Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-370 goes missing

[Suraj]

This episode has also shown that Chinese remote sensing assets are not very high resolution. I do not buy the 'they are bluffing' idea. IF they wished to conceal their capabilities, they would have kept quiet entirely, which is how they normally are.

There's no point in publicly embarrassing themselves by first claiming to redeploy 10 satellites, and find something only to have the rest of the world go look and said, 'We already went there. Those are two boats!' and cause them to lose credibility before they open their mouths again. Some wags on the internet even joked that it was probably the debris of two of those satellites than accidentally slammed into each other while being redeployed.

[chetak]

even the 911 pilots were essentially students who took enough classes to crash a plane on target

I doubt that "few classes" and students bit. They could navigate to New York from Boston, and fly with precision into a the twin towers at high speeds with great accuracy at low levels. That high speed flight at low levels is not an easy thing to do, especially in a largish plane like the ones that hit the twin towers , fully loaded with fuel and hit bulls eye. A few degrees to the left or right would be a big miss and crash and a crash into the Hudson or East river or the PANYNJ harbour ,or a miss of Manhattan altogether.

I agree with Enqyoob who used to post here earlier . They were trained pilots who had handled fighters before and were trained elsewhere , the coursework if any in flying schools were probably to familiarise with the type they got to fly.

Don't need to fly the aircraft hands on into the building.

It can be done easily enough with the aircraft on autopilot and the direction and height (level flight, rate of climb or descent) being controlled with just two little knobs. Works essentially in the same way in the Boeing and the Airbus.

Just awareness of the cockpit layout, various controls and how to engage the autopilot and which knobs to turn.

Which is probably what the 9/11 guys had learned.

[Victor]

..The rapid accent and consequent decent may be to ward off those trying to barge into the cockpit.

If nobody is controlling a jet with engines running constant, it will tend to fly itself and result in a porpoising action, gaining altitude until it loses speed and noses down into a dive, gains speed and again goes into a climb, rinse and repeat.

[member_22733]

Yes, that could be as well.

To take the aircraft to such stresses in case of a hijack does not make sense. Unless like Cramsji suggests that the pilot went cuckoo.

I had a mallu friend who got real depressed, took a bus to his native place (it was that Thorium beach IIRC), and walked into the ocean wanting to meet his "dad" in gulf.

[negi]

Let us for time being agree that this is a Hijack, then following questions arise .

1. Why ?
2. Who ?

and Finally and more importantly for What ? Even there it's been friggin 7 days since the AC disappeared from Radar so why have no demands been made ? I mean any group will hijack a flight only for say 3 reasons , first either to take hostage , 9/11 type attack or finally if something/someone very important was flying on that AC and it had to be taken or individual killed/taken hostage.


On Kazakistan angle, firstly as India has already said that it cannot have flown over our airspace undetected secondly it appears that Malaysian PM is deliberately misleading people in order to hide something more sinister, how about this flight landed in Diego Garcia ? US has the means to blackout/jam radars not only that it has enough data on the region's radar coverage and hence can set some non state actor up to fly via these select blind spots.


All in all imho either the AC has crashed or if at all it has been hijacked then it has to be a very expert state funded team like the one which made Stuxnet because no commercial pilot training center tells/teaches you to disable ACAR of a Boeing 777 AC .

Another CT is idiots in the USN shot down the AC (because it was not flashing it's IFF) like the Iranian airline in 1988 and this whole tamasha is being cooked up to cover their @$$.

[member_22733]

GPS is receive only. No transmit business. To transmit you needed to find another way.

Have you seen how ambulance is tracked from control room? And you missed the word transceiver.

GPS system is just recieve. For it to become a transreciever you need another network to transmit the location information. If those transmit electronics get disabled, your plane might get GPS signals but it wont be able to transmit it. In that sense it would be able to navigate, but it wont be able to send data to an external entity.

