The Mystery of Missing Malaysia Airlines 370

[alfred russel]

If they can't find a crash site in the Gulf of Thailand soon, the only other non-hijacking explanation I can think of is the depressurization/hypoxia scenario I mentioned earlier like what happened with that Helios Airlines flight.

How can you pull off a hijacking without a distress call? Aren't pilots locked away as a basic security precaution?

Sheilbh, the verdict isn't in yet, but are you starting to come around on my third world statement? 

[CountDeMoney]

The wreckage will most likely be found in the last place they look.

[Sheilbh]

From the Guardian liveblog. Again really striking that the reports in the US are that it carried on transmitting data, the Malaysians and Malaysian Airlines are totally denying it:

Some expert opinion on this back and forth about the transmitted data:

If the plane did crash, it's "highly unlikely" that it could send data for the four hours after it lost contact, as reported by the Wall St Journal but dismissed by Malaysian authorities as "inaccurate".

Peter Marosszeky, adjunct senior lecturer at the University of NSW's department of aviation has told the Guardian: "it is recording and transmitting in real time. It seems pretty strange that a plane could be destroyed and still transmit [data]."

Marosszeky also queried theories involving an onboard electronics failure. "The only thing that really strikes me is the fact that the aircraft has reporting systems on board which don't exactly rely on electronic systems, because the idea is if you lose electronics on the plane you can still track it."

Aircraft also carry an Emergency Location Transmitter (ELT) device which has its own battery pack, activates on contact with water and cannot be switched off manually, he said.

"For that to stop working would have to suggest there was a really intense explosion that would have destroyed that device as well."

Marosszeky also said it's "very unlikely" that the plane could crash into the ocean and not break up into visible debris, "unless there was complete and utter destruction."

[alfred russel]

I hope to god they find that plane. Otherwise, for the next 40 years we are going to hear dumbass theories about what happened.

[lustindarkness]

I think the aliens may return the plane, but they normally don't return mass abductions. 

[CountDeMoney]

From the Guardian liveblog. Again really striking that the reports in the US are that it carried on transmitting data, the Malaysians and Malaysian Airlines are totally denying it:

But hey, they have radar.

[Monoriu]

How can you pull off a hijacking without a distress call? Aren't pilots locked away as a basic security precaution?

Sheilbh, the verdict isn't in yet, but are you starting to come around on my third world statement? 

Simple, if the hijacker is the pilot 

[Razgovory]

If it crashed in the Gulf of Thailand, it seems like it shouldn't be this hard to find.  The Gulf of Thailand isn't that big and is pretty shallow.

OTOH, if in fact it did change course and went off into the Pacific or the Indian, and they aren't sure where exactly, I doubt it'll ever be located.  It had enough fuel to go way out over both of those.

Still surprising given how many radars and satelites must cover those areas.

Probably not many.  Radar detection tends to be patchy over open ocean.  Almost certainly so over the Indian ocean.

[Sheilbh]

Also from the Guardian liveblog:

The shutdown of two communication systems happened separately, 14 minutes apart, two US officials have told ABC news in the US, indicating a possible deliberate act.

The unnamed investigators believe the data reporting system shut down at 1.07am and the transponder at 1.21am, calling it a "systematic shut down."

ABC cited a source saying this disputes the theory of a single catastrophic theory.

[Monoriu]

If it crashed in the Gulf of Thailand, it seems like it shouldn't be this hard to find.  The Gulf of Thailand isn't that big and is pretty shallow.

OTOH, if in fact it did change course and went off into the Pacific or the Indian, and they aren't sure where exactly, I doubt it'll ever be located.  It had enough fuel to go way out over both of those.

Still surprising given how many radars and satelites must cover those areas.

Probably not many.  Radar detection tends to be patchy over open ocean.  Almost certainly so over the Indian ocean.

I have zero idea about how radar works.  Do you just push a button and it automatically reports everything that moves within a certain distance, or do you have to specifically aim it at a particular area, height, or something?

[dps]

How can you pull off a hijacking without a distress call? Aren't pilots locked away as a basic security precaution?

Sheilbh, the verdict isn't in yet, but are you starting to come around on my third world statement? 

Simple, if the hijacker is the pilot 

I'm thinking that you might be on to something here.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Yeah, I'm starting to think China was in the right when they kind of bitched about Malaysia being really bad at this. I got the impression when unnamed U.S. sources started to leak information that we had evidence the plane continued to fly for hours after its transponder was turned off that the U.S. was trying to be diplomatic...not wanting to just come out and say "Yeah, the Malaysian officials are full of shit, don't have the information we have or for some reason don't want to accept it" but wanted that information out there. FWIW it looks like a lot of search effort has been moved west into the Indian Ocean some I'm guessing that didn't just happen at random and that behind the scenes someone has prevailed on the Malaysians that there is strong evidence the plane went in that direction.

