Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

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Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby seektravelinfo » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:40 am

Six Important Facts You’re Not Being Told About Lost Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
March 10, 2014

There are some astonishing things you’re not being told about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the flight that simply vanished over the Gulf of Thailand with 239 people on board.

The mystery of the flight’s sudden and complete disappearance has even the world’s top air safety authorities baffled. “Air-safety and antiterror authorities on two continents appeared equally stumped about what direction the probe should take,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ goes on to report:

“For now, it seems simply inexplicable,” said Paul Hayes, director of safety and insurance at Ascend Worldwide, a British advisory and aviation data firm.

While investigators are baffled, the mainstream media isn’t telling you the whole story, either. So I’ve assembled this collection of facts that should raise serious questions in the minds of anyone following this situation.

• Fact #1: All Boeing 777 commercial jets are equipped with black box recorders that can survive any on-board explosion

No explosion from the plane itself can destroy the black box recorders. They are bomb-proof structures that hold digital recordings of cockpit conversations as well as detailed flight data and control surface data.

• Fact #2: All black box recorders transmit locator signals for at least 30 days after falling into the ocean

Yet the black box from this particular incident hasn’t been detected at all. That’s why investigators are having such trouble finding it. Normally, they only need to “home in” on the black box transmitter signal. But in this case, the absence of a signal means the black box itself — an object designed to survive powerful explosions — has either vanished, malfunctioned or been obliterated by some powerful force beyond the worst fears of aircraft design engineers.


Fact #3: Many parts of destroyed aircraft are naturally bouyant and will float in water

In past cases of aircraft destroyed over the ocean or crashing into the ocean, debris has always been spotted floating on the surface of the water. That’s because — as you may recall from the safety briefing you’ve learned to ignore — “your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device.”

Yes, seat cushions float. So do many other non-metallic aircraft parts. If Flight 370 was brought down by an explosion of some sort, there would be massive debris floating on the ocean, and that debris would not be difficult to spot. The fact that it has not yet been spotted only adds to the mystery of how Flight 370 appears to have literally vanished from the face of the Earth.


Fact #4: If a missile destroyed Flight 370, the missile would have left a radar signature

One theory currently circulating on the ‘net is that a missile brought down the airliner, somehow blasting the aircraft and all its contents to “smithereens” — which means very tiny pieces of matter that are undetectable as debris.

The problem with this theory is that there exists no known ground-to-air or air-to-air missile with such a capability. All known missiles generate tremendous debris when they explode on target. Both the missile and the debris produce very large radar signatures which would be easily visible to both military vessels and air traffic authorities.

• Fact #5: The location of the aircraft when it vanished is not a mystery

Air traffic controllers have full details of almost exactly where the aircraft was at the moment it vanished. They know the location, elevation and airspeed — three pieces of information which can readily be used to estimate the likely location of debris.

Remember: air safety investigators are not stupid people. They’ve seen mid-air explosions before, and they know how debris falls. There is already a substantial data set of airline explosions and crashes from which investigators can make well-educated guesses about where debris should be found. And yet, even armed with all this experience and information, they remain totally baffled on what happened to Flight 370.

• Fact #6: If Flight 370 was hijacked, it would not have vanished from radar

Hijacking an airplane does not cause it to simply vanish from radar. Even if transponders are disabled on the aircraft, ground radar can still readily track the location of the aircraft using so-called “passive” radar (classic ground-based radar systems that emit a signal and monitor its reflection).

Thus, the theory that the flight was hijacked makes no sense whatsoever. When planes are hijacked, they do not magically vanish from radar.

by MIKE ADAMS
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby svizzerams » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:55 am

Seeks, I'm reading "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" by Ryan Holiday. Kinda explains the current level of inanity of the media in general these days - especially as it pertains to the internetz.....


I thought this take from VICE was novel:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/print/media-c ... ight-mh370
Cutting Through the Bullshit Surrounding Flight MH370

Sometimes planes crash. But in a post-9/11 world, that story isn’t quite interesting enough. We can't just report that Flight MH370 crashed and we don’t know where or why yet; instead, we have to be able to relay the plot of exactly what happened, using whatever scraps of information we can find.

Sprawling news organisations struggle to feed 24-hour news channels and rolling liveblogs with the meagre rations available, each morsel sniffed and inspected and toyed with hour-after-hour until every last drop of flavour has been extracted from it. And when the facts run out, you can always rely on the efforts of experts-cum-story-tellers, spinning yarns from the thinnest and most fragile of evidence.

