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Wednesday, March 12, 2014

So where is Malaysia Air Flight MH370?

Missing aircraft may have flown over five hours from last contact… 
More from Hot Air…
Indonesian Al Qaeda Terror Group?
Sabotage?
Hijacked?  Steered off course?
Can bombs disable transponders like this?
Did the aircraft fly on for seven hours?
Is China being targeted by al Qaeda?

5 comments:

  1. I'm guessing a "Let's roll" situation developed after a hijack attempt.

    That or the bomb went off before it was supposed to.

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    Replies
    1. If that were the case, why no alarm or distress signal? It is very odd and strange.

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    2. Maybe it happened too fast, or maybe, as with the case of that Egyptian airliner a couple of years before 9/11, there's reason to believe one of the cockpit crew dun it.

      (If you recall, all anybody heard was one of the pilots saying, "Give me strength", in Arabic and then nothing)

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  2. Beats the hell out of me. I do like watching the CNN guy with the English accent Richard Quest explain how we don't know anything. He is brilliant at it. I could watch him all day long without loosing any enthusiasm.

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  3. As Evi suggests, almost any plausible scenario should be considered at this point, but I'll give just two:
    Aircraft Failure: Last nights latest nugget of supposed fact was 14-15 minutes elapsed between the loss of transponder and final communication. So here's the scenario, a major event occurs and the aircraft loses primary power. The aircraft begins to glide from altitude at slightly over 2000fpm, the crew is trying to trouble shoot the problem and restore power. Shortly before hitting the water, they decide to fly the aircraft into a ditching. There heroics keep the aircraft mostly intact, preventing a major fuel leak, but windows are broken and massive flooding prevents any escape. Communication is lost as the vessel sinks beneath the waves.

    Hostile takeover: A well trained hijacker (possibly one of the crew) takes over the cockpit and shuts down the transponder. Eventually, other communication systems are shutdown. The pilot wants to head somewhere in the Middle East and flies that direction. For all his intelligence and training, the hijacker (this suggests not the crew) thinks the range of the aircraft is close to Boeing's published distance of 5000nm, but the airline doesn't fly fully fueled, because that is excess weight. Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, the aircraft runs out of fuel, and lands in area no one will search for weeks or years.

    The information about the aircraft continuing to fly continue to end up being dodgy. Still, the primary search area for a catastrophic event has been well searched, and a 777 has never had a catastrophic event other than the CFIT of Asiana airlines. So, it's likely the aircraft stayed airborne after the final communications. The dodgy information is not to let on to whoever hijacked the aircraft that more information is known and a rescue attempt might be afoot. However, I'm starting to be less inclined to believe a rescue attempt, because if anyone had a clue where the plane actually went (including a primary direction and thus a few potential landing spots), then a rescue attempt would likely have been carried out by now. It's possible that a well trained hijacker also has a lair that requires some practice before breaching, but I'm having a tough time going further on the limb. Add in a "let's roll" scenario or "fool didn't check the fuel gauge", and I suspect any takeover of the aircraft ended up in a crash that just happens to be where searchers aren't looking.

    Either way, I think the crew and passengers are lost. Once I come to that scenario, absent a heart broken crewmember, I start to shy away from hijacker/terrorist, because no one has claimed responsibility, and thus no one seems to have a motive to hijack or terrorize.

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