[Anujan]

If transponders are much easier to disable than ACARS, why was the latter disabled significantly before the former?
If the pilots were part of the hijackers, they would have disabled the transponders first.
Were the hijackers working in stealth mode first and then forced access to the cockpit later?
But then the pilot would had time to signal distress...
Maybe the pilot knew that shutting off ACARS would not be noticed till later...so maybe he was involved!
Argh...too much confusion only.

Ground crews could have disabled the ACARS first.

[Saral]

Pilot going temporarily cuckoo theory seems most likely and then taking rash decisions like your mallu friend. What event(s) triggered it can be speculated about. Apparently family had moved out of his home before the flight and then you also have the local political angle of the prison sentence given to someone he admired. Co-pilot may have realized what was going on and likely there was some kind of altercation etc. Hijacking or Hijackers other than main pilot seems absurd.

THE family of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, pilot of the vanished MH370, had moved out of their residence in Laman Seri even before the flight’s disappearance last Saturday. The Malay Mail visited the family’s house yesterday but discovered no one at home, except their 38-year-old maid. “Captain Zaharie’s wife and three children had camped at their second house in Subang a day before the incident,” said Norhayati Wahiduddin.

[member_22733]

Could it be, just could it be, that the main pilot was suffering from such a hard core mental disease and he hid it, and so did his doctor or whoever else knew it, from the world? So that night, he simply snapt, and just went crazy? And as I said about my friend, I wouldn't read too much into his last statement, namely, "good night, everything is normal" or whatever normal sounding phrase he used. He might have been simmering inside himself, and when he saw the quiet of the night and the stars and the empty space outside the cockpit, he just went berserk and said to himself, I am going to go and join that "peace"?

And so turned off the transponder, and the ACARs and .... instead of promptly plunging the plane into the sea?

Suicides can be very ritual. Ex: Hara Kiri. He might have wanted to see the Milky Way in Antartica before going nose down.

[UlanBatori]

And with a bit of further exertion you may be able to understand that six days ago there were no surface resources or helicopter that could have reached a remote location, 2000 miles from nearest port,

1) Right, in the middle of Kazakhstan.

... so it would have given the game away to any terrorists and signed the passengers' death warrant before anyone could do anything useful.

2) Already mentioned that the only bonafide reason for deception is the above, so you're telling me nothing new.

And neither you nor anyone else spending their days in Internet Fora know what the governments and action teams actually conveyed, and to whom. They could not, for instance, tell the search teams in Malaysia: "OK, stop looking in South China Sea"

3) The questions are (a) Why not? and (b) Why is no one asking that question? I don't see that in the MSM, or on BRF, except for "stressed me".

Or, horror of horrors, did they keep their knowledge to themselves and not tell us!!!!! Or CNN!!! At 20 knots, sailing 24 hrs a day, you go around 500 miles. It takes 4 or 5 days' sailing just to go 2000 miles after you have got underway.

4) And there are assets now in place to undertake a rescue/recovery in the South Indian Ocean?
5)And this deception was pretty elaborate. The USS Kidd moved from the Gulf of Thailand to the Malacca Strait just on Thursday/Friday.

Just out of curiosity, how would you have set up a rescue operation for 230 ppl being held hostage by say 50 terrorists in a well-prepared holdout, 2000 miles in the ocean?

6) Certainly not by searching in the Gulf of Thailand.

That continues from your previous post:
7)

At this point, I think you are deliberately being dense. They could say, just as they did today, that though ACARS was turned off, the plane continued to ping the satellites, and the plane continued flying for 7 hours after take off, and was likely not in the Gulf of Thailand.
I am not suggesting they should have given away their secret technology and say "Hey, stop searching and look over here, under the Indian Ocean 2000 miles south of Sri Lanka where we saw a flash after your flight should have run out of fuel!".
I will say one last time, and if you don't get it,
it might be best you go back into hibernation -
9) I don't see any reason the "information" they have "revealed" today could not have been "revealed' six days ago, and you have provided none.