The Boeing 777 is the nearest thing to real magic that most of us will experience in our lifetimes. It contains three million parts from 500 suppliers, working in perfect harmony for millions upon millions of miles, maintaining a safety record any car manufacturer would kill for. To call it a miracle would be an insult to the skill and effort of the thousands of engineers responsible for building the craft, but each time one of these contraptions makes a successful flight it should be hailed as an extraordinary achievement.

It’s a testament to how safe modern planes are – and how skewed our sense of risk is – that a single crash has generated more headlines than the nearly 2,000 people who died on Britain’s roads last year. The loss of Flight MH370 is undoubtedly a tragedy and an utterly horrible thing for the passengers and their families to go through. But how many lives are lost and how many families are affected each day in accidents involving cars, motorbikes and bicycles?

That’s not the only thing the press have failed to comprehend in their race to build stories and attract readers. Probably the most damaging misunderstanding has been around the stolen passport story, which has been used in the last three days to build an absurd "terrorism" narrative around the disaster on the basis of basically zero evidence whatsoever.

Two passports used on the flight were discovered to have been lost or stolen, suggesting the passengers were travelling under false IDs. That, along with the large Muslim population in the region, was enough to prompt theories about the disappearance being related to terrorism, and for the Telegraph to talk about a "terror fear" – the ultimate combination of fear and terror – over "mystery passengers".

Even as Interpol confirmed that two passports used on the flight matched records in its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (STLD) database, they also pointed out that up to 40 million IDs could be in circulation, and that checks in most countries were so lax that “passengers were able to board planes more than a billion times without having their passports screened against Interpol's databases”.

It turns out that bogus passports are surprisingly common, but even if they weren’t, do terrorists generally even use stolen passports? The 9/11 hijackers didn’t.

However, none of that stopped the media from clinging doggedly to their narrative. By Tuesday, "air security expert" Philip Baum, appearing in the Daily Mail, had pieced together – albeit hypothetically – a scheme that had the East Turkestan Islamic Movement at the heart of a militant plot to down the aircraft. “Could it be that ETIM, having failed to gain international publicity through its domestic attacks, has decided to go international?” If so, they’re keeping pretty bloody quiet about it.

One of the more ludicrous theories was the accusation, promoted by the Mail, that 20 employees from the semi-conductor firm Freescale lost on the flight were involved in some kind of electronic warfare experiment. “This could include ‘cloaking’ technology that uses a hexagonal array of glasslike panels to bend light around an object, such as a plane, according to a report in Beforeitsnews.com,” the paper speculated, neglecting to mention that other stories on the site include gems like, “Alien Technology Discovered in Man’s Tooth?!”

At the farthest end of the making-shit-up spectrum sits Mike “Health Ranger” Adams, the author of Natural News – a site that specialises in peddling bullshit quackery to anyone dumb enough to take the link bait plastered up on Facebook. Slate’s Brian Palmer observed recently that Adams has become adept at exploiting the social network, with “an uncanny ability to move sophisticated readers from harmless dietary balderdash to medical quackery to anti-government zealotry”. Natural News has its own take on Facebook: “Worse than meth: Facebook is altering your mind and turning you into a slave” – which sounds like something Susan Greenfield might say when she’s drunk. Natural News posts on Facebook probably won’t enslave you, but they may make you an idiot.

Adams has his own theory about Flight 370, if you can call six brain-farts and a non-sequitur a "theory". As with most conspiracy theories, it takes a series of barely-connected, context-deprived "facts" – drawn largely from the observer’s own ignorance – and adds a strong dose of paranoid finger pointing, but fails to draw any sort of cohesive framework together to hang a plausible story on.

To the pseudo-religious mind of the conspiracy theorist, the failure to find the black box or floating debris after four days isn’t simply a sign of how difficult it is to find a tiny box in a vast deep sea (the flight recorder on Air France flight 447 took two years to locate), but evidence of dark, mysterious forces at work.

