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The folks over at airliners.net have pointed out that the 777's collision avoidance system only works if both planes' transponders are turned on. That doesn't m
by jballanc 13y ago
The folks over at airliners.net have pointed out that the 777's collision avoidance system only works if both planes' transponders are turned on. That doesn't mean this scenario is impossible, but it does raise the level of sophistication required.
Sadly, I feel like whatever happened, the amount of sophistication involved increasingly points toward the involvement of one or more state actors. If that's the case, I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever find out what happened to this plane...
- ekianjo 13y ago> Sadly, I feel like whatever happened, the amount of sophistication involved increasingly points toward the involvement of one or more state actors. If that's the case, I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever find out what happened to this plane... Indeed. And not just the "what", but the "why" as well.
- Fuxy 13y agoThat's exactly it why would anybody put this much effort into making a plane disappear and why this plane. Given all this effort it is very unlikely any of the passengers will be found alive so what would warrant the murder of all the passengers. Digging should turn up something very interesting.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Shivetya 13y agotime to figure out who was on that flight, perhaps it was someone so important that taking a plane full of passengers was worth the cost.
- Tuna-Fish 13y agoA team of freescale chip engineers for one. Also, the answer might well be "what" instead of who. Many people have pointed out that the cargo manifest hasn't been published, and that the airline declared 50 less seats as available for boarding than the plane had. This means it had several tons of cargo on board.
- justincormack 13y agoGold? needs to be something worth stealing a plane for.
- jdimov 13y agoMangosteens
- jdimov 13y agoWho downvotes someone over mangosteens??
- nyrina 13y agoI don't think gold is valuable enough for stealing a whole plane and killing 220 passengers. Gold, for it's weight, is very expensive. Transporting gold of high enough volumes for it to be worth killing so many people, steal a plane as well as making all of that possible wouldn't be worth it, I would say.
- gambiting 13y agoIf the plane was carrying a tonne of gold(and could have been carrying more) then that gold would be worth 44 million dollars[1]. [1]http://www.onlygold.com/tutorialpages/value_of_gold.asp http://www.onlygold.com/tutorialpages/value_of_gold.asp
- nerfhammer 13y agoThe plane itself costs more than $200 million
- gambiting 13y agoYes, but I imagine that you can sell gold a lot easier without having to explain where it comes from,than a Malaysian Airlines branded 777.
- maxden 13y agoI remember when the first passenger list came out, one was obscured (passenger 84). I thought it may have been because they were unable to contact the family before releasing the name. Looking into it again, this page [0] seems to suggest it is a Uyghur name? [0] http://therealsingapore.com/content/who-passenger-84-mh370-and-why-hisher-name-blurred-out http://therealsingapore.com/content/who-passenger-84-mh370-a...
- fafner 13y agoIt would be much easier to get a person on the ground instead of hijacking a large aircraft and then magically landing it somewhere without being noticed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Houshalter 13y ago>You think that such acts of criminal mass murder are common enough that this is a reasonable question to ask? When the evidence you have stops fitting the (previously) most likely hypotheses, you have to consider the (previously) less likely hypotheses. >An as aside: I don't know why reading such flippant comments about possibly murdering 240+ people upsets me so much. It's not really flippant, it's speculation on the motive. Everyone wants to know why those 240 people were killed, or if they are possibly still alive.
- leoc 13y agoIt's only one vague point of interest among many, but there were twenty Freescale employees on board flight 370. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/09/malaysia-airlines-freescale-idUSL2N0M602O20140309 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/09/malaysia-airlines-...
- simias 13y agoI don't understand what the twenty Freescale employees have to do with anything and I keep seeing this fact mentioned in every discussion about MH370. How could they be important/valuable/dangerous enough to justify the hijacking or destruction of a commercial airliner containing hundreds of passengers? That sounds completely insane to me.
- yannyu 13y agoIt's a bit Bond/cyberpunk-esque, but one could imagine a scenario where an evil villain could short a company's stock and then kill off 20 extremely valuable employees of said company. Not saying that's what happened here, but 20 of the right employees of a company could be very significant.
- mootothemax 13y agoIt's a bit Bond/cyberpunk-esque, but one could imagine a scenario where an evil villain could short a company's stock and then kill off 20 extremely valuable employees of said company When was the last time you heard of 20 employees of a company being murdered? To do so by killing 220+ other people makes such a theory even more absurd.