Sorry to waste space, but I was hoping Shri A_Guptaji would ease up on his personal hostility.
1. Guptaji, Kazakhstan is north of the equator. Actually it is a land-locked nation. Please try going to http://www.maps.google.com, and you can confirm that. Middle-school geography texts would also tell you that.
2. You have been accusing the various national governments of holding out information while resources were being wasted on searching the wrong places for many days.
3. For the past 3 or 4 days, since the report first came out in the WSJ, it has been clear that the governments have known very well that there was more than an accident, and they told the rest of the world that they have known. So it was most certainly not you who revealed anything. Everyone in the aerospace industry realized immediately what that first "4.5 hours" evidence implied. That was when I withdrew my "CT" because there was no point in pointing it out, only question was where they thought the plane was. Anyway since the first Malaysian military radar report came out.
4. I don't know, all I am saying is that it takes a long time to get there. Unlike Kazakhstan, there are no ground roads or stations. Again, Maps.Google.com could help you out.
5. Not being on the USS Kidd, I wouldn't know if they even moved, so I have no idea how elaborate the deception was. But if nothing was announced about a search there, the hijackers would have known that the game was up. Finis for the passengers. If there are hijackers. If the passengers are alive. I would not know, perhaps you do and are not telling.
6. Thanks, I didn't think you had any better answer than that.
7. No I am naturally dense, but I am in excellent company.
8. Thank you but winter is over in the northern hemisphere.
9. Q.E.D. You don't /didn't see it. It would have been criminally insane to reveal that 6 days ago because it would have made the hijackers kill the survivors, or start some Kandahar-type festivities.
But now you DO claim to see it, so some progress has been made, albeit slowly.
Please don't make hostile posts in future. Read them before hitting the "submit" button. Or later, and delete them. Thanks!

[Rony]

Malaysia Airlines Plane Landed In Central Asia Region, Officials Now Believe

The Malyasia Airlines plane now vanished without a trace for over a week was the victim of one of the most sophisticated criminal operations ever to target an aircraft and its passengers. That, it is becoming clear, is now the consensus belief of officials and searchers who have been frustrated in their efforts to find the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Malaysia government authorities have now shifted their focus from a search for wreckage of the Malaysia Airlnes Boeing 777-200 to a criminal investigation of who stole the plane in mid-air, and why.

A BBC reporter stated via Twitter Saturday morning that he is learning where the officials now believe the plane may have landed — a region in Central Asia dominated by China’s Uyghur ethnic minority. Uyghur separatist extremists have been waging a violent terror campaign against China.

Most of the passengers on the Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines plane were Chinese nationals.

BBC correspondent Jonah Fisher said via Twitter that he is told the plane probably touched down somewhere along the border of China and neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

That area includes the Uyghur heartland, China’s Xinjiang province.

What was just a few days a considered a highly improbable, even fanciful theory — that a highly sophisticated jetliner such as the Malaysia Airlines 777-200 carrying 239 passengers could be commandeered and stolen in mid-flight without anyone on the ground having a clue — is now the official belief of the Malaysian government.

No less a source that Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak said exactly that in a public statement on Saturday. Razak announced that his government has concluded that the plane was deliberately diverted and flown for as many as seven hours toward a point in Central Asia.

If not Central Asia, the plane could also have flown toward somewhere between the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta and the Indian Ocean.

The two possibilities are based on data received by a satellite more than 22,000 miles over the Indian Ocean which at 8:11 am on March 8 received the last detected signal from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. Based on the trajectory of that signal reaching the satellite, investigators narrowed the plane’s location down to two “arcs.”

Either arc still covers a vast area. But if BBC reporter Fisher has good information, investigators may have already eliminated the Indonesia-Indian Ocean arc as a possibility for the Malaysia Airlines plane’s final destination, or at least consider it the less likely of the two.

The conclusion that the plane was stolen and almost certainly landed leaves open the questions not only of where the plane now is, but also, what has become of its 239 passengers and crew.

Did whoever took the Malaysia Airlines plane simply murder all of the passengers, in order to use the plane for some other, nefarious purpose? Or or are they still alive somewhere, held hostage?

