“We also have the potential that the pilot we think was in the cockpit was never really there. It could have been hijacked before take off. Clever disguise or look alikes.” Now THAT is clever, fifty-six! Would be hard to pull off, but your outside-the-box thinking impresses me.
If there was an emergency the pilot would have headed for TGG airport. If for some reason this was successfully dialed into the FMS and then the crew lost consciousness the plane would have flown south toward the Cocos Islands. Again, this would have been picked up by all manner of land based radars.
I’m of the opinion that if the plane made it to land it was tracked and should be a matter of reviewing radar data. One hopes such data exists. Never know.
Without seeing a radar coverage map we just don’t know that. Not everywhere is like US and Europe with pretty much no radar holes. Australia for example has vast vast areas with no radar coverage and where there is radar coverage, the further you are from the radar site the higher you need to be to be detected. Unless the military radar sites and civilian radar sites in Malaysia are co-located there may be areas and/or altitudes that are covered by one but not the other. You can’t just say “if it flew over land the civilian radar would have picked it up” it’s not that simple.
Perhaps it was hijacked by refugees who tried to get it flown to Australia but they didn’t have enough fuel, similar to the Egypt hijacking.
I linked a map that shows the coverage. you have to do some measuring but I don’t see how it’s possible to cross the coastline without it being recorded. A 777 is a big chunk of reflective metal.
So now we know the plane continued ticking after all previously-reported “final” beeps. Thank you Boeing, for getting around to telling us.
Wonder what more info has been sitting and waiting for somebody to look at it/mention it to responsible parties?
That’s just a map of airports. It may well be that Malaysia has complete radar coverage, or it might not.
Some people have commented above that this situation is unheard of.
Not so.
Air France Flight 477 went down in the Atlantic in 2009 - only 5 years ago, and floating wreckage was only found after 5 days even with transponder information. Furthermore it took another 2 years to find and recover the “black box”.
So these accidents can and do happen - we live on a vast planet.
I’m a bit perplexed about the criticism of Malaysian Air and indeed Malaysia in general, echoed both here and in the news media.
Malaysia is an Asian tiger - a vibrant second world nation boxing above its weight given that its basically a skinny peninsula covered with oil palms.
Malaysia is not the USA, or France, or Britain etc. They don’t have a sliver of that wealth and technology. They also have some very conservative views - people are executed for drug dealing. As a society they don’t exercise open democracy as we think of it and they certainly wouldn’t expect to be at the beck and call of frothing media demands.
I expect Malaysian Air which is an excellent airline and the flag carrier for the state, is extremely embarrassed and simply doesn’t know how to respond. No doubt this is made worse by conflicting demands from the government and the military and the terrible reality that they just don’t know. Did anyone call France useless when that plane disappeared?
Anyway give them a break.
It has been suggested that the US military and possibly the Chinese military could pull out data showing Flight 377’s track and presumably its stop. However if either was to do so publicly then that would expose more capabilities than they acknowledge.
I’d dismiss it except a US destroyer is sailing into the Andaman sea right now on an “undisclosed” mission albeit related to the missing aircraft.
Finally and please forgive me for breaking up ideas into discrete posts, its just easier.
Its easy enough to understand why radar cannot answer the puzzle: I live next door to Australia and we don’t have nation wide radar coverage here either. Small planes regularly disappear.
But - but - the world is surrounded by a cloud of satellites and not all of them are busy with the Playboy Channel or European League. I’d be astonished if South East Asia doesn’t have a least half a dozen optical and infra-red satellites gazing down 24/7 with high resolution.
Admittedly going through the data would be a beast but computers are very clever. Am I wrong?
It’s worth bearing in mind the Malaysian government isn’t used to a great deal of scrutiny. Whilst a democratic country (yes, the same party has been in power for the last 50-odd years, but they have won generally free and fair elections to keep getting voted back in), the media generally isn’t there so much to hold the government to account as to make sure everyone’s on the same page (and report on the same sort of local stuff newspapers the world over report on, too).