- jzwinck 13y agoIt happened to 13 separate companies on September 11, 2001 (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/twintowers/ http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/twintowers/). It was sort of not targeted at those companies, but on the other hand it sort of was. And it certainly had huge market impact.
- wsc981 13y agoI think it's most likely the plane will be used in a terrorist action. For example in the next week there's a nucleair summit being held in The Hague: http://www.geenstijl.nl/archives/images/EH-eSUP-2014-01-NSS.pdf http://www.geenstijl.nl/archives/images/EH-eSUP-2014-01-NSS.... It would be a very hard to reach target, though.
- hyperbovine 13y agoAs has been pointed out elsewhere, there are literally thousands of disused airframes nestled in various out of the way corners of the globe. If your goal is really to fly an explosive laden jet into something, absconding with a loaded passenger jet is about the least clandestine method imaginable.
- phire 13y agoAnd if you decide to go down the route of hijacking a passenger jet, why not hijack one near your intended target? Chances are there are hundreds of aircraft flying right next to your target everyday, simply hijack one of those on the day and fly it right into your target. 9/11 already proved the viability of this tactic.
- qq66 13y agoNot saying that this is likely, but one explanation is that they want to weaponize the plane first.
- bananas 13y agoI think that hypothesis has been disproven a couple of times at least!
- twistedpair 13y agoWhy? Three cases of pilots committing suicide with big jets in the last few years. Silk Air 185, Egypt Air 990, LAM 470. So either (a) it's an act of war by another country or (b) the far simpler a pilot committed suicide. However, it if was a state actor, would you as the US tell people that? Wars cost trillions. Perhaps just sweep it under the rug.
- ianhawes 13y agoThe current administration wants a reason to increase the military budget, so they would tell people. Aside from that, if it likely got out that US officials knew, it would be a scandal of epic proportions.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- venomsnake 13y agoIf you want to kill yourself - you just fly the plane into the ground during landing or takeoff. It is way too elaborate to get to the no mans land and then fly 5 hours and crash somewhere.
- frenchy 13y agoI'm not at all an expert on the topic but I would guess that people who are willing to commit suicide are emotionally troubled and may not act in predictable or rational ways.
- twistedpair 13y agoLookup Silk Air 185. Pilot went to lengths to disable CVR and FDR so that there was no record of him incapacitating the FO and directing the plane into the ground. He had an insurance policy he took out that day. Some people don't want to have a wikipedia article saying they murdered 238 people. So, fly it into the middle of no where and no one will ever know. It's working so far.
- ccarpenterg 13y agoI hope you're wrong. If a state was involved that would mean that boarding a plane is extremely dangerous from now on. This case is really suspicious but I still think this was just an accident.
- raverbashing 13y agoYeah, because states were never behind any deliberate downing of a civilian aircraft, either through external hit or from within the aircraft.
- etherael 13y agoWhy is this being downvoted? Are people really so naive as to not be aware of this?
- coldpie 13y agoArguments and supporting evidence is much more highly regarded than pithy sarcasm with nothing to back it up.
- raverbashing 13y agoAt the day and age of google, wikipedia, it should be obvious where to look for those, which are public and very widely known events. I can think of three with no effort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
- knowaveragejoe 13y agoOf course, none of these fit the profile of this incident and all of them occurred before 1990, so, hard to draw a comparison here.
- 13y ago
- smoyer 13y ago"points toward the involvement of one or more state actors" I agree ... and so I think it's become useful to identify the skills and knowledge of each of the jet's passengers. You have to assume that, in this case, the plane was hijacked in order to obtain one of the passengers. Terrorism simply doesn't make sense!
- etherael 13y ago20 freescale semiconductor employees on board.
- smoyer 13y agoWould an embargoed country like Iran consider them worth the risk? It would be a pretty serious international incident if they were found out. And if you hold the passengers too long, you can't claim "some crazy terrorist/spy/actor" was working without authorization and here are your people back.
- nutjob123 13y agoWow, thats scary. Some countries would kill to have engineers with specific skill sets. Maybe these guys were worth it.
- prewett 13y agoAll that effort, and still no guarantee that they will actually work with you. Some may be willing to die, others might stealthily sabotage the product, etc. And if you can provide 20 freescale engineers with what they need to actually make something, you can probably just hire people normally.