More than a week has gone by since whoever stole the Malaysia Airlines plane accomplished their incredible task — if in fact, that is what happened — and there has been no communication or claim of responsibility for the act.

[chetak]

{quote="LokeshC"}GPS is receive only. No transmit business. To transmit you needed to find another way.

Have you seen how ambulance is tracked from control room? And you missed the word transceiver.
{/quote}

GPS system is just recieve. For it to become a transreciever you need another network to transmit the location information. If those transmit electronics get disabled, your plane might get GPS signals but it wont be able to transmit it. In that sense it would be able to navigate, but it wont be able to send data to an external entity.

All the big birds, Boeing and Airbus also carry multiple inertial navigation platforms. Once initialized, you don't have to depend so much on GPS. The greater the distance you have to fly on such a inertial platform generated data then the greater would be the error. In flight, GPS signal are used to constantly correct the errors, if any on the inertial platforms.


The amrekis can selectively and purposely switch off the GPS signals over any area of the globe that they chose. The GPS antennas can be selectively shaded so that any contour of any landmass can be blanked off. The bas@#$% did it to us in cashmere during the kargil operations where they purposely disabled the GPS over the Indian side in cashmere.

[Anurag]

I told you.. some professional AF has dauda dauda ke maara the plane..

I doubt it, would be too much to cover up.

[Anujan]

Okay a few CTs.

If the op was as sophisticated as described, no way fellows like ground crews were not involved. Time to round up anyone who has demonstrated pakiness.

Secondly, if a planeful of Chinese passengers is coming straight at Kalpakkam, what would India do? Shoot it down? And then explain to China why we shot it down? Remember that our desh didn't shoot down a massa spy plane that flew over pokharan for several hours.

Even if we shot it down, the damage is done. Its a lose lose situation. This is to answer "why plane filled with cheenis". I have a hard time believing the plane landed safely. Was probably flown by some paki. Sadly for him, the part of the book which deals with how to cruise a plane was replaced with a chapter on why Hindus and Jews are bad people, and how Pakistan won 1971 and how Chairman Mao and Bin Qasims horse estabilished Pakistan. This is typical of paki textbooks. Fellow simply didn't know that part, yelled AoA and went down into the sea.

[ManuJ]

If transponders are much easier to disable than ACARS, why was the latter disabled significantly before the former?...

Ground crews could have disabled the ACARS first.

No, the news reports specifically say that ACARS was disabled "just before it had reached the east coast of Malaysia".

[CRamS]

And so turned off the transponder, and the ACARs and .... instead of promptly plunging the plane into the sea?

Believe me, those who suffer from Bipolar and other mental diseases are bizarre. Rational and logical reasoning can't explain their behavior. Even an IIT genius like you can't. I am sure NTSB and FBI and CIA that Malaysians have now acquiesced to are examining the psychological profiles of the pilots and the passengers.

All this said, remember the CRamS lemma, one must always watch out for the bottom line when Uncle pontificates: Uncle's global interests. And there are lot at stake: Boeing business, defense industry, Uncle's super duper status etc. So while Uncle is the most resourceful and competent, keep all these things at the back of your mind when interpreting whatever Uncle and his mouthpieces on CNN say. BTW: That MIT aerospace prof on CNN is succinct but brilliant don't you think? He said a lot of insight things, but he was the first to be skeptical on the Chincom satellite images BS that everybody latched onto.

[UlanBatori]

No less a source that Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak said exactly that in a public statement on Saturday. Razak announced that his government has concluded that the plane was deliberately diverted and flown for as many as seven hours toward a point in Central Asia.

But he said nothing of the sort!

If not Central Asia, the plane could also have flown toward somewhere between the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta and the Indian Ocean.

Oh! So he read it and deliberatly misleads.

But if BBC reporter Fisher has good information, investigators may have already eliminated the Indonesia-Indian Ocean arc as a possibility for the Malaysia Airlines plane’s final destination, or at least consider it the less likely of the two.

or is just blowing hot air, most likely of all.

