Malaysia Airlines Flight Goes Missing En Route to China

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's getting curiouser and curiouser. The Austrian and Italian passengers they were reporting on board actually weren't on board... Their passports had been stolen a couple of years ago. Makes me wonder what is going on... At least two people on board who weren't who they said they were. Got this at from CNN.

Also for those wondering about the kids, they're reporting five kids under the age of five total. So I'm guessing two lap kids, three seat kids.

I would think this is just coincidence. Passport theft and forgery is very common.

If it were terrorism or something, I would find it odd that there would be no distress signal. The plane was not old, and you would think they'd have an "emergency button" or something installed that conveys a signal about an attempted hijacking - something that doesn't require a radio call. Hijackers generally like attention - no group has claimed anything. It seems like whatever happened was EXTREMELY quick - 1-2 minutes max from normal flight, to destruction. Hell, it would take that long just to fall from 7 miles up in the sky. A hijacking would have to have been absolutely instantaneous. It seems very unlikely to me.

Of course it's not coincidence. How many times have you heard of a plane going down and TWO of passengers used stolen passports? Uh, never. These 2 guys blew the plane up with one of those newfangled bombs al Qaeda has come up with - shoe, underwear, liquid, whatever....And they haven't taken credit for it because they're busy making more bombs now that they know they work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's getting curiouser and curiouser. The Austrian and Italian passengers they were reporting on board actually weren't on board... Their passports had been stolen a couple of years ago. Makes me wonder what is going on... At least two people on board who weren't who they said they were. Got this at from CNN.

Also for those wondering about the kids, they're reporting five kids under the age of five total. So I'm guessing two lap kids, three seat kids.

I would think this is just coincidence. Passport theft and forgery is very common.

If it were terrorism or something, I would find it odd that there would be no distress signal. The plane was not old, and you would think they'd have an "emergency button" or something installed that conveys a signal about an attempted hijacking - something that doesn't require a radio call. Hijackers generally like attention - no group has claimed anything. It seems like whatever happened was EXTREMELY quick - 1-2 minutes max from normal flight, to destruction. Hell, it would take that long just to fall from 7 miles up in the sky. A hijacking would have to have been absolutely instantaneous. It seems very unlikely to me.

Of course it's not coincidence. How many times have you heard of a plane going down and TWO of passengers used stolen passports? Uh, never. These 2 guys blew the plane up with one of those newfangled bombs al Qaeda has come up with - shoe, underwear, liquid, whatever....And they haven't taken credit for it because they're busy making more bombs now that they know they work.

There are a lot of flights in certain parts of the world where you can find a passenger or 2 with a stolen passport -- not so much in North Am. and Western Europe but I think it does happen in the Eastern world. So just because this flight had people with stolen passports doesn't prove anything alone -- may be a drug or human trafficking type of thing. Plus wouldn't a terrorist group take responsibility by now -- they do these things for publicity -- you'd think someone would be saying something in the last 36 hrs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's getting curiouser and curiouser. The Austrian and Italian passengers they were reporting on board actually weren't on board... Their passports had been stolen a couple of years ago. Makes me wonder what is going on... At least two people on board who weren't who they said they were. Got this at from CNN.

Also for those wondering about the kids, they're reporting five kids under the age of five total. So I'm guessing two lap kids, three seat kids.

I would think this is just coincidence. Passport theft and forgery is very common.

If it were terrorism or something, I would find it odd that there would be no distress signal. The plane was not old, and you would think they'd have an "emergency button" or something installed that conveys a signal about an attempted hijacking - something that doesn't require a radio call. Hijackers generally like attention - no group has claimed anything. It seems like whatever happened was EXTREMELY quick - 1-2 minutes max from normal flight, to destruction. Hell, it would take that long just to fall from 7 miles up in the sky. A hijacking would have to have been absolutely instantaneous. It seems very unlikely to me.

Of course it's not coincidence. How many times have you heard of a plane going down and TWO of passengers used stolen passports? Uh, never. These 2 guys blew the plane up with one of those newfangled bombs al Qaeda has come up with - shoe, underwear, liquid, whatever....And they haven't taken credit for it because they're busy making more bombs now that they know they work.

Case closed, call the investigation because Inspector Anonymous has solved it. Everyone can go home now.

[Anonymous]

Damn, did they find the plane yet?

[Anonymous]

No, they think it is in the ocean where they spotted large oil slicks.

[Anonymous]

How do they get on the planes with stolen passports?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How do they get on the planes with stolen passports?

Apparently not all airlines check a database for stolen passports all the time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No, they think it is in the ocean where they spotted large oil slicks.

Sounds like really deep water.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No, they think it is in the ocean where they spotted large oil slicks.

Sounds like really deep water.

It's actually pretty shallow. It's in the Sea of Thailand.