- knowaveragejoe 13y agoAnd? Finish the thought.
- maaku 13y agoAnd so "they" hijack a plane to get these guys? Wouldn't it be easier to just kidnap them at gunpoint from their hotel? The freescale connection is a total red herring. Either they intended to land/crash the plane somewhere and failed, or the plane was the target and it's now sitting in some deserted desert airstrip getting retrofitted for whatever mission it is intended for.
- herbig 13y agoI think the level of sophistication required increasingly points to a much simpler explanation than terrorism.
- Shivetya 13y agowhy do people underestimate what terrorist groups are capable of? Some have training from various countries and quite a few have financial and material backing. If anything, the common theme on this site was to find every possible explanation other than terrorism. Sorry to be the party pooper, but there are people out there who operate without regard to our beliefs and at times love to exploit the stories we tell ourselves.
- stephengillie 13y agoI don't know that it's underestimation so much as Occam's razor
- knowaveragejoe 13y agoYes, but I think what Herbig is saying is that the increased sophistication of assumptions means decreased likelihood that this was a deliberate hijacking. We get further away from Occam's razor in order to satisfy that. As of yet we haven't seen any group take responsibility, no claims of hostages or anything remotely indicative of this. So if it was taken by a terrorist group, where is the terrorism they plan to conduct with it?
- cube13 13y agoThis is the kind of target that would have someone claiming responsibility. The plane wasn't from a country that's known for disproportionate responses to attacks(i.e. the US or Russia). I would figure that if any group actually did pull this off, they'd be making public announcements that they took down the plane, or were holding it for ransom.
- DanBC 13y ago
- thekevan 13y ago"UPDATE - Monday, March 17, 2014 - 12:15 PM EST Some have raised the statement that TCAS doesn’t work if the transponder is disabled… this is only partially correct. Other planes TCAS would NOT see MH370 at all. MH370 would not actively query other planes as it’s transponder is off HOWEVER it could still listen to any transponder output from other planes that are actively transmitting. SQ68 would have been actively transmitting while in-range of Subang ATC center. Even if TCAS on MH370 wasn’t working for some reason, an in-expensive portable ADS-B receiver paired with an iPad and Foreflight app would allow a pilot to receive the ADS-B output being transmitted by SQ68 at that time."
- toomuchtodo 13y ago> Even if TCAS on MH370 wasn’t working for some reason, an in-expensive portable ADS-B receiver paired with an iPad and Foreflight app would allow a pilot to receive the ADS-B output being transmitted by SQ68 at that time." http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR That ADS-B receiver runs about $20-30.
- madaxe_again 13y agoI'm looking at Russia, and thinking that it would be very convenient for them for Ukraine to drop off the news... which it largely did when this broke. Now what could cause that - perhaps a good mystery. Everyone likes a good mystery. Baikonur is a pretty f'ing good place to hide something like a 777, and is very proximal to the last possible position. Been there. Middle of nowhere. Airstrip is high security, remote, and has underground hangers. Local populace are very well versed in "I see nothing". It's also jurisdictionally weird, being a bit of Kaz rented to Russia as sovereign territory, meaning that any legal search would be very tricky to arrange to say the least. Add that to the big old pile of theories.
- thenmar 13y agoWait, you don't seriously think that Russia disappeared a Malaysian airliner (and hundreds of international citizens) to distract the world (?) from Crimea. That's just fucking absurd.
- philwelch 13y agoThe USA bombed Yugoslavia to distract the world from Bill Clinton fooling around with an intern. Putin plays to win and if he doesn't get caught, what's a couple hundred airline passengers to him?
- gamblor956 13y agoThe US bombed Yugoslavia pursuant to its commitments to NATO, which voted to intervene in the conflict.
- philwelch 13y agoUnder heavy US influence. You use the tools at hand to achieve the goals you want.
- jusben1369 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cc439 13y agoThis whole affair is taking such a conspiracy laden turn that it makes me miss Tom Clancy. Russians building up rhetoric and pushing tensions to a high not seen since the cold war? An airliner that mysteriously disappears with some evidence pointing toward an elaborate hijacking scheme? Tell me that doesn't sound like an outline for one of his books. I'm not trying to be flippant with the fact that hundreds of people lost their lives or that friends and families are being crushed by the uncertainty. It's just a thought that springs to mind.