There is no indication (large pdf) that Malaysian planes have such a thing.
I flew the Beijing to KL leg of this route this past October and they did have flight trackers. I can’t remember if it was seat back or at the head of each section, but they definitely had live tracking.
Only because terrorism and hijacking have an end goal, to terrorize or take hostages for ransom or political demands, neither of which happened with this flight. Simply disappearing doesn’t accomplish either of those goals. It’s possible that it was tried and failed, but given what else we know, like the professional way the plane was flown, for example, it seems more likely to me that one or both pilots were in on it. I don’t like the idea of good pilots going bad, though, so I’d be glad and relieved to be proven wrong.
An interesting article that the NY Times put up just a few minutes ago:
American officials believe that the diversion was entered into the plane’s Flight Management System. They do not know if it was done before or after takeoff.
That means it wasn’t somebody who seized control of the airplane and manually flew it off course. It had to have been done by somebody who knew how to program the FMS. It notes that the plane would have made gentle turns that probably would not have alarmed anyone.
It does not say how they know this.
Thanks.
Ok, so say your theory is true. What is it that the pilots are in on? What is the end goal?
Suicide? It’s happened before.
Cash payment? Hijack for hire?
I imagine it can be turned off by the pilot.
That I can get onboard with. Suicide as stated above? Where is the wreckage?
I understand that Singapore checks the Interpol list…at least it was reported that way here.
I thought the Greek tanker was sailing towards it.
If the pilot(s) were committing suicide, why fly on for another 7 hours? Why not just nose it into the water immediately like the Egypt Air flight a few years back?
A thought - even IF they find the plane someday, and even IF they find the black box, we’ll probably still never know what happened. I’ve heard that all onboard recorders only have a duration of a couple of hours at most (the cockpit voice recorder maybe only 30 minutes?) before they start recording over older data. I could be wrong, but I’m sure I’ve seen/heard that somewhere else, so at best they would have only blank tape/recordings.
May be a mystery forevermore, although the last few days my darker side has said we’ll see the plane one more time, just before it hits something.
I’m afraid this is looking more and more like a case of pilot suicide after all. BBC mentioned that the deepest parts of the Indian Ocean are something like the third deepest on Earth. Maybe he wanted to minimize the chances of ever being found.
That’s true. They did that for us a couple of years ago. Is that only since 9/11? The last time I flew back here from Los Angeles was pre-9/11, and no Immigration check. We’ve flown back from Hawaii since 9/11, but I can’t remember how that was handled.
That was a couple of pages back. I think that report has since been discredited.
That Greek tanker is a slow sumbitch. give it time. 
I am hard pressed to believe that there is no quicker way to check for wreckage aside from waiting for that tanker to get there.
this story is so bonkers.
i think the reason it’s so captivating is that pretty much every potential answer is fairly hard to swallow from one angle or the next, making too many insane
possibilities plausible.
pilot suicide? that’s pretty absurd given the details alone. there’s no evidence either pilot was suicidal.
pilot suicide coupled with an insane scheme to fly known pathways to both skirt radar and avoid detection? WAY harder to believe.
and it was radar detected, by the military–and no one really gave a shit about it until well after the fact. every aspect is so dubious. it didn’t even actually avoid radar, it just didn’t matter.
i have been following that fish fellow’s twitter feed and he claims to have DHS info that lends some credibility to the notion it landed someplace, possibly Kazakhstan or in China.
right now there’s a dearth of significant info and an orgy of potentially insignificant info, so we are all kind of stuck parsing data that could or could not be valuable. everything is a WAG.
one thing is clear: it IS possible there was a grand scheme to steal this plane and there is evidence it COULD work. it has worked before–the Angolan 727 was for all intents stolen without a trace. The Guardian reported the the plane was sighted later sporting new paint and fake Guinean registrations. the FBI wrote it off as a crash after no terroristic plots unfolded, but it appears that is all they really cared about. read this article–there is massive evidence the plane was used for any number of african lawless uses, and zero evidence it ever crashed.
there is a market for planes, both black and legit market.
there’s millions in payoff to scrap one. there are terrorist ideas. there are infinite possibilities.
i am of two minds: 1, this was deliberate from the onset, a series of subterfuge all designed to confuse with some end-goal in mind; suicide or landing for some purpose. and it went as planned and we probably will never know the motive or the final outcome of the plane.
or
2. something bizarre and catastrophic occurred, and the plane drifted erratically due to a series of cascading circumstances and flew off into oblivion. there has been at least one good blog postlending credence to the idea the plane could have drifted without human or autopilot input…you have to admit it is as plausible as anything else at this juncture.
all i know is we don’t know and i doubt we ever will. way too many planes have crashed beyond any trace, never to be found or seen and left to speculation.
The flight attendants object if they see it. No one ever reports anyone else because what happens is the flight attendants return to the galley, and then you’re left across the row (or God forbid, sitting next to) some angry, glowering person who mutters assholic comments about you the entire flight. No thanks, not my concern.
I never said anything about reception from land. The question was raised whether or not phones can even possibly work at cruise altitude; I assure you that in some circumstances they can, because I’ve answered my phone at 30,000+ feet. That’s all.
The National Geographic channel produced an excellent documentary show called Mayday. Each episode was about one hour and usually examined a commercial jet plane crash. There was one episode about a train crash and another about a helicopter crash. But there are more than 70 episodes over 11 seasons and almost all of them examine a commercial jetliner crash usually between the years of 1990 to the present.
Recently, I’ve been watching many of those episodes and one thing seems very clear to me.
The odds that a commercial airline pilot would choose to suicide or intentionally divert the aircraft from its intended destination is extremely low. The odds that the pilot and co-pilot would both choose to do that on the same flight is just about impossible (mathematically speaking).
So, I feel certain that if and when the truth is ever learned about this event, it will be something other than both men decided to suicide or to divert the plane and hide it (as well as all the hundreds of passengers) somewhere that would not be seen by anyone in the whole world.
Of course, this is just my opinion and it could turn out that I’m wrong. But the odds just seem astronomically against both men agreeing to take this extreme course of action.
After all, both of them would be throwing away their future as pilots as well as their pensions which would cause some terrible financial hardship to their families.
But more importantly, their families would have to live with the shame and humiliation that would be sure to follow if they did do such a thing.
You make some very cogent points.
The one thing I would disagree with is that we will **NEVER **know the cause of this event.
It is just a guess. But it is so difficult to keep a secret - even among a small number of people about a small event, I just cannot believe that all the hundreds of people who were on board this plane could keep the cause secret for any length of time. Even if they did not know the true cause but just thought they knew something about the cause, my guess is they would not be able to help themselves from blabbing.
I have a great deal of difficulty believing that we will never learn the truth behind this event. There is simply far too much pressure being placed by far too many people to know the reason why this happened. Even if it’s not the absoute truth but just a rumor or a lie, we are almost sure to hear something about the cause.
Why do you think they both would have to agree to this? The murderous/suicidal pilot conks the other one on the head, knocks him out, and takes control of the plane. At the moment, they are reporting the co-pilot said, “All right, good night” so I think he is the culprit.