“If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet, which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence,” Adams postulated. “If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever controls it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power. “

It’s easy to mock internet conspiracy theorists, but what they’re doing isn’t that far removed from the psychology at play in the mainstream media. They’re all filling the vacuum with their own stories; it’s just that some restrict their stories to slightly more plausible territory. There’s just as little evidence for a terrorist attack as there is for a missile strike, and both stories have been built around the idea of a monster under a bed. For conspiracy theorists, it’s the US government or the New World Order; for the Daily Mail, it’s Muslim extremists with scary-sounding names.

The whole scenario sounds almost religious, and perhaps, in a way, it is. It all seems to come back to a deep-seated need for somebody – some unseen hand – to be in control of events. As David Aaronovitch pointed out in Voodoo Histories, the alternative is, in many ways, more frightening – that the universe doesn’t really care whether we live or die, that it has no respect for the narratives we build around our lives and that death can simply just happen, random and unplanned.

The irony is that, buried in this avalanche of speculation, there are some really interesting stories that have been largely ignored. How is it, for example, that for all the supposed increases in airline security in the wake of 9/11, checks at airports are so bad that people with stolen passports can apparently travel at will? And why is it that in an era of high speed 4G broadband, when 40-year-old technology can transmit data back from beyond the edge of the solar system, we still have to send ships and divers to retrieve data from a plane, rather than simply transmitting it in real time?

To me, these questions – and others – are far more interesting than invisible Muslim militant groups or government laser beams.
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby svizzerams » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:56 am

Followed by:
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-does ... a-airlines

Cutting Through Even More Bullshit Surrounding Flight MH370

It didn’t take long for us to get used to being watched. From the CCTV lining our streets to the GPS receivers in our phones, from targeted web ads to the GCHQ agents watching us wank away on webcams, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that wherever we are, and whatever we’re doing, we can be found and seen. For all the criticisms of mass surveillance, we almost seem to want it to be true – to believe that somewhere up in the heavens, a distant spy satellite is watching over us with its beady little lens, giving a shit.

Just how far we’ve travelled down that path can be seen in the public responses to two recent stories. When it was revealed that American and British intelligence agencies were collecting bulk data from communication networks, many people were indifferent – 'Of course they can,' we thought. 'We expected that.' In contrast, Flight MH370’s abrupt disappearance from the grid is much harder to comprehend. How is it possible that over 200 people, on an airliner stuffed with modern communications technology, can just disappear?

People seemed to believe, fairly reasonably, that the health and position of any aircraft in our skies is being streamed back to a base somewhere pretty much in real time. But this wasn't true in the case of MH370 – the Rolls-Royce engines powering the aircraft transmit data packets back to the company’s Derby headquarters via satellite, but this only happens a few times in any given flight. It’s not a live feed as some have suggested. In the case of MH370, two packets of data were sent – one on take off and one during the 777’s climb to cruising altitude.

That's not a great deal to go on, but sending a constant stream of data would soon become prohibitively expensive – BusinessWeek’s Justin Bachman dug out a report from 2002, estimating that such a system would cost hundreds of millions in satellite bandwidth fees. Doubtless, things are cheaper now than they were in 2002 but modern planes can accumulate a lot of data, and streaming all that back is still going to be pretty expensive.

Would this kind of live monitoring be worth it? For a manufacturer like Rolls-Royce, the bursts of data they receive from each flight give them vital information that they can use to improve the reliability and performance of their engines, and deliver better value to their customers. For a modern, safe airline and its passengers, the benefits aren’t so clear. The extra data would be unlikely to prevent deaths, just provide slightly quicker information in their aftermath. Would you rather airlines paid for that, or would you rather they spent the money improving safety in the first place?

What about RADAR? The truth is, once you pass outside the range of a shore-based radar you’re largely on your own. Most airliners carry an ADS-B transponder, which broadcasts the plane’s location every half a second – that’s the information used to plot aircraft trajectories on websites like FlightRadar24.com, which published a map of MH370’s last known position recently. If the transponder fails, then the plane could end up pretty much anywhere. In theory, a stricken Boeing 777 could glide for ten or 20 minutes before finally hitting the water, which could easily translate to a hundred miles of travel. Draw a circle with a radius of say, 150 miles around the last known position, and you have something like 70,000 square miles of inscrutable ocean to search. Tough.

A number of people have pointed out that flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders – a plane's "black box" system – are equipped with underwater locator beacons, which is true. The devices emit an ultrasonic scream that can be picked up by sonar systems within a range of a couple of miles. ULBs have a survival rate in aircraft crashes at sea of around 90 percent, which is the good news. The bad news is that you’re only going to detect them if you have a sonar system within two nautical miles of them. If the search area covers tens of thousands of square miles, the odds of finding them quickly are pretty low.

