Of course! That explains everything!
No, Communism is a red herring.
Yep, I agree. The initial flow of information has made it difficult to give much weight to anything they’ve said subsequently. But it’s all we have.
That was 10 days ago, and nothing’s come of it. If the plane was that low, it would have crashed or landed within seconds, but nothing!
No.
False hope engendered from ignorance.
Not necessarily. If it was low but in level flight then what would it have crashed into? It could have carried on flying low for some time. Seems odd that it was heading south rather than west, but I still think this is the only semi-reliable sighting and the wreckage is going to be found somewhere in the vicinity of the Maldives.
I’m pretty sure that if I flew to Pakistan tomorrow and took my iPhone, I’d be able to make calls as soon as I landed, with no action on my part. My network has roaming agreements with over 400 networks in 200 countries, including four in Pakistan, and I imagine that’s fairly typical. You step off the plane, switch your phone on and it automatically connects to whichever network your provider has an agreement with. You get a text message saying “Welcome to <country X>, calls cost <Y> per minute” or whatever, and off you go. The only thing that might stop you is if you have an international call block in place on your phone, which I imagine most frequent travellers would have turned off by default. And even with the block in place, your phone would still connect to the network and allow emergency calls.
As I said, even back in 2002 I was able to make calls and send texts in most countries I visited around the world. Nowadays virtually all networks have roaming agreements.
Well, that settles that. We all know how absolutely reliable the Malaysian government has been.
Malaysia’s transport minister says the pilot wiped about a month of data from a flight simulator at his home. They’re working to retrieve the data. In the meantime, that’s something else to wonder about.
So what’s up with the Thais? Did they just sit around for days saying “Gee, that missing airliner that everybody is looking for- got it right here on our radar records. Should we let anyone know? Naw, let’s wait till we’re asked.” Is there some Thailand-Malaysia history of bad blood or something?
I wouldn’t automatically think this is some problem with Thailand. It is at least as likely that Malaysia didn’t ask for any help from Thailand. Or that Thailand might have extended an offer to help and been snubbed or ignored.
I used to have a … non-existent … opinion of Malaysia. Now it seems like it’s the Freedonia of southeast Asia.
Interesting, thanks, I learned something today.
And in the latest press conference, yet another case of non-information. They say in response to suggestions that there were additional waypoints, no additional waypoints were in the flight plan, just the route to Beijing. But that doesn’t address the waypoint reports at all, the waypoint reports aren’t about what was in the flight plan, but what was entered into the FMC later in the flight. So they give information that may or may not contradict previous information but there’s no way to tell.
They also refused to confirm that the flight went through two or more waypoints after it made the turn.
It which case we could well be back to a technical issue and a return for an emergency landing.
Maybe I’m biased having owned and used a couple of flight simulators myself, but this whole notion of owning and using a flight simulator being somehow inherently suspicious is bogus and grasping at straws.
Unless there is something highly specific about this flight simulator that’s triggering suspicions but nothing related so far strikes me as odd. Practicing on a half dozen runways in the region? What’s peculiar about that? I used to use mine to practice emergency landings under severe conditions to test my skills. I used to fly in and out of O’Hare in a Cessna 150 which I’d never do in real life (just the landing fees would be prohibitive, along with sharing airspace with jumbo jets in the aviation equivalent of a mini-bike). I used to use the simulator to fly slalom through the Chicago skyscrapers which, again, I’d never do in real life (especially post-9/11).
A lot of pilots like to use flight simulators. A large number of those like to build out their home systems (I added rudder pedals to mine, which was definitely non-standard, and if I was still using it I’d use dual screens as well).
This ranks right along with “OMG How come you can turn off a transponder?!?” It’s fear-mongering, grasping at straws, and a lot of it is coming from people who are, frankly, ignorant of the facts of flying. Ignorance is curable, of course, and I’m happy to educate people but for goodness sake people have to listen rather than just run around in circles.
Look at this thread - it seems on every damn page someone says that “OMG! TRANSPONDER!” line even though it’s also been answered on just about every goddamned page. OK, you don’t want to read the entire thread - would it kill you to read the most recent page or two?
Yeah, I’m more inclined to believe a bunch of Maldivian islanders than official military reports that seem to contradict themselves day after day.
As one Maldivian points out: “There’s literally nothing to do in Kuda Huvadhoo except look at the sky. Why would you not believe them?” 
I was listening to a report on NPR this morning that highlighted the…well, not "distrust…maybe “steadfast non-sharing of information” between nations in that region. I don’t think it’s online yet (it was Morning Edition) but I remember the reason the Thai officials gave for not releasing their radar data earlier was, “Well, the Malaysians didn’t ask for that *specific *information.”
:smack:
I dunno…maybe because people just make shit up for no reason, and others believe them without checking? Ya think?
I hadn’t heard anyone treat the flight simulator itself as suspicious. On the other hand deleting the data is extremely suspicious… unless he was just doing the equivalent of deleting cookies or doing something perfectly normal that everybody does. I think they’ll find the plane eventually, but I’m not sure how trustworthy anybody’s explanations are until then.