What’s the point of of all the security checks if they don’t flag stolen passports?
Granny in a wheelchair wearing depends, strip search her. Got stolen passport, no problem.
Living to terrorize another day? IF the terrorist is more interested in maximizing damage instead of a political agenda, it might make sense to keep quiet.
Surely these stolen passports would have been cancelled once their theft was reported and replacement ones issued? How does a would-be traveller on a stolen passport even get onto the aeroplane?
AFAIK there is no worldwide central passport database that airlines can check.
I am not speculating on this aircraft or the cause of its disappearance. I will wait until we have something to speculate about.
As an aircraft mechanic with an Inspection Authorization, (A&P,IA) I know to be careful about this. I have not seen said pictures. Minor damage to the wing tip? Remember that the wing tip is many feet from the wing root. The wing itself is a huge lever. A small amount of force on the tip can create a large force on the root. The wing attach points are very robust but they do have their limits. That force went somewhere, was it dissipated in the damage seen at the tip or did it also damage something else? We do not know. Was the inspection and repair done to address the possibility of other damage? I think so, but…? Mistakes can, and do happen. That is why we double and triple check everything we do on an aircraft. One must be careful when checking this kind of damage. It is not good to ASSuME something is OK without checking to see that it is, indeed, OK.
I could go on and on about what major damage can be caused by a “minor” collision on a wing tip causing minor damage to that tip, but I do not want to bore you-all! Hint: Think cracks.
Once again, I will wait until we have something to discuss in regard to THIS airplane.
One thing I have been wondering about is how it seems to be taking rather a long time to find the plane.
I appreciate there’s a lot of ground to cover and a plane (even a Boeing 777) is still a fairly small thing to be looking for, but I would have thought that within minutes (certainly an hour or so) of the plane going off the radar or contact being lost, one of the countries in the area would be scrambling a fighter jet (after letting the neighbouring countries know, obviously) to go and have a look and find out what’s happened. However, my understanding is the search and rescue effort wasn’t mobilised until several hours after the plane vanished.
Evidently there is a central database of stolen passports, maintained by Interpol. Interpol just put out a whiny statement asking why hardly anybody uses their fancy database:
AIUI, the scan and/or polling of your passport info that the airline performs before letting you board is usually for the purposes of providing a manifest to the country of arrival (let THEM deal with you), and online verification against the watch lists, which are a different database. Probably they feel it would take them too much time and/or money to also hook up to Interpol’s database.
Some passports have a picture of your iris imbedded. Apparently they are like fingerprints. No two are alike.
The stolen Italian passport apparently was in the Interpol database. Which is part of what I meant about airport security tightening up. I’ll bet there’ll be a lot more connections to it after this incident.
BBC says the authorities are still checking out four passengers, but the focus seems very much on those first two mentioned, the two with the stolen passports. I’m hearing it looks like they bought them together from China Southern – their ticket numbers are sequential – and the two were scheduled to transfer to the same onward flight from Beijing. That would have been to Amsterdam, and from there they were to transfer again to different flights to separate European destinations – one to Copenhagen, the other to Frankfurt. And while I haven’t heard where they bought the tickets, I’ve read they paid for the tickets in baht, which is Thailand’s currency. So they may very well have bought them here in Bangkok. (I guess it’s possible they bought them in Malaysia but paid in baht, but doing that would probably have gotten them a crappy exchange rate, and anyway they’ve obviously spent some time here if they had baht. Of course, if they planned to blow themselves up, why would they care about the exchange rate? But it seems like just paying in ringgit, the Malaysian currency, would have helped them keep a low profile. No, I’ll bet they bought the tickets here in Bangkok.)
The Washington Post has picked up the passports-stolen-in-Thailand angle.
Radar data indicates the plane may actually have tried to turn back just before it disappeared but no guesses as to why. And authorities can’t seem to confirm if those oil slicks have anything to do with the crash. It’s a complete mystery. I’m wondering if they’re using submarines to search under water. They’ve got such a flotilla out there now, you’d think a submarine or two could help, but no word about that.
That would be great if submarines had windows. Most don’t. AFAIK, submarine sonar isn’t going to tell you much more than surface-based or towed sonar.
Huh. You mean they don’t have windshield wipers to keep the water off the front? 
I would have thought they’d have cameras or the sonar could pick up something like a fuselage. But then, I’m not up on submarine technology.
You do raise valid points and I get that even a minor collision can cause major problems. As just one example, I once rejected an airplane during a pre-flight because a “hangar rash” accident broke hinges in the elevator that, without a close look, could have easily gone unnoticed.
However, this airplane was inspected and repaired. Given that most such inspections and repairs are done competently it’s not an unreasonable assumption that this one was as well. However, I completely agree that everything must be looked into, including all past repairs.