[Rony]

Malaysian plane saga highlights air defense gaps

Whatever truly happened to missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, its apparently unchallenged wanderings through Asian skies point to major gaps in regional - and perhaps wider - air defenses.

More than a decade after al Qaeda hijackers turned airliners into weapons on September 11, 2001, a large commercial aircraft completely devoid of stealth features appeared to vanish with relative ease.

On Saturday, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak said authorities now believed the Boeing 777 flew for nearly seven hours after disappearing early on March 8. Either its crew or someone else on the plane disabled the on-board transponder civilian air traffic radar used to track it, investigators believe.

It appears to have first flown back across the South China Sea - an area of considerable geopolitical tension and military activity - before overflying northern Malaysia and then heading out towards India without any alarm being raised.

The reality, analysts and officials say, is that much of the airspace over water - and in many cases over land - lacks sophisticated or properly monitored radar coverage.

Analysts say the gaps in Southeast Asia's air defenses are likely to be mirrored in other parts of the developing world, and may be much greater in areas with considerably lower geopolitical tensions.

"Several nations will be embarrassed by how easy it is to trespass their airspace," said Air Vice Marshal Michael Harwood, a retired British Royal Air Force pilot and ex-defense attache to Washington DC. "Too many movies and Predator (unmanned military drone) feeds from Afghanistan have suckered people into thinking we know everything and see everything. You get what you pay for. And the world, by and large, does not pay."

"TOO EXPENSIVE"

Air traffic systems rely almost entirely on on-board transponders to detect and monitor aircraft. In this case, those systems appear to have been deactivated around the time the aircraft crossed from Malaysian to Vietnamese responsibility.

At the very least, the incident looks set to spark calls to make it impossible for those on board an aircraft to turn off its transponders and disappear.

Military systems, meanwhile, are often limited in their own coverage or just ignore aircraft they believe are on regular commercial flights. In some cases, they are simply switched off except during training and when a threat is expected.

That, one senior Indian official said, might explain why the Boeing 777 was not detected by installations on India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago which its planes were searching on Friday and Saturday, or elsewhere.

"We have many radar systems operating in this area, but nothing was picked up," Rear Admiral Sudhir Pillai, chief of staff of India's Andamans and Nicobar Command, told Reuters. "It's possible that the military radars were switched off as we operate on an 'as required' basis."

Separately, a defense source said that India did not keep its radar facilities operational at all times because of cost. Asked what the reason was, the source said: "Too expensive."

"SOMEONE ELSE'S PROBLEM"

Worries over revealing defense capabilities, some believe, may have slowed cooperation in the search for flight MH370, particularly between Malaysia and China. Beijing has poured military resources into the search, announcing it was deploying 10 surveillance satellites and multiple ships and aircraft. It has been critical of Malaysia's response.

While Malaysian military radar does appear to have detected the aircraft, there appear to have been no attempts to challenge it - or, indeed, any realization anything was amiss.

That apparent oversight, current and former officials and analysts say, is surprising. But the incident, they say, points to the relatively large gaps in global air surveillance and the limits of some military radar systems.

"It's hard to tell exactly why they did not notice it," says Elizabeth Quintana, senior research fellow for air power at the Royal United Services Institute in London. "It may have been that the aircraft was flying at low level or that the military operators were looking for other threats such as fast jets and felt that airliners were someone else's problem."

Current and former officials say that - hopefully, at least - such an incident would be detected much faster in North American or European airspace. There, military and civilian controllers monitor radar continuously on alert for possible hijacks or intruders.

The sudden failure of a transponder, they say, would itself prove a likely and dramatic cause for concern.

"I can't think of many situations in which one would actually need to switch them off," said one former Western official on condition of anonymity.

U.S. and NATO jets periodically scramble to intercept unidentified aircraft approaching their airspace, including a growing number of Russian long-range bombers.

In some other areas, it is simply not seen as worth maintaining a high level of alert - or radar coverage itself may not even exist.

