Possible hijacking?
Military radar data suggests a Malaysia Airlines jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown hundreds of miles off course, heightening suspicions of foul play among investigators, sources told Reuters on Friday.
Analysis of the Malaysia data suggests the plane, with 239 people on board, diverted from its intended northeast route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew west instead, using airline flight corridors normally employed for routes to the Middle East and Europe, said sources familiar with investigations into the Boeing 777’s disappearance.
Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country’s northwest coast.
This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said. […]
“What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,” said that source, a senior Malaysian police official.
All three sources declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media and due to the sensitivity of the investigation.
Officials at Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport, the official point of contact for information on the investigation, did not return calls seeking comment. […]
As a result of the new evidence, the sources said, multinational search efforts were being stepped up in the Andaman Sea and also the Indian Ocean.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Missing a certain UAV MQ-5B? Somebody says they found it! Huzzah.
Not that drone technology is all that arcane to the Russians, anyway, but I’ve heard that some electronic components are physically protected in such a way that any breach of their containers causes them to self-destruct.
Wherever it vanished, look for an ’80s aircraft carrier commanded by Kirk Douglas.
I’m holding fast to my theory about alien abduction.
New York Times:
Of course, nose-down and under power I imagine it could exceed terminal velocity, but if it didn’t break up in mid-air doing so, it would when someone tried to pull out of the dive.
– Malaysian officials are sure plane was hijacked.
Richard Fernandez, in keeping with his nom de cyber, dreams darkly.
If we’re lucky, Somali pirates are branching out.
God save us all if we’re not.
That was a good movie.
The carrier was the U.S.S. Nimitz, by the way.
Really pissed of the Senator Charles During played, naming a carrier after a serving officer.
More today.
Of course this is assuming that the fuel load aboard was really known. If this was a well planned operation then it could have had more fuel loaded than what was reported as on-board. This class of plane, and a Malaysian one at that, holds a record for distance.
The normal rated range for this type is 7,700 nautical miles.
One variant of a scenario geoffb linked above might explain the lack of passenger participation (using cell phones or other devices to attempt to establish post-takeover communications).
If induced gradual oxygen deprivation was employed by one or more hijackers who had oxygen masks, then all the passengers would be conveniently dead soonest. Re-establishing pressurization would allow the hijacker(s) to collect and destroy communication-capable devices.
That variant would also explain the rambling flight patterns between the checkpoints: the pilot furiously searching passengers and their carry-ons for devices.
Meantime, V. Putin carries his war plans into action, devouring Ukraine one scrumptious snacky chunk at a time. and his nominal American global adversary, ClownDisaster, while running away as fast as his little midget legs will carry him, shouts back over his shoulder at his friend Vladimir, “Hey, good on you chum! Well done! We Americans will turn your adventures into a blockbuster movie, but rest assured, we’ll substitute a nasty Israeli imperialism for you Russians, so that no offense can be taken should we happen to depict any necessarily troublesome injustices, or, y’know, murders.”
Over the South China Sea there wouldn’t be cell coverage; unless someone had a sat phone any other means of communication would be controlled by the crew. And of course all communications controlled by the crew were shut down before the course change.
Would a planeload of ChiCom citizens stage a counter-hijacking like the Americans on Flight 93?
Would a planeload of ChiCom citizens stage a counter-hijacking like the Americans on Flight 93?
Suppose for a moment that this happens to be a carefully planned event (which is not over yet, so not known to us in its full extent) by al Qaeda central, so-called. Under that hypothesis, they have had years to put into the effort, with all the previous lessons learned to account for. If, again hypothetically, there is a hidden collusion within the aircraft itself (pilot or co-pilot or both together), what’s to prevent further collusion within the cabin attendant staff? The whole thing can grow to be very logical series of events, once we think about it as other than an ad hoc one off.
But they missed disabling the data pings from the engines. Perhaps they weren’t aware they even pinged.
My best guess is that the hijacker(s) learned much from the Lockerbie failure (that explosion was intended to take place over ocean, making identification of the responsible party impossible; but instead, it happened over Scotland) was taken to heart, and wasn’t to be repeated.
If the scenario I postulated above happened, after all devices were rendered inoperable, the fuel near-exhausted, the plane was pointed straight down and accelerated to eleven. That would account for the the 40,000-foot drop in less than a minute, as was reported by the engines.
Is there a deep trench in the Indian Ocean? That’s where they needs search.
Oh. Sunda Trench.
My take is that the pings from the [engine, aircraft?] systems, which are/were not singed up/paid for, but active like your cell phone when not in use, have a timing component that tells the distance from the satellite but not a direction. Thus the arc of possible positions. Now they must have the data for all earlier pings which would form a series of arcs of possibility from the last known position. These arcs should together show the only path that could satisfy all the pings that happened up until they were shut off.
There is speculation that we do know, at least up until all radio pings shut off, the location but must, to protect methods and means, try to get the info out in a way that does not point to the actual source. Like the NSA/CIA telling the DEA and local law enforcement to make up a reason to stop a certain car or raid a certain place at a certain time to find drugs when the real source was intercepted phone calls or emails that they don’t want revealed.
That would be a hopeful best case. If we don’t really know then all this is just static, noise in the system.
“Dastardly pings! Curses, foiled again!”
*** America is our first target, followed by United Kingdom, France and other crusader countries. [. . .]
Washington DC and New York:
Washington is the capital, and New York is the former capital. Both have symbolic importance to the American people and government. Moreover, White House is in Washington, and DC has about 347,000 federal govern ment employees and many important figures in the government live there. As for New York, it is known for its status as a financial, cultural, transportation, and manufacturing center, it is the leading center of banking, finance and communication in the United States. ***
This goes doubly well for weaponized airliners as for carbombs.
A John Varley short story which was made into a fair movie turns out to be pretty true and all the passengers are now in the far future where the AGW and human poisoned planet has finally recovered and needs settlers who can reproduce the race. But this time do it right!
If this was a terror plot, it’s advanced enough and audacious enough that it will never work again.
The evolution of our defenses against them was manageable when they innovated incrementally. Quantum leaps in offense lead to quantum leaps in defense.
Hubs read a story back when the plane first vanished that related that 20 engineers from Houston (NASA?) were aboard this flight. They are Chinese nationals working in the USA on some kind of EMP technology. It sounds like nonsense to me, but I figured I’d toss it out there for you all.
Apparently, the device(s) are about the size of a cellphone and account for the transponders lack of signal and loss of tracking from the ground.
A non-conspiracy story. The conspiracy one was in the Daily Mail, “Before It’s News” and Examiner.com.
Ah, thanks. I can’t keep up with all the stories even when you aggregate them here, Geoff.
A Criminologist Questions: Was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Hacked?
REPORT: Doomed airliner pilot was political fanatic: Hours before taking control of flight MH370 he attended trial of jailed opposition leader as FBI reveal passengers could be at a secret location
Looks like the pilot was a nutcase. If he worked alone, then this plane’s fate was his snap reaction to his favorite politician’s sodomy conviction, and it’s likely in the trench. If he was employed, then this gets huge, and we’d better watch the skies.
But, the KISS principle.
Also, the last direction that plane was pointed? Directly towards Mecca.
“and needs settlers who can reproduce the race”
I’ve heard better pick up lines.
Lebanon is about to go to war with Lebanon, but then Lebanon has already always been at war with Lebanon, so there’s little news in that. But crusader countries, if they must still be known as crusader countries, might take a higher regard of themselves and consider whether they ought not join with Bernard de Clairvaux in his recommendation to spernere se sperni, and thereafter put the vengeful Muslim’s Allah to the test.