The Mystery of Missing Malaysia Airlines 370

[Monoriu]

Maybe a couple years down the road, when everybody has forgotten about it, the plane will show up, fully loaded in fuel, and crash into a nuclear powerplant or dam 

[Grinning_Colossus]

This is really weird. If the plane was intact and at least one pilot survived, they might even have managed a water landing in the Indian Ocean.

[Maladict]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-radar-data-suggests-flight-path-1.2572287

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 radar data suggests flight path
'We are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,' senior Malaysian police official says

Thomson Reuters Posted: Mar 14, 2014 2:14 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 14, 2014 4:20 AM ET



Military radar-tracking evidence suggests a Malaysia Airlines jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown across the Malay peninsula towards the Andaman Islands, sources familiar with the investigation told Reuters on Friday.

Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints - indicating it was being flown by someone with aviation training - when it was last plotted on military radar off the country's northwest coast.


The last plot on the military radar's tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India's Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said.

Waypoints are geographic locations, worked out by calculating longitude and latitude, that help pilots navigate along established air corridors.

A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight, with 239 people on board, hundreds of miles off its intended course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

"What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards," said that source, a senior Malaysian police official.

All three sources declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the media and due to the sensitivity of the investigation.
Search area for flight MH370

Sources: CBC News stories, Reuters, AP (CBC)

Officials at Malaysia's Ministry of Transport, the official point of contact for information on the investigation, did not return calls seeking comment.

Malaysian police have previously said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew had personal or psychological problems that might shed light on the mystery, along with the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or mechanical failure.

The comments by the three sources are the first clear indication that foul play is the main focus of official suspicions in the Boeing 777's disappearance.

As a result of the new evidence, the sources said, multinational search efforts were being stepped up in the Andaman Sea and also the Indian Ocean.

Last sighting

In one of the most baffling mysteries in modern aviation, no trace of the plane nor any sign of wreckage has been found despite a search by the navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries.

The last sighting of the aircraft on civilian radar screens came shortly before 1:30 a.m. Malaysian time last Saturday, less than an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur, as the plane flew northeast across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand. That put the plane on Malaysia's east coast.

Malaysia's air force chief said on Wednesday an aircraft that could have been the missing plane was plotted on military radar at 2:15 a.m., 320 kilometres northwest of Penang Island off Malaysia's west coast.

This position marks the limit of Malaysia's military radar in that part of the country, a fourth source familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

When asked about the range of military radar at a news conference on Thursday, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said it was "a sensitive issue" that he was not going to reveal.

"Even if it doesn't extend beyond that, we can get the co-operation of the neighbouring countries," he said.

The fact that the aircraft - if it was MH370 - had lost contact with air traffic control and was invisible to civilian radar suggested someone aboard had turned its communication systems off, the first two sources said.

They also gave new details on the direction in which the unidentified aircraft was heading - following aviation corridors identified on maps used by pilots as N571 and P628. These routes are taken by commercial planes flying from Southeast Asia to the Middle East or Europe and can be found in public documents issued by regional aviation authorities.

In a far more detailed description of the military radar plotting than has been publicly revealed, the first two sources said the last confirmed position of MH370 was at 35,000 feet about 144 km off the east coast of Malaysia, heading towards Vietnam, near a navigational waypoint called Igari. The time was 1:21 a.m.

The military track suggests it then turned sharply westwards, heading towards a waypoint called Vampi, northeast of Indonesia's Aceh province and a navigational point used for planes following route N571 to the Middle East.

From there, the plot indicates the plane flew towards a waypoint called Gival, south of the Thai island of Phuket, and was last plotted heading northwest towards another waypoint called Igrex, on route P628 that would take it over the Andaman Islands and which carriers use to fly towards Europe.

The time was then 2:15 a.m. That's the same time given by the air force chief on Wednesday, who gave no information on that plane's possible direction.

The sources said Malaysia was requesting raw radar data from neighbours Thailand, Indonesia and India, which has a naval base in the Andaman Islands.

[Caliga]

Maybe they went to visit the savages on North Sentinel Island.

[grumbler]

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?

As long as your radar is operating, it is detecting everything in its beam that is large enough and near enough to reflect radar energy back to the source.  The problem is that the operators don't care about a lot of returns, and there is a fairly high false alarm rate (spurious returns generated by the environment or even in the equipment itself), so a short-duration detection of the airliner might not be seen as a valid contact.  Even worse, unless someone paid attention to the return and designated it as a target of interest, no data on it would probably be recorded (there is simply too much data from raw radar for anyone to pay to record that mass of data except for specialized purposes like radar R&D or in especially sensitive geographic areas where you might want to go back and analyze patterns of behavior). 