"NOTHING MUCH HAPPENS AT NIGHT"

Investigators now say they believe MH370 may have turned either towards India and Central Asia or - perhaps more likely, given the lack of detection - taken a southern course towards the Antarctic. That would have been an effectively suicidal flight, the aircraft eventually running out of fuel and crashing.

The waters of the southern Indian Ocean and northern Southern Ocean are among the most remote on the planet, used by few ships and overflown by few aircraft.

Australian civilian radar extends only some 200 km (125 miles) from its coast, an Australian official said on condition of anonymity, although its air defense radar extends much further. Australia's military could not be reached for comment on Saturday and if it did detect a transponder-less aircraft heading south, there is no suggestion any alarm was raised.

U.S. military satellites monitor much of the globe, including some of the remotest oceans, looking primarily for early warning of any ballistic missile launch from a submarine or other vessel.

After the aircraft's initial disappearance a week ago, U.S. officials said their satellites had detected no signs of a mid-air explosion. It is unclear if such systems would have detected a crash landing in the southern Indian Ocean.

On India's Andaman Islands, a defense official told reporters he saw nothing unusual or out of place in the lack of permanent radar coverage. The threat in the area, he said, was much lower than on India's border with Pakistan where sophisticated radars are manned and online continuously.

At night in particular, he said, "nothing much happens".

"We have our radars, we use them, we train with them, but it's not a place where we have (much) to watch out for," he said. "My take is that this is a pretty peaceful place."

[Philip]

If in Central Asia,then the aircraft would've flown between the A&N islands and Burma,over BDesh,whose mil radars are most likely primitive,over Nepal and then onto "Weegerland".

However,the fact has now been revealed that our magnificent air defences of "Fortress Andamans" ,switched off at night because "nothing happens" while "India sleeps",is as magnificent as "Fortress Singapore" in WW2,whose guns were all trained to the sea and not to the mainland at the rear,from where the Japanese invaded through the Malay peninsula! I'm sure the Chinese especially at Hainan will be enjoying this delicious titibit but priceless piece of info to factor into their warplans for the future.

[rohitvats]

As I said couple of pages back, the question about intended destination of the flight and purpose is hidden in the type of aircraft high-jacked...there is a very specific reason someone chose to commandeer a long range aircraft of B 777-200 type....

[rgosain]

Rohitvats, specific to that aircraft would be its cargo and we have yet to see the manifest list

[UlanBatori]

I KNEW IT! Pakis want vacation in Antarctica!!!! 404th Southern Flight Infantry going to take over Ross Ice Shelf, break it off and go cruising around the world spreading joy!!! Was there a run on white parkas and RayBans like there was in 1998-99 I wonder.
Pretty tough to set up a scheme like this at v. short notice. It is very airplane-specific unless they had a whole book of SOP covering all airliner types/airlines. This is the part I find about the critical cargo question: If one were shipping a very sensitive cargo, would one get to decide exactly which route and flight, I wonder. Assuming that there was an insider in the cargo origin company/organization, would the (Pakis) be able to respond fast enough and find the right loader/flight crew/passengers?
Same goes for critical passengers. General type of aircraft, yes, I guess they can decide that with high probabilty, only the precise flight day would be in question. They may have flown their "team" on many flights b4 saying: todin is da din.
I still think the oil slick was deliberate, to buy time until a/c was under cover. Also, choice of flight time was pretty smart: daylight was in about 5 hours, and by then they were cruising far south over the remote IO, or maybe around the Himalayas (unlikely: don't u think PRC radar would take a dim view of a large thingy flying from Yindoostan over Uighurstan and Splittist Northern Arunachal?)

It also took many hours for the Malaysian Air Force radar to confirm that they had indeed seen MH370, that would have been utterly unbelievable; operator would have checked and double-checked b4 reporting to higher-ups. Until the slick was confirmed as NOT from MH370, I doubt if the radar guys would even have dared to present their conclusion, for fear of being Just speculating of course... but it's normal human reaction. If they said: Aha! Vietnam reports oil slick right where we expected! then would you push your dubious sighting saying: But-but-but.. I saw this djinn going WESTWARDS 4 hours later!!! ??