[Anonymous]

Is there any video footage of the search? Or other good feeds/ sites?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's getting curiouser and curiouser. The Austrian and Italian passengers they were reporting on board actually weren't on board... Their passports had been stolen a couple of years ago. Makes me wonder what is going on... At least two people on board who weren't who they said they were. Got this at from CNN.

Also for those wondering about the kids, they're reporting five kids under the age of five total. So I'm guessing two lap kids, three seat kids.

I would think this is just coincidence. Passport theft and forgery is very common.

If it were terrorism or something, I would find it odd that there would be no distress signal. The plane was not old, and you would think they'd have an "emergency button" or something installed that conveys a signal about an attempted hijacking - something that doesn't require a radio call. Hijackers generally like attention - no group has claimed anything. It seems like whatever happened was EXTREMELY quick - 1-2 minutes max from normal flight, to destruction. Hell, it would take that long just to fall from 7 miles up in the sky. A hijacking would have to have been absolutely instantaneous. It seems very unlikely to me.

I'm the one you're quoting and I hope you're right. CNN is now also reporting that this is a strange coincidence that they're looking into. I hadn't realized it's so easy to use a stolen passport. Oh and both passports were stolen in Thailand. Seems too coincidental to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That air france plane fell out of the sky in the middle of the south Altantic without a distress call.

Wonder if they met with a similar fate. How awful.

The Air France crash was pilot error. A mechanism froze, which automatically disabled auto pilot, and the pilots basically didn't know what to do, and wrongly maneuvered the plane. They should have been able to recover. It was gross negligence on the part of Air France-- they basically sent pilots who did not know how to properly fly the plane when it wasn't on auto pilots. Absolutely disgusting.

Read that the pilot had taken a break about ten minutes before they crashed, just before they were entering an area of turbulence. The two, less experienced co-pilots were flying the plane at the time. The plane rolled a little to the right and one of the co-pilots corrected the plane to the left. But the plane was operating in a different flying mode which was more sensitive so the correction was an over correction. So for thirty seconds the plane rolled left and right. The pilots were confused because they didn't understand what was happening and tilted the nose upwards so the plane started to climb. Because they were flying in the regular mode, the auto pilot was off and the air speed information wasn't being correctly reported and I think there weren't as many stall warnings. As the plane climbed higher, the plane was still at an angle. The wings loss lift and the plane stalled causing them to crash.

When you start to stall, the human reaction is to pull the stick back / nose up. However, in order to restart stalled engines, you need "suck," which comes from speed. So you need to do what's nearly counter-intuitive to a human, which is point the airplane nose down. With Air France, the pilot assumed he was in the beginning of a stall, not the end, and pointed the stick up when he needed more speed than power alone was going to provide in order to recover at that point. It's very hard to speculate on air accidents before the NTSB has conducted a study, though everyone wants answers... I have to say, I hadn't read the news last night and had a scary plane crash dream. Then woke up to the story. Ugh. I'm also in the industry, though I do not work for that carrier.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Bizarre. How does a plane go from 35,000 feet in the air to undetectable? The plane was logged every minute or so - sometimes multiple times a minute. And then at 12:02, it just disappears without a trace, no distress signal. Cruising altitude is typically the safest time of a flight.

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/MAS370/history/20140307/1635Z/WMKK/ZBAA/tracklog

Can anyone explain technically how this can happen? I get that catastrophic depressurization can knock out humans, but how is it that no passive or active sensors would have been tracking the position? Is it just that the plane could fall that distance in between scheduled pings? With modern GPS tracking / equipment / redundancies, it just seems crazy for a plane to simply disappear, unless there is in fact more data that hasn't been released.

There is some GPS telemetry transmitted by satellite for maintenance purposes, but it's sporadic because that is expensive. It's not designed for tracking. And at 600 mph, the aircraft travels 10 minutes in a minute, so if you get data every 5 minutes, that's 50 miles, and it could glide another 50 on the way down.

An example of tracking -- aircraft from Europe to the US have only unreliable High Frequency radio for occasional contact, no radar tracking, and are separated by flying different ground tracks and leaving lots of space in the front and back. So, on any flight abroad, you are basically out of contact for most of the trip.

Thanks for the explanation. I suppose I'm just surprised that the speed and altitude sensors aren't rigged to transmit location if the rate of change goes outside normal parameters.

Industry insider again. You'd be amazed at how low-tech GPS is. Most air navigation is ground based, and the system has not been meaningfully updated since the 1950's. Airliners could be rigged to stream location but it would be enormously expensive.

[Anonymous]

I read a report that the stolen passport passengers had consecutive ticket numbers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I read a report that the stolen passport passengers had consecutive ticket numbers.

It's definitely terrorism. I don't know why officials bothering saying "it's too early to tell." Last time I checked Malaysia is definitely a country with Al Qaeda groups and sympathies.