Of course, there was one other class of communications device on the plane – the mobile phones carried by most of the passengers. These have been the source of some of the most stupid reporting in the last few days, when newspapers were amazed to report that some of the passengers’ phones were still ringing when dialled, four days – sorry, FOUR DAYS – after the crash.

The solution to this mystery is that there’s actually no mystery to solve. People assume that when they dial a number and hear a phone ringing, that means the phone is actually ringing at the other end. In reality, that assumption is completely bogus – it hasn’t been true for years – and as soon as you realise that, it’s obvious that there’s actually no mystery to solve. The only puzzle is why so many journalists reported this story without bothering to call a phone company and check it out first.

It isn’t just information from the plane that’s patchy. Many people, myself included, have learned in the last five days that dodgy passports are actually far more common than we realised. Given that Interpol maintains a database of lost and stolen passports, accessible to any airline in the world that chooses to use it, why are a billion passengers each year able to board aircraft without having their passports checked?

Once again, the question rests on a big assumption: that checking whether passports are lost or stolen is going to make much difference to security in the first place. Only two of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 carried dodgy passports – to give one example – and it’s not immediately obvious why any would-be bomber would need to. After all, suicide bombers rarely pull the same stunt twice. Recent history has shown, too, that there are no shortage of fresh recruits to the cause. Extremists have shown a terrifying willingness to attach bombs to partners, children or even babies in the past. While passport checking might have a role in curbing illegal immigration, its use against terrorism seems limited at best, and easily circumvented.

Ultimately, lots more information about Flight MH370 could have been available, or been available faster. Even if that were the case though, our understanding of what happened would still rely on an effective organisation on the ground, piecing together all the parts into a coherent story. Unfortunately, it seems that one of the biggest factors hampering the search is the confused and garbled information coming out of various arms of the Malaysian government.

Amid all the conspiracy theories emerging in the last few days, it’s ironic that it may well be a government that prevents the plane from being found, but through incompetence rather than design. There’s an important lesson in here somewhere: that for all the focus on technological and data-driven solutions to the mysteries of the world – and for all our faith in the powers of surveillance – in the end, it all comes down to people.

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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby seektravelinfo » Thu Mar 13, 2014 3:14 am

but I enjoy conspiracy theories
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby Hunter » Thu Mar 13, 2014 9:51 am

seektravelinfo wrote:but I enjoy conspiracy theories


Sometimes the unknown is more interesting than the truth.....however there are a lot of unexplained questions with this flight. Things don't seem to add up
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby nowonmai » Thu Mar 13, 2014 9:54 am

I trust Kiwis. Especially ones that work on oil rigs. Could have been a meteor of course but if this bloke says he saw something then I think he probably did.


Missing plane: Kiwi claims to have seen plane burning in sky

10:11 AM Thursday Mar 13, 2014
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Aviation Malaysia
A member of the Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) uses a binocular to scan the horizon during a search operation for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight. Photo / AP
A member of the Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) uses a binocular to scan the horizon during a search operation for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight. Photo / AP
A New Zealand oil rig worker has claimed to have seen the missing Malaysian Airlines plane burning in the sky.

Read more: Debris found at sea - reports

Mike McKay told his employers, in an email made public overnight, that he had observed the plane burning at high altitude.

A man stands near an office building with lights forming the words MH370, the flight number of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in Shanghai, China. Photo / AP
A man stands near an office building with lights forming the words MH370, the flight number of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in Shanghai, China. Photo / AP
"I believe I saw the Malaysian Airlines plane come down. The timing is right," he said.

"I tried to contact the Malaysian and Vietnam officials several days ago. But I do not know if the message has been received."

Mr McKay said he was on the oil rig Songa Mercur, off south east Vietnam.

When he observed the plane it appeared to be in one piece, he said.


"From when I first saw the burning (plane) until the flames went out (still at high altitude) was 10 to 15 seconds," he wrote.

Several online news outlets have posted the letter, and say the man's employer has confirmed it's authentic.