[Victor]

At least one of the passengers was apparently an Uyghur (CNN pronounces it "weeger").

Inmarsat thinks it is possible someone disabled the pinging equipment on the plane. The last ping showed the plane at a normal cruising altitude and speed but the company has declined to reveal the location to the public. It would most likely have shared the info with the US, Chinese & Malay govts and the re-assignment of assets in the Indian Ocean West of Indonesia and in the BoB are pointers. The biggest gaps in radar and ATC coverage would be over Myanmar and West of Indonesia in the Indian Ocean. There is very little chance of the aircraft approaching undetected into Indian airspace.

The initial zig-zag path may indicate a fight on board with one or the other party/parties gaining momentary control of the aircraft. After some time, the fight may have ended with one side gaining full control and if that side was the good guys, they would have headed back to base in Malaysia. The fact they didn't may mean the bad guys had the freedom to fly to wherever they wanted. Of course, it could also mean that the plane crashed in the ocean or somewhere remote.

[Anujan]

Wiggles havent demonstrated the ability to carry out terror attacks of this sophistication. Their last "terror attack" was to run into a crowded station, yell AoA!! and stab a bunch of people with knives. This attack is by the usual suspects who have demonstrated sophistication in the past.

Our long lost amonkey ayesha cousins, chechnya birathers and so on.

[vasu raya]

Once on an international flight route, can it be shadowing another airliner to evade radars? the TCAS wouldn't go off if its dependent on the transponder signal which is switched off, the 45000ft altitude would permit such an approach at 6 O'clock and at night there is no visual for the below airliner

btw, if there was any knowledge of special cargo, all those fancy maneuvers would have been moderated, more likely the cargo will be loaded when re-purposed if that was the case and not crash

[gnair]

Possibly crossed the Andaman chain for 15 min. taken the 90 degrees north meridian and cut across the Tibet plateau for a non-event(ELT didnt trigger) in Xinjiang or KazStan.

[Vayutuvan]

why would someone use a malaysian airline with chinese passengers to whack an India city ?

Only plane where all the elements - perpetrators ideologues insiders equipment lax security - came together.

[A_Gupta]

All this said, remember the CRamS lemma, one must always watch out for the bottom line when Uncle pontificates: Uncle's global interests.

Now, that is indisputable!

[A_Gupta]

....and Finally and more importantly for What ? Even there it's been friggin 7 days since the AC disappeared from Radar so why have no demands been made ?

Most likely - the hijackers (and plane) did not survive to make demands. Some failure in their plan?

Much less likely, but I think still with non-zero probability: proof of concept for something bigger, maybe. The trials of shoe bomb, underwear bomb and liquid bomb failed, and resulted in immediate security counter-measures. Maybe this time was "try something, and if successful, leave no evidence behind" so no one knows what to look for? (This willingness to die would indicate this is jihadi).

Or it was not a hijacking, and then some variant of CRamS theory applies.

[A_Gupta]

WNYC Radio publishes this map of 634 runways where the plane could have landed.
Cute; probably irrelevant.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... anded.html
or
http://project.wnyc.org/runways/

[Cosmo_R]

"That, one senior Indian official said, might explain why the Boeing 777 was not detected by installations on India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago which its planes were searching on Friday and Saturday, or elsewhere.

"We have many radar systems operating in this area, but nothing was picked up," Rear Admiral Sudhir Pillai, chief of staff of India's Andamans and Nicobar Command, told Reuters. "It's possible that the military radars were switched off as we operate on an 'as required' basis."

Separately, a defense source said that India did not keep its radar facilities operational at all times because of cost. Asked what the reason was, the source said: "Too expensive."

Ask the Egyptians how 'expensive' it was to switch off radars at night in 1967

The Bourbons (the dynasty not the distillers) were labeled best: " They learned nothing, forgot nothing"

Elections at $5Bn a pop to enthrone pols: Priceless.

