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Theories on what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) are plentiful on the Internet and TV news shows, but one Ohio man's theory has gained the attention of thousands.
Wednesday marked 11 days since Flight 370 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to Beijing Capital International Airport.
Ohio man Keith Ledgerwood posted his own theory on his Tumblr blog that he believes the plane may have "shadowed" another plane to appear undetected.
Ledgerwood says Singapore Airlines flight number 68 was in the vicinity of MH370 when it lost contact with ground crews. He says MH370 could have flown above or below the Singapore Airlines flight and on the same course to avoid radar detection.
http://mh370shadow.com/post/79838944823 ... sia68-sq68
Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?
NOTE - An update and follow-up has been posted at:
http://mh370shadow.com/post/80154688823 ... -malaysian
Here is the this from a mainstream news paper:
Malaysia Airlines 370 in Central Asia? A Theory That's Less Outlandish Than it Seems
Each day Malaysia Airlines flight 370 remains lost, the chances grow higher it was stolen intact and lies hidden near an isolated airstrip in Central Asia, somewhere, waiting to serve a dark purpose in terrorism, crime, or global political intrigue.
Bizarre and unlikely as it seems, that’s one scenario that emerges from confirmed data, the sequence of events, and speculations on what’s possible and what’s not as experts challenge everything we thought we knew about avionics, communications, and commercial air crashes and searches on the Internet and ‘round-the-clock TV news.
MH370 was well on its way to China across the Gulf of Thailand when it reversed course in a long, wide arc that took it west, passing back over the Malay Peninsula. Directing India to search a sector of the southern Indian Ocean earlier in the week, Malaysian authorities were suggesting the Boeing 777-200 headed southwest. After early promise, searchers have found no debris southwest of Australia, in a patch of ocean known to attract flotsam.
But there’s another plausible answer: suppose it continued to the northwest.
After all, that’s where it was headed when Thai military radar found it in the last known sighting. And one aviation enthusiast and pilot has advanced the theory that the plane not only flew that way over the guarded airspace of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, but did so hiding in the radar shadow of a wholly legitimate commercial flight, using the identical type of aircraft.
“These air corridors are the interstate highways of the skies,” Keith Ledgerwood told Forbes Asia in an exclusive interview. “Yes, the national borders are guarded. But radar operators see dozens of flights a night. A radar signature for a Boeing 777 that contains an unusual blip would look like a minor anomaly in something they’re used to looking at, and would not attract interest.”
At the time MH370 passed westward over the Malay Peninsula, another Boeing 777 was in the same vicinity. Ledgerwood plotted the route MH370 would take across the Straits of Malacca, and found it would begin to intercept Singapore Airlines 68, Singapore to Barcelona, near the navigational waypoint known as ‘gival’. By the time it reached another, ‘igrex’ at 18:15UTC, the two Boeing 777s would be at the same place at the same time.
“Don’t forget there’s no radar out over much of the ocean, and both of the key systems that would make MH370 visible to another aircraft, the transponder and the ACARS [Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System], had been turned off,” Ledgerwood said.
From that point, he said, it would be a simple matter for the pilot of MH370 to plug in the same flight plan used by SIA68 – a Malaysia Airlines pilot would have access to it – and switch to autopilot to maintain consistent speed, altitude, and direction.
By the time they neared the reach of Indian radar, MH370 would be flying ‘dark’, in the ‘shadow’ of SIA68. That would make it possible to hug the legitimate flight’s radar signature, stamped as that of SIA68, across the Indian subcontinent. Once free of these volatile airspaces and their watchful radar operators, it would be able to veer off to land in China’s Xingjian province, Kyrgyzstan, or Turkmenistan. “Each of these final locations would match up almost perfectly with the 7.5 hours of total flight time.”
Flying in the shadow of a similar aircraft is easier than critics make it out to be, he said in a blog entry. Answering objections such as wake turbulence, visual separation, and altimeter interference, he said he’s heard from dozens of seasoned Boeing 777 pilots who agree with him.
This theory faces one glaring problem: where do you land a 348-ton aircraft that requires an 5,000-foot runway in one of the more remote regions of the world?
But other scenarios seem even more unlikely. If a mechanical breakdown had been responsible for the early change in course, the flight would be safe by now or would have crashed in the Gulf of Thailand. (Or would have flown on for many hundreds of miles after a fire killed the crew but somehow left the autopilot and major avionics systems intact, in a Wired.com ‘zombie flight’ speculation.)
Taking this aircraft, whoever did it, would require inside knowledge, a professional’s skill at piloting a Boeing 777 — and a complex motive. Anyone like this, the reasoning goes, would have a destination in mind. Intending suicide or ransom, he could have gone to Beijing as scheduled or returned to Kuala Lumpur without attracting notice, or even gone to any of the cities of Southeast Asia or Australia. He could have simply crashed into the sea. But instead, he did something that required him to fly to the west.
Would someone with a scheme like this have collaborators on the ground? And if so, would they have the resources to service a modern jetliner and, presumably, fly it again under conditions of absolute secrecy on a scale that would make this one of the most brazen crimes in history?
All of this is imponderable. But it would explain one of the many mysteries of MH370. After taking its U-turn and crossing back over the Malay Peninsula the aircraft likely, but unaccountably, ascended to 45,000 feet. This is a remarkable elevation for a Boeing 777, making it hard to fly and requiring a precipitous descent to get to back to 23,000 feet. But just a few minutes of depressurization at this altitude would eliminate any possibility of resistance from its remaining crew outside of the cockpit – or its 227 passengers.
Donald Frazier writes about Asia and its business culture for a number of magazines, including Forbes Asia, Forbes Life, and Forbes. He saw the crash of one airliner, Air France 4590 in Paris in July 2000, and hopes he never sees another.
Then it seems everyone needs to keep up. Australia, France, USA, etc.
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