Yes, it’s possible that the force on the wingtip was such that it caused damaged in the rest of the wing that might have gone unnoticed for years. If the wing root had cracks and the wing suddenly snapped off in flight yes, that could fit with a sudden drop off radar and no time to get off a mayday. I really hope that’s not the case as that would have been a horrific fall for the people on board. Given that wingtip damage does occur with some regularity, though, and we don’t have airplanes raining out of the sky on account of it, I’m thinking it’s not likely.
For the record, this is reputed to be a picture of the damage that occurred 2 years ago. While there is no way in hell I’d take off in an aircraft with that sort of damage, and you raise a good point that things need to be repaired and inspected, and certainly the possibility needs to be examined, until we actually find the airplane and can conduct a proper analysis on the structure we really can’t say. Airplanes have been repaired after that sort of damage, returned to service, and performed without problems afterward.
There is now speculation that the airplane might have tried to turn back to Kuala Lumpor, so maybe the pilots did notice something amiss… but if they did they never told anyone
Well, a fighter jet isn’t necessarily the best aircraft to use for search and rescue. They have to fly pretty fast to stay in the air, which makes looking for stuff below a bit more difficult than if you were going slower. This is why S&R frequently uses a helicopter, so they can scan and area slowly and thoroughly, and even hover if they need to look closely at something.
You can lose contact with an airplane and have it show up safe and sound after awhile. It’s possible to have a radio failure and still fly the airplane and land it, after all. You don’t want to trigger S&R too quickly because you’ll wind up with a lot of false alarms.
If ATC receives a mayday they’ll launch S&R immediately because they know there is a problem. Just not hearing from an airplane? Over oceans there are spaces with no ATC coverage, or minimal and/or unreliable. Pilots have been known to dial in the wrong frequency on the radio, so they’re transmitting but not being heard. And, like I said, radios can fail. Since there are alternative explanations besides “it crashed” for not hearing from an aircraft doing things like asking other aircraft if any can see or hear them, double-checking radar, and so forth makes some sense.
It’s when an airplane is overdue that alarms start to go off.
I’m hearing now that one of the people whose passport was stolen said he had deposited it with a car-rental agency in Thailand. When he returned the car, the passport was mysteriously gone. It’s quite common for passports to be kept for vehicle rentals. The temptation to make some extra money by selling one may be too great for some staff, particularly at some of the dodgier rental places.
EDIT: Geez, BBC is saying that the authorities are so desperate to find something – ANYTHING – that the search has been extended to the Strait of Malacca, which is actually to the west of Malaysia. Just on the off chance that somehow it veered back from east of peninsular Malaysia all the way over the peninsula and past it to the west. Grasping at straws it sounds like.
There was no plane. All the grieving relatives are crisis actors.
…are crackpot claims that I’m sure will be made, if they haven’t already.
Ah ha! The tickets were bought in Pattaya, which is east(ish) of Bangkok, not south. And in the latest case of closing the barn door once the horses get out, now the police are scrutinizing stolen-passport rings.
I don’t disagree, but lets pool what we know as observers and factor out what is impossible:
*Seat cushions & various other parts of a plane, if free from obstruction and not contained inside of a heavy object, float.
*Pilots are trained to report trouble very quickly; within seconds.
*Electronic systems cut off as if at the flick of a switch.
*Aerial photography shows oil only; no launched rafts, no inflated life vests, no debris.
*No after crash signals have been picked up, like from a raft launch (transponders are embedded & activate on inflation).
I’m willing to posit that the single most likely event is that it exploded and that rescuers have just not found the debris field yet. It may be that the oils slick is something else and that they are looking in the wrong place.
But, purely as speculation, lets play the cards we hold now:
Q: what could knock out all electronics and all crew quickly while still leaving a plane intact enough to submerge without leaving a significant debris field?
A universal pressure drop at high altitude will knock everyone out instantly. What could have caused that, if at the right junction/junctions, could have knocked out all of the electronics. A nose-in at full speed: might that not make the debris field smaller?
Or, if the crew could be taken out fast enough to avoid an alarm by an on-board team that had people capable of flying her, then technically someone could have an airplane for a use to be determine later.
What was that old movie? An Evening in Byzantium?
There are other reports that the people using the stolen passports had bought tickets from Beijing on to Europe, not something you might expect of terrorist bombers. The passport thing just seems like a false lead, being reported only because there’s so little else to report.
The reports that radar returns suggested a turnback seem misleading, too - a wreck falling out of the sky might appear to be an intact airplane turning, especially at long range with degraded radar accuracy. But that *would *suggest a catastrophic failure at altitude.
They have already: Malaysia Airlines MH 370 Hoax