Radars to protect country @ <$5.00 KW-HR: Too much.

Go figure.

I mean it would be 'unsporting' of the enemy to attack during 'chota peg' hours wot?

[A_Gupta]

My guess is that if the plane landed anywhere, it would be Burma/Myanmar (what is the official name these days?)
http://www.dvb.no/news/search-for-missi ... nmar/38448

If India does not keep its Andaman radar up and running 24x7, I have my doubts about any radar coverage in Burma.

Maybe the hijackers landed in some remote part of Burma, and in landing damaged the plane enough that they aren't able to communicate any more. Meanwhile Burma says it won't look for the plane without a formal request from Malaysia (so says the article I quoted above).

[ldev]

Malaysian jet couldn’t have flown over India undetected: Military

The Indian military establishment has rejected the possibility that the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which mysteriously disappeared eight days en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, could have flown over India on way to Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan in Central Asia.

"If the jetliner had tried to cross the Indian mainland, our primary radars (which bounce radio signals off targets) would have picked it up despite its transponders being switched off (secondary radars beam signals that request information from a plane's transponders)," said a top IAF officer.

If an "unidentified" plane had been picked up flouting prescribed procedures or with switched-off transponders or not "squawking" IFF (identification, friend or foe) codes, a series of "air defence measures" would have kicked in - including the scrambling of fighters - to "detect, identify, intercept and destroy" the intruder.

Senior IAF and Navy officers admitted there were "a few gaps" in India's civil and military radar networks but stressed it would be "virtually impossible" for a jetliner to fly undetected across the Indian mainland. "The five Airports Authority of India radars at Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Mumbai are integrated with IAF's air defence network. The possibility is far-fetched," said an officer.

However, this does not appear to preclude an unknown aircraft flying over A&N, where radars may be switched off at night.

[komal]

Perhaps the Indian radars were turned on that evening for some reason (testing, drill, etc). The hijackers realizing that they would be detected were forced to change plans which spared an 9/11 style attack the nuclear facilities in Tamil Nadu.

[A_Gupta]

Q: Might China have a hole in its radar coverage over the China-Burma border?

Could the plane have turned away from its Andaman heading and flown over Burma, and over the Myanmar-China border. I imagine the Tibet border with India is well-covered with radar but maybe not interior Tibet? Subsequently over Tibet towards Xinjiang?

Is this even remotely feasible?

The problem with the plane landing in Myanmar is that we have a 7-hour flight to account for (unless the engines were kept running on the ground).

PS: the problem with flying over Myanmar is that if you look up on Google maps, the airforce bases as mentioned in Wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_Ai ... #Air_Bases, seem difficult to dodge. But maybe the Myanmar air force is more lax than India in the Andamans?????

[Agnimitra]

On Twitter:

Strobe Talbott ‏@strobetalbott 6h
Malaysian plane mystery: Direction, fuel load & range now lead some to suspect hijackers planned a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city.

[UlanBatori]

Now they're blaming Pilot Error as always!

[Shreeman]

Well, "no findee enythingee" bit seems to hold against all odds. Enough time has passed for all "assets" to have looked through everything twice. Whither MH370?

The Pilot Error (a la Egypt Air) is the usual last excuse to hide things.

[A_Gupta]

^^^ More like pilot malice aforethought rather than pilot error.

[Harpal Bector]

If this is the world's first incident of cyber-jacking - the hijackers will want to be paid.

The least traceable way to do this is to ask the Malays to buy large quantities of Bitcoin. This will jack the price of the Bitcoin up and increase consumer confidence and the hijackers can then release any bitcoin they hold for a much higher price than before.

A number of criminal groups use bitcoin in the same way the Cali cartel used the black market peso exchange. After the FBI actions and adverse publicity to Mt. Gox, many of these transactions became lossy. If the hijackers make a demands in Bitcoin, the malay transactions could provide criminals a way to make back losses incurred earlier this year.

Has there been any unusual volume transaction or activity on the Bitcoin side?