FWIW, you can end up in jail in Malaysia for reporting the wrong things (ie criticising the government more than very slightly), and annoying the government can also result in the revocation of a newspaper’s printing permit, so the media likes to play it safe and simply quote the politicians directly - even if they’re saying things which would appear to be vague or contrary to the commonly understood situation or version of events.
There’s basically Hansard-style “qualified privilege” protections in place which mean reporters won’t end up in jail for breaching Malaysia’s sedition laws provided they’re quoting politicians directly and from somewhere they’re speaking in public (eg Parliament, a press conference, etc).
There’s a lot of “reading between the lines” required to get the most out of anything political in the Malaysian media, basically.
It doesn’t seem to just be a lack of information, but also misinformation. If I had a family member on that flight, I would be furious with all the times that meaningful information was released days after the fact, or information was released and then later denounced, or relevant SMEs refused to comment on the information released.
What I’m still inwardly debating is if the misinformation is a natural byproduct of journalists looking for something to report when there’s nothing, or if it’s suspicious. It does seem like the Malaysian government is having problems getting its story straight, and what comes across as incompetence may be a deliberate attempt to misinform (I won’t even begin to speculate as to why). But on the other hand, we’ve seen all the false leads that can crop up when a child has been kidnapped, or a serial killer is on the loose.
I compare the Malaysian government’s difficulty in presenting itself as competent or sympathetic as similar to the Mexican government’s response to the big earthquake there in the 1980s. Like in Malaysia, the same political party had held national office for over fifty years. While Mexico’s march toward a more competitive political system was gradual, many see the public’s dissatisfaction at that time as a key moment (indeed, the PRI probably lost the subsequent national election, but there was a mysterious computer crash, and when the computers came back to life, lo and behold they had more votes.)
I have a tangential question:
Two of the passengers had passports stolen long beforehand. With today’s networked computers, is it really possible to travel successfully with such documents? I realize they boarded successfully, but would they have been able to clear passport control at the other end? Were these passengers deceived about their chances?
Is it possible they only wanted documents good enough to board, and had no plans to disembark in China?
We could speculate endlessly about that but terrorist’s only succeed when they can shout to the world. Thus far silence.
It is far more likely that they simply wanted legitimacy to allow them to move to other countries.
As for passport control, unfortunately it is not as all seeing as we’d like to think. Indeed INTERPOL has publicly lamented the fact their database of suspect passports goes unnoticed by many immigration systems.
Thankyou for that. Well said.
Would you? Really? Check out the world news. Every day a bus or a train or even a plane crashes in Africa, South America, China, India etc etc and people die. It is sadly common. But it doesn’t happen in our safe peaceful nations so we don’t even notice.
If an aeroplane with my family onboard disappeared over the ocean I’d be devastated. I’d shrivel up and die inside knowing they were gone but I wouldn’t blame the people trying to find them.
(Yay jargon!) I understand that. We were talking about why the press isn’t and shouldn’t call this a “probable hijacking.” It’s a strong possibility - especially if the plane was deliberately flown along a specific route after it went off-course - but there are alternate explanations and it’s not for the press to say if it was a hijacking or not.
Not sure if this was deliberate, but by cutting my quote off halfway through you seem to effectively be changing the meaning of what I said. What I said was “It doesn’t seem to just be a lack of information, but also misinformation. If I had a family member on that flight, I would be furious with all the times that meaningful information was released days after the fact, or information was released and then later denounced, or relevant SMEs refused to comment on the information released.”
The fact that planes and buses crash all the time doesn’t have much to do with all the misinformation being released. If a family member was killed in an accident, I might be upset at a person’s carelessness, but that’s a different matter. With the current media coverage of this event, people who are deeply invested in the outcome of this probably feel dicked around. Ordinarily, once a bus crashes, you know where it crashed, whether there are survivors, and (usually) what caused it. When you’re trying to figure out the basic details of what happened, and you’re hearing “this happened … no wait this happened … actually those people were wrong, this happened … oh wait, look at this information we waited five days to release!” that would get me pretty riled up if I were highly invested in the outcome.
At this point, I’m starting to suspect the Malaysian officials know exactly where this plane is, but they’re all playing dumb to cover up some bullshit of their own - some military target or government facility or screwup. At this point, none of them want to be the first to admit they’re lying.