ABC reported that Vietnam officials confirmed they had received the email but found no wreckage in the area specified.
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby ROB » Thu Mar 13, 2014 8:30 pm

svizzerams wrote:Seeks, I'm reading "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" by Ryan Holiday. Kinda explains the current level of inanity of the media in general these days - especially as it pertains to the internetz.....


That book was hilarious. In a really depressing way.
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby coldharvest » Fri Mar 14, 2014 12:07 am

I'd be shakin' down those Vegas magicians
David Copperfield and those cunts
and that goes double for that surviving Tiger guy, Seinfeld and Roy, whichever


but not Penn & Teller, I like those assholes
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby Bouncer » Fri Mar 14, 2014 5:12 pm

And why is it that in an era of high speed 4G broadband, when 40-year-old technology can transmit data back from beyond the edge of the solar system, we still have to send ships and divers to retrieve data from a plane, rather than simply transmitting it in real time?

This I can answer.

Short answer: Because it would be expensive.

Longer answer: There are systems that can do this, but you have to buy full time satellite bandwidth for the capability to do moment by moment telemetry upload. Voice and data would cost even more, the equivalent of a satellite phone call that lasts for hours. Every transoceanic flight, every day, would get cost prohibitive quick.

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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby svizzerams » Sat Mar 15, 2014 2:10 pm

BBC News Asia
15 March 2014 Last updated at 08:03 ET
Missing Malaysia Airlines plane 'deliberately diverted'

The communications systems of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 were deliberately disabled, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak has said.

According to satellite and radar evidence, he said, the plane then changed course and could have continued flying for a further seven hours.

He said the "movements are consistent with the deliberate action of someone on the plane".

The plane disappeared a week ago with 239 people on board.

Mr Razak stopped short of saying it was a hijacking, saying only that they were investigating "all possibilities".

He said the plane could be anywhere from Kazakhstan to the Indian Ocean.

The developments have added further uncertainty to the relatives of the 239 people on board the Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight.

Some in the Chinese capital said the news had made them more hopeful that their loved ones are alive, but one woman said they were on an emotional rollercoaster and she felt "helpless and frustrated".
'New phase'

The flight left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 00:40 local time (16:40 GMT) on 8 March and disappeared off air traffic controllers' screens at about 01:20.

Mr Razak told a news conference that new satellite evidence shows "with a high degree of certainty" that the one of the aircraft's communications systems - the Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System - was disabled just before it had reached the east coast of Malaysia.

ACARS is a service that allows computers aboard the plane to "talk" to computers on the ground, relaying in-flight information about the health of its systems.

Shortly afterwards, near the cross-over point between Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic controllers, the plane's transponder - which emits an identifying signal - was switched off, he said.

According to a military radar, the aircraft then turned and flew back over Malaysia before heading in a north-west direction.

A satellite was able to pick up a signal from the plane until 08:11 local time - more than seven hours after it lost radar contact - although it was unable to give a precise location, Mr Razak said.

He went on to say that based on this new data, investigators "have determined the plane's last communication with a satellite was in one of two possible corridors":

a northern corridor stretching from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan through to northern Thailand
a southern corridor stretching from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean

The BBC's Jonah Fisher in Kuala Lumpur says investigators will now focus on trying to obtain the radar data from any of the countries the Boeing 777 may have passed over.

This could include Thailand, Myanmar, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India and Pakistan.

Mr Razak said that in light of the new evidence, the investigation had "entered a new phase" and would focus on the crew and passengers on board.

Shortly after the news conference finished, Malaysian police searched the Kuala Lumpur home of the plane's pilot, 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Malaysia's prime minister confirmed much of what had been leaked to the media, from US agencies and satellite companies, in the last 48 hours.

His government had been facing severe criticism for not being more open about what it knows.

China - which had 153 citizens on board the flight - has urged Malaysia to continue providing it with "thorough and exact information" on the search, state news agency Xinhua said.

The foreign ministry said it was sending technical specialists to participate in the investigation, and appealed for the help of other countries and organisations.

Along with the Chinese passengers, there were 38 Malaysians and citizens of Iran, the US, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, India, France, New Zealand, Ukraine, Russia, Taiwan and the Netherlands on board.

An extensive search of the seas around Malaysia - involving 14 countries, 43 ships and 58 aircraft - since the plane disappeared had proved fruitless.