It is simply not true that it is more difficult to detect things on radar over the water.  Generally, the opposite is true:  you don't have ground return masking true target signals, since the sea is flat.  However, it is true that, generally speaking, the longer-ranged the radar set, the less precise the return you get from it.  Air search radars (the kind that would have tracked this aircraft) tend to be designed for long range but low precision.

Due to the curvature of the earth and the limited ability of radar frequencies to take advantage of atmospheric bounce, it is generally true that targets further away must be at higher altitudes to be seen by a given radar.  When you hear about something flying "below the radar," that is what they are referring to:  flying lower than the radar horizon at that distance.  At some altitudes, this plane could have been only intermittently spotted by the radar, when the random environmental variation sometimes allowed radar returns.  if that happened, the radar operators might have disagreed about whether there actually was a contact, and we would see the kinds of reports we are now seeing, with some people honestly believing that some radar was tracking the plane, and others honestly believing it was not.

[Maladict]

I wonder if you could land a plane this size anywhere on earth without being detected. Some really remote, abandoned airstrip maybe?

[Caliga]

There are probably a few places.  If it was headed in the other direction and had enough fuel, Johnston Atoll might be one.

[KRonn]

Grumbler's explanations give more insight into why there's so much confusion and conflicting info over the tracking of this airliner. I had wondered why an object he size of an airliner went missing, even if the transponder was turned off. I think the air traffic controller radars keep a record of activity? Something like that was said on the news, but even then it's hard to get the timing on it and sort through the info. This whole thing really opens up the problems inherent in commercial flight with the tracking systems. Transponders can be turned off, which is surprising to me that it's doable on a commercial aircraft.

[Capetan Mihali]

Unsurprisingly, Pitbull is linked to this tragedy:

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/lyrics-of-pitbull-shakira-song-bear-uncanny-similarities-to-mh370-mystery

[grumbler]

Grumbler's explanations give more insight into why there's so much confusion and conflicting info over the tracking of this airliner. I had wondered why an object he size of an airliner went missing, even if the transponder was turned off. I think the air traffic controller radars keep a record of activity? Something like that was said on the news, but even then it's hard to get the timing on it and sort through the info. This whole thing really opens up the problems inherent in commercial flight with the tracking systems. Transponders can be turned off, which is surprising to me that it's doable on a commercial aircraft.

Air traffic control radars do keep records of all tracks (actually, they keep the synthetic video, not the raw video, but ATC radars are so accurate that the distinction is meaningless), but ATC radars only focus on the areas surrounding airports.  Between airports planes are on their own, so long as they stay in the traffic corridors at the approved altitudes.

[OttoVonBismarck]

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

That was my understanding at one point but I thought the Malaysian military later denied they had ever seen the "blip" being reported in the news. I think the newly released information about the satellite system tracking its location probably shows the plane was deep over the Indian Ocean at the time of its last transmission to that system--as all the news outlets are reporting increased searching in that area and even India starting a land based search for the plane. (Which would call into question my theory that India has comprehensive radar if they believe it's possible a plane flew into Indian air space and crashed/landed without being registered by their radar.)

Edit: Actually looks like the Malaysian military has confirmed they had something that may have been the plane. I was actually reading an article in Xinhua of all places yesterday which complained about how every time one of the four parts of the Malaysian government dealing with this speak they contradict the other...must be maddening for the Chinese or anyone more directly connected to the tragedy.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic was essentially where it was supposed to be, and while we did find a small bit of wreckage within the first week we didn't find the wreck for like two years. If this plane went down some random place in the Indian Ocean off of its flight plan I suspect it will never be found, or if it is found it will be serendipitous. I certainly wouldn't have any high expectation of it being found.

[Caliga]

I really don't think this could be a 'conventional' hijacking.  Airplane hijackings used to be more common and in every case I'm familiar with the hijacking was extremely obvious from the beginning of the incident, with the hijackers getting on the radio and making their intentions known or making the pilots communicate their intentions.  Why would you hijack an aircraft and then do nothing with your hostages?  Unless it's some never before seen 'black ops' government thing that Clancy fans dream about, it's not a hijacking.

[Queequeg]

I think it's possible the terrorists might have been flying to friendly territory and crashed it, either through incompetence or through Flight 93 esque intervention. If that were the case you'd expect cell phone calls from the family.

[jimmy olsen]

I'm gonna go with attempted theft/terrorism that ended in a crash due to incompetence.