It’s hard to lay much blame for that on anyone, though. This case is bizarre in the extreme. When a plane vanishes from radar, it’s natural to assume it crashed at that point since that’s what happens in the overwhelming majority of disappearances, if not absolutely all of them. So they start looking in the South China Sea. Then radar data shows it turned around and was last detected heading towards the Andaman Islands. What The Everlovin’ F!?? So the search shifts there and by extension to the Bay of Bengal. Then satellite data narrows the location down to two possible corridors. Then it’s crunched some more to determine that it must have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean. How The Everlovin’ F did it get there!?? Then a raw guess at fuel use is taken into account and the likely area is moved again. It’s taken some human ingenuity to get the investigation this far, and still, after three weeks they haven’t been able to find a trace of the plane, or gain even a hint about the possible cause and/or motivation. This is truly the most bizarre case of air tragedies ever. If it weren’t for the fortuitous handshake pings to the satellite, which I’m guessing the perpetrator wasn’t aware of, they’d still be looking in the northern part of the Indian Ocean.
Maybe because there’s so much shit floating around out there. One thing I’ve learned from this search is what a fucking cesspool the oceans have become, even an area as remote as the southern Indian Ocean. When the garbage-to-plane-debris ratio is so huge, the search would get bogged down immensely if they closely investigated every piece they see. Must be frustrating as hell for the searchers.
Yes but they’re expending a lot of fuel to fly over something and then rely on boats to research it. Better to toss a cheap drone out the window and look at the objects in real time. A couple of hundred bucks on a drone versus a zillion gallons of fuel for planes and boats.
And I wonder if it was human ingenuity that deliberately misled us this way. Maybe misdirection was the intention? If so, what would be the next step to fool us to not find the plane or look in the wrong place?
Maybe, at this point in time, the cost is less important than the speed. We have been constantly bombarded by “we found something,” followed by “we’ll send a boat to look in a few days,” followed by “the weather is forcing delays…”, followed by “the debris has drifted hundreds of miles and we see nothing.” What price should we put on time, which right now, is the most critical element in the search?
I’m trying hard to not sound like a conspiracy theorist, but consider this scenario.
You are a pilot or a disgruntled, psychopathic idiot who has managed to conceal that fact so far. For some reason, you want to either kill yourself, or kill a bunch of people perhaps to make a political statement. Remember, we’re dealing with a psychopath here – just because no political statement has been forthcoming doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist in some twisted mind.
So you very carefully plan your course of action, and concealment is paramount (again, we’re not postulating a rational mind). How would you do this?
You plan a flight with no red flags. Normal flight, normal actions, normal procedures, no sudden moves. Shortly after takeoff, at a point where communication typically is poor and the region is mostly asleep, the plan takes effect (never mind if it is the pilot or a hijacker for now).
You do know, based on past controller and airline incidents (think 9/11), that no one will come looking for you if communication is not normal right away. They won’t be seriously upset; they won’t work with the military, the military doesn’t consider civilian planes a threat and will generally ignore you, and no one will be expecting what you are doing (just like 9/11). They will make only feeble attempts to find you for many hours, maybe longer. A controller reporting a missing airliner? History shows us it’s not important enough to take immediate action (the CEO needs his sleep), and you can count on that.
So you make your position, heading, and altitude as unlikely as possible. Your flight was heading to China? No one will be looking for it west of Malaysia. You are tracked across Malaysia? No one will expect you to fly south to nowhere. Last contact was at X? Who would be looking for you 3000 miles away, in the wrong direction? There is enough junk floating in the world’s oceans that there will be eyewitnesses placing you at the opposite side of the planet, if not the moon. Every bogus report increases confusion and your chances of delayed discovery.
So what more could you do? Could you make the plane, using autopilot, crash in such a way that it would be even harder to find? I think investigators need to seriously consider this in the absence of more evidence.
This plane search is almost sounding like the “Finding Bigfoot” TV series. “Here’s some evidence.” “No, it’s not.” “Oh, here’s some more. . . .” Lather rinse repeat. Unlike the Bigfoot series, I suspect they will actually find the plane, but so far nothing seems like real evidence.
Or, as Alice once said, “Curiouser and curiouser.”
You know how sometimes you’ll do something like stub your toe, and that will lead you to bang your head on something and then drop what you were carrying, which then rolls under the fridge, and the cat goes chasing after it, knocking over the bowl of hot soup on the table, which lands on the dog, who knocks over the iron and ironing board while running away yelping, setting a small fire in the process? You know how when that happens? It will probably turn out to be some similar sequence of events.
I hate it when that happens. Rube G.? Is that you?
Oddly that’s how most plane accidents read. Sequential problems that snowball. Except for the cat part. They hate flying although are sometimes named Snowball.
I don’t think we’re getting anything close to the full story from Malaysia so it’s difficult to even guess what happened. I still don’t know for sure if it was a straight run back from the last point of contact or the “mr toad’s wild ride” that’s been described in the news.
A pic on my Facebook feed shows a screenshot from CNN with the banner: “DEVELOPING STORY - BOEING 777 WILL STRUGGLE TO MAINTAIN ALTITUDE ONCE THE FUEL TANKS ARE EMPTY”
Yes, friends, it *has *come to that.
If you mean misdirection by whoever was flying the plane, I agree, although I’d call it evasion rather than misdirection. Every movement the plane took points to deliberate attempts to evade detection before crashing where no one would think to look. I suspect that the perpetrator wasn’t aware that the handshake pings would still be sent from the plane with ACARS turned off, or if he was, that they couldn’t be used to track the plane’s movement.
If you’re suggesting that the pings to the satellite were somehow false in order to misdirect the search to the southern Indian Ocean, then I think you’re stretching the bounds of credulity to the breaking point. IANAExpert on the ACARS system, but I’m pretty sure it would be next to impossible.
Is this perhaps a conspiracy by Big Oil to make certain that aircraft require fuel to remain in flight?
This is why we need nuclear-powered airplanes. Fuel lasts longer.
They tried this.
It was wisely discarded.
But the mushroom cloud would make it easier to pinpoint the crash site.
From The New Zealand Herald:
From USA Today:
Both articles I linked to in the post above are a little old, from March 26, but interesting nonetheless.
Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.
No, no, I’m not suggesting that.
On the upside of all those satellite debris images, we’re getting a visual queue of how much garbage there is in the oceans. Alas, I doubt any talking head will make the connection.