I can’t imagine the panic on board in this scenario. But why no radio distress call? It would only take seconds to do. I guess it isn’t a priority.
I don’t think it is all that odd. A Western passport makes travel easy with few visas… you can even transit China without a visa if you are staying less than 72 hours. It’d be interesting to know where the “Austrian” and “Italian” were headed (assuming it was beyond Beijing).
I was once traveling stand-by flying from Singapore to Tokyo and the guy who was on the stand-by list in front of me was caught trying to board with a stolen passport. He was Asian of some sort (Cambodian, Burmese?) and he was trying to use a Brazilian passport. The Singaporean gate agent became suspicious and called in immigration officials. I ended up getting his seat.
Would that not suggest a sudden explosion or similar catastrophic failure? Or would there be some other evidence of that this early?
Reports of wreckage and then denials of the reports have been on and off all day. But it does seem now like there’s a genuine report of two oil slicks in the area where the plane is believed to have gone down. It apparently never actually entered Vietnamese air space.
There was a question above about the weather, and I can tell you this is the dry season now. The weather along the route was considered perfect.
BBC is reporting the Italian and Austrian “passengers” and their stolen passports. Very suspicious, and it doesn’t matter if a passport was stolen months or years ago. There is a very large black market for passports over here. I’m not sure how much I could get for my US passport, but I know it would not be difficult finding a buyer. Quite a few travelers down on their luck do that, then report it as “stolen” to their embassy. And of course, many do get stolen for real.
The Chinese congress is in session now. There’s speculation that it could have been a terrorist act aimed at embarrassing China while it’s in session. (Most of the passengers were Chinese.) That’s one nascent theory. But I personally doubt if someone like, say, a Uighur separatist would be able to pass as Italian or Austrian.
Malaysia Airlines is widely considered a safe airline. The wife and I have flown them before – not on this particular route – and we liked them just fine. I have heard that while they used to be regarded as a premium airline, competition with low-cost carriers in the region have forced them to drop their fares, and they’ve been struggling with profitability in recent years.
With good weather during the cruise stage it’s unlikely that pilot action would accidentally cause the plane to crash. But, there have been a couple of cases where a member of the flight crew was suicidal and tried to crash the plane. Something similar could have happened in this case and would match the circumstances reported so far.
Terrorism in this day and age is always a possibility. Storming the cockpit would be next to impossible without the flight crew reporting something to the ground during the process. There were reports leading up to the Olympics of a new technique terrorists may have come up with to get a bomb onto a plane. If those reports were true then this could be a result of that.
In flight fires are always a possibility and have been responsible for crashes in the past as well. Smoke can incapacitate the flight crew, or the fire can directly compromise the plane.
Of those possibilities, I’d put my bet on suicidal flight crew member, or inflight fire. Of course that’s just a guess and we’ll see what comes when the flight recorders are found.
The pilot’s been with Malaysia Airlines 33 years, has 18,365 hours flight time, and no one is suggesting yet that he was suicidal.
They say if all aboard are lost, as is looking increasingly likely, this will be the worst crash since the November 2001 American Airlines Airbus A300 in Belle Harbor, Queens.
Dang it!
For years I’ve been saying airplane crashes happen because of one of three reasons, or a combination of them:
- weather
- mechanical problems
- people make mistakes
NOW I have to add #4:
- there are some evil m-----f-----s out there.
It’s a sad fact there’s pollution in the oceans. I suppose it’s possible that there are numerous oil slicks and rubbish fields in the area, so if you did spot one someone would have to figure out if it’s old garbage or something from last night.
Doesn’t the transponder beacon have to have power going to it to work? If the planes engines failed, then the transponder shuts off.
The black boxes have ‘pingers’ which will operate for 30 days.
I haven’t seen much of the coverage but I noticed two outlets giving conflicting maps of the flightpath. One outlet says the it was a counterclockwise arc around the Eastern shore of Vietnam while CNN is indicating a clockwise arc over Laos and Cambodia.
And as an aside, while does CNN’s map have the entire SW part of China white, like it is a glacier.
“My mommy told me there are no monsters. But there are, aren’t there?”
As to be expected, the conspiracy minded have started muttering “hoax” and/or “false flag”.
I can think of a fourth.
Great username/post combo!
They mostly come at night… Mostly.
I’m thinking this is going to be the final explanation for this incident…but no group is claiming responsibility yet. I wonder if there’s any connection to Tibet?
It seems that there were some oil slicks found on the surface of the ocean. But there is no reports of any floating wreckage.
Even if the plane hit the water while still fully intact, wouldn’t it have broken up when it hit and wouldn’t that mean there should be hundreds of floating objects on the surface?
Very mysterious to me.
http://www.rantcentralforums.com/Thread-The-Search-for-the-Boeing-777?pid=99097#pid99097
The timeline seems to have contradictory information. Perhaps this will be cleared up in coming days.
A search of the Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight route indicates it should be a flight of approximately 6 hours.
Per sources cited by the New York Times:
The flight departed Kuala Lumpur “just after midnight”
Air Traffic Control at KL loses contact per Malaysian Airlines official at 2:40am, though last radio contact was around 1:30am.
Yet the oil slicks seem to be on the Gulf of Thailand side of the peninsula, much less than a 2 hour flight. In two hours that flight could have flown to northern Vietnam, possibly skirting the Gulf of Tonkin.
China denies it ever entered Chinese air space.
But an operator of an online airline tracking website says radar contact was lost at 1:19am, about 40 minutes into the flight. That would seem to coincide with the location of the oil slicks.
Either something seriously weird was going on unnoticed for more than an hour or the MA official has his lost contact time off by an hour?
I looked at the flight track on flightaware.com and the last recorded position was still over the Malay peninsula.
The timeline problems may be from using local time in different countries without accounting for timezone changes.
An oil slick doesn’t necessarily mean anything, it could be from a boat. I would think an oil slick without debris would not be from an aeroplane.