happened to cause them to fly some distance before crashing, yet not issuing a distress call (say, for example, somehow the plane lost all oxygen and everyone passed out before being able to grab masks (re: Payne Stewart, albeit that was a small private plane) and the plane flies on it’s own for a while, it would not explain the plane disappearing off of radar tracks.
Very, very baffling at this point.
A fascinating mystery. My guess is that the plane the Malaysian military tracked crossing the peninsula is only roughly compatible with flight 370 in terms of location, altitude, and bearing. Malaysia probably gets overflown by military planes without registered flight plans once in awhile. Hence the searching on both sides. Or maybe they did track it and don’t want to admit it.
It’s all speculation but I don’t think the terrorist thing will pan out. The weakest link in air crashes these days seems to be the pilots, whether they make errors or intentional actions. Systems failures don’t really cause crashes anymore.
I believe it would be easy for a pilot to disable communications (change the frequencies I suppose), but that would require the co-operation of or subduing the other pilot.
Also interesting is that even though the peninsula is heavily populated, there are large undeveloped areas even on land. It would be crazy to think that it could have crashed on land, but you never know.
A high-res sat photo has been uploaded that will supposedly let all of us help search. Unfortunately the server immediately caved and it doesn’t work.
The more I read about it, the more I lean towards the plane just not being where they’re looking. As in, don’t want to be found.
Anyone seen Kris Kristofferson lately?
I gotta think it’s deliberate. There’s no way a 777 could get lost like that; it has some of the most advanced avionics around. Plus, anyone smart enough to fly knows that a rising sun is always to your right if you’re supposed to be flying North. There’s no way a pilot and co-pilot could confuse that.
Not to make light of this, but one of the first thoughts in my mind when I read about this missing plane was Millennium.
CNN is now saying the plane was seen about 400 miles off-course.
Crazy. My crackpot post is now a leading theory. But don’t pilots or airline stewards have a super easy way of sending a “we’ve been hijacked” message? There’s no way the course they were on was accidental… What more do we know about the pilots?
Can you imagine if this had happened in the Bermuda Triangle? Conspiracy theorists and alien nuts would be on every news channel instead of pilot or ATC experts. It would be a feeding frenzy of circus proportions.
I guess I’m confused. Tracking websites like that use the same transponders and radar that the ATCs have, so I’m not sure there’s anything newsworthy about that, other than the radar site just boosted its hits.
What now seems to be the issue is the plane tracking far off-course after losing comms and radar back to controllers.
EgyptAir 990 and SilkAir 185 are two recent major air disasters due to pilot suicide. Unfortunately, my theory of the day is that when the pilot or co-pilot went to the bathroom, the other one locked the door, shut off the comms, and went flying for a couple hours. Then when the pilot or passengers were about to break in, he put it down. Morbid, but plausible?