The earlier WSJ reports that the data collected was from a Rolls Royce system that resides inside the engines themselves and sends data to Rolls Royce was actually not accurate (no idea on whether that system continued to report data or not), as the WSJ has said in their most recent article:

Some people briefed on the issue initially described the transmissions as information that had been relayed from onboard monitoring systems embedded in the two Rolls-Royce PLC Trent 800 engines, not the idling satellite communications system.

From the same article:

Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU +2.13%  ' missing jet transmitted its location repeatedly to satellites over the course of five hours after it disappeared from radar, people briefed on the matter said, as searchers zeroed in on new target areas hundreds of miles west of the plane's original course.

The satellites also received speed and altitude information about the plane from its intermittent "pings," the people said. The final ping was sent from over water, at what one of these people called a normal cruising altitude. They added that it was unclear why the pings stopped. One of the people, an industry official, said it was possible that the system sending them had been disabled by someone on board.

It looks like they aren't telling the WSJ yet where that final location was, but I'm guessing it was in the Indian Ocean which is why search efforts have been directed there. Also notable is it stopped transmitting at cruising altitude, so unless the plane just exploded in mid air four hours after turning off its transponder and deviating from its route the likelihood is someone on the plane realized the idled satellite communications system was still sending data and turned it off (from what I can tell this would be either the second or third communications system that most likely had been turned off intentionally by someone on the plane.)

Going West over the Indian Ocean they basically could have at maximum turned North and landed in India, Sri Lanka and maybe Pakistan. I'm sure all of those countries have comprehensive military radar and a wide-bodied jet would not have flown into their airspace without them knowing about it (with the caveat that maybe not in Sri Lanka's case.) Not all countries have very comprehensive radar systems, but considering the military tensions between India and Pakistan I'm sure they do, I'd also be surprised if Vietnam or Myanmar which have a militarized history don't have a pretty comprehensive radar system. I don't really know any of that and am just guessing, maybe all the countries in that region have major radar holes.

Also, my understanding is the point when the transponder was lost also roughly corresponds to the edge of the Malaysian civil radar range, which makes it even more suspicious that is right when the transponder was disabled. I've not heard for sure about Malaysian military radar, since they deny they saw it later on their radar, but I have heard that there are actually large swathes of that part of the world over the bodies of water where no military radar is active and you could actually fly a plane undetected. But again, if it landed any country it could have landed in would almost certainly have noticed it.

It seems to me the most likely two possibilities are a failed terrorist attack due to poor piloting or a very poorly planned hijacking. The first scenario is they wanted to use the plane to attack some key target somewhere in that part of Asia, but the inexperienced pilots they used perhaps got lost and flew the plane out into the ocean until it ran out of fuel and would have came down. The second scenario is maybe it was a traditional hijacking and the same thing happened, they turned intending to go somewhere and weren't able to properly manage fuel/navigation. It could be they were planning on landing somewhere in reasonable range and then making demands/demanding refueling but got lost, or maybe they were even planning on going somewhere like Africa not realizing the plane didn't have enough fuel until they were halfway across the Indian Ocean and hit E.

[Razgovory]

If it crashed in the Gulf of Thailand, it seems like it shouldn't be this hard to find.  The Gulf of Thailand isn't that big and is pretty shallow.

OTOH, if in fact it did change course and went off into the Pacific or the Indian, and they aren't sure where exactly, I doubt it'll ever be located.  It had enough fuel to go way out over both of those.

Still surprising given how many radars and satelites must cover those areas.

Probably not many.  Radar detection tends to be patchy over open ocean.  Almost certainly so over the Indian ocean.

I have zero idea about how radar works.  Do you just push a button and it automatically reports everything that moves within a certain distance, or do you have to specifically aim it at a particular area, height, or something?

I believe there are both types of radar.  Radar works by sending radio waves out and bouncing them back toward the radar station.  Because of this most radar systems need a straight line of sight from the station to the object.  Since the earth curves radar doesn't work so well on objects very far away, and because there is not many radar stations in the middle of the Indian ocean  You can easily lose something out there.

[katmai]

@Otto
It was my understanding the reason the search had expanded to Strait of Malacca was because of Malaysian military radar.

[jimmy olsen]

How can you pull off a hijacking without a distress call? Aren't pilots locked away as a basic security precaution?

Sheilbh, the verdict isn't in yet, but are you starting to come around on my third world statement? 

Simple, if the hijacker is the pilot 

I'm thinking that you might be on to something here.

Maybe it was stolen. 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/13/mh370_disappearance_could_the_missing_malaysia_airlines_plane_have_been.html