BBC © 2014 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby friendlyskies » Sat Mar 15, 2014 4:53 pm

It occurs to me that, while building nuclear weapons isn't exactly rocket science, building ICBMs is. That plane might make a good delivery system for someone with a nuke, but no way of getting it to the target.
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby coldharvest » Sat Mar 15, 2014 7:28 pm

friendlyskies wrote:It occurs to me that, while building nuclear weapons isn't exactly rocket science, building ICBMs is. That plane might make a good delivery system for someone with a nuke, but no way of getting it to the target.

Jesus, that was my thought exactly
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby svizzerams » Sat Mar 15, 2014 8:09 pm

Since there was at least one Ukranian passenger I thought it might be an attempt at repurposing a slightly used 777 as the future flagship of a new national airlines, considering I heard some Russians exclaiming on BBC that all Ukranians are criminals. (I just think they are all spammers.....)
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby svizzerams » Sat Mar 15, 2014 8:29 pm

(Reuters) - 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.

The last plot on the military radar's tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India's Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said.

Waypoints are geographic locations, worked out by calculating longitude and latitude, that help pilots navigate along established air corridors.

A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight.

POSSIBLE SABOTAGE OR HIJACK

"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.

Malaysian police have previously said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew had personal or psychological problems that might shed light on the mystery, along with the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or mechanical failure.

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.

LAST SIGHTING

In one of the most baffling mysteries in modern aviation, no trace of the plane nor any sign of wreckage has been found despite a search by the navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries.

The last sighting of the aircraft on civilian radar screens came shortly before 1:30 a.m. Malaysian time last Saturday (1730 GMT Friday), less than an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur, as the plane flew northeast across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand. That put the plane on Malaysia's east coast.

Malaysia's air force chief said on Wednesday an aircraft that could have been the missing plane was plotted on military radar at 2:15 a.m., 200 miles northwest of Penang Island off Malaysia's west coast.

This position marks the limit of Malaysia's military radar in that part of the country, a fourth source familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

When asked about the range of military radar at a news conference on Thursday, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said it was "a sensitive issue" that he was not going to reveal.

"Even if it doesn't extend beyond that, we can get the co-operation of the neighboring countries," he said.

The fact that the aircraft - if it was MH370 - had lost contact with air traffic control and was invisible to civilian radar suggested someone on board had turned off its communication systems, the first two sources said.

They also gave new details on the direction in which the unidentified aircraft was heading - following aviation corridors identified on maps used by pilots as N571 and P628. These routes are taken by commercial planes flying from Southeast Asia to the Middle East or Europe and can be found in public documents issued by regional aviation authorities.

In a far more detailed description of the military radar plotting than has been publicly revealed, the first two sources said the last confirmed position of MH370 was at 35,000 feet about 90 miles off the east coast of Malaysia, heading towards Vietnam, near a navigational waypoint called "Igari". The time was 1:21 a.m..

The military track suggests it then turned sharply westwards, heading towards a waypoint called "Vampi", northeast of Indonesia's Aceh province and a navigational point used for planes following route N571 to the Middle East.

From there, the plot indicates the plane flew towards a waypoint called "Gival", south of the Thai island of Phuket, and was last plotted heading northwest towards another waypoint called "Igrex", on route P628 that would take it over the Andaman Islands and which carriers use to fly towards Europe.

The time was then 2:15 a.m. That is the same time given by the air force chief on Wednesday, who gave no information on that plane's possible direction.

The sources said Malaysia was requesting raw radar data from neighbours Thailand, Indonesia and India, which has a naval base in the Andaman Islands.

(Additional reporting by Christine Chan in Singapore. Writing by Alex Richardson: Editing by Dean Yates)
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Re: Malaysion Flight 370 where art thou?

Postby marie-angelique » Sun Mar 16, 2014 12:05 am

Bouncer wrote:And why is it that in an era of high speed 4G broadband, when 40-year-old technology can transmit data back from beyond the edge of the solar system, we still have to send ships and divers to retrieve data from a plane, rather than simply transmitting it in real time?

This I can answer.

Short answer: Because it would be expensive.

Longer answer: There are systems that can do this, but you have to buy full time satellite bandwidth for the capability to do moment by moment telemetry upload. Voice and data would cost even more, the equivalent of a satellite phone call that lasts for hours. Every transoceanic flight, every day, would get cost prohibitive quick.

Regards,
-Bouncer-


Thanks :) I was wondering about that. cheers.
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