Search on after Malaysia Airlines flight vanishes

[Babel]

They were all likely dead from lowering the cabin pressure

Bugger.

[pErvinalia]

The authorities are certain it's a suicide, it's just a question of who.
How do they know? It's the way the plane was flown, following navigation points, and dropping low, where there is radar, and climbing again when out of range.

How does that lead anyone to a suicide conclusion??

[pErvinalia]

How many Christians on board? Could easily be a case of premature rapture. A test run so to speak?

That's pretty much what Sarah Palin said.

[Jason]

Hijackers pulled a D.B. Cooper with a waiting boat - thus faking their own deaths for nefarious purposes.

[macdoc]

How does that lead anyone to a suicide conclusion??

not going to walk you through all the arguments but the odds against any other explanation are very high.

The plane is not simply going to turn sharp left exactly on a hand over boundary, ( known ) turn off the comm ( known but could be failure - however both comm units appear to be turned off at different times ), follow and turn at waypoints [/b ( known ) ]so it's heading north still with the comm off, drop down again to 12,000 feet ( military radar ) and even lower ( eye witnesses ) then head due south until it is out of fuel.

FBI and the aviation officials working on the case are of the opinion someone flew the plane. Reasons unknown - only three aboard had the background for it.

Here you go

What do we know about the plane's disappearance?
00:41, 8 March: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Saturday, 8 March (16:41 GMT, 7 March), and was due to arrive in Beijing at 06:30 (22:30 GMT).

Malaysia Airlines says the plane lost contact less than an hour after takeoff. No distress signal or message was sent.

01:07: The plane sent its last ACARS transmission - a service that allows computers aboard the plane to "talk" to computers on the ground. Some time afterwards, it was silenced and the expected 01:37 transmission was not sent.

01:19: The co-pilot was heard to say "All right, good night" to Malaysian air traffic control.

A few minutes later, the plane's transponder, which communicates with ground radar, was shut down as the aircraft crossed from Malaysian air traffic control into Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea.

01:21: The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam said the plane failed to check in as scheduled with air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh City.

02:15: Malaysian military radar plotted Flight MH370 at a point south of Phuket island in the Strait of Malacca, west of its last known location. Thai military radar logs also confirmed that the plane turned west and then north over the Andaman sea.

08:11: (00:11 GMT, 8 March) Seven hours after contact with air traffic control was lost, a satellite above the Indian Ocean picked up data from the plane in the form of an automatic "handshake" between the aircraft and a ground station.

This information, disclosed a week after the plane's disappearance, suggested the jet was in one of two flight corridors, one stretching north between Thailand and Kazakhstan, the other south between Indonesia and the southern Indian Ocean.

08:19: There is some evidence of a further "partial handshake" at this time between the plane and a ground station but experts are still working on analysing this data, the Malaysian transport minister said on 25 March.

09:15: (01:15 GMT) This would have been the next scheduled automatic contact between the ground station and the plane but there was no response from the aircraft.

Graphic: Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER
line break
What happened next?
The plane's planned route would have taken it north-eastwards, over Cambodia and Vietnam, and the initial search focused on the South China Sea, south of Vietnam's Ca Mau peninsula.

But evidence from a military radar, revealed later, suggested the plane had suddenly changed from its northerly course to head west. So the search, involving dozens of ships and planes, then switched to the sea west of Malaysia.

Further evidence revealed on Saturday 15 March by the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak suggested the jet was deliberately diverted by someone on board about an hour after takeoff.

After MH370's last communication with a satellite was disclosed, a week after the plane's disappearance, the search was expanded dramatically to nearly three million square miles, from Kazakhstan in the north to vast areas of the remote southern Indian Ocean.

Then, on 20 March, Australian search teams revealed they were investigating two objects spotted on satellite images in the southern Indian Ocean and sent long-range surveillance planes to the area, followed by further sightings. An Australian ship arrived in the area and further vessels are on their way.

At 1400 GMT on 24 March the Malaysian prime minister announced that following further analysis of satellite data it was beyond doubt that the plane had gone down in this part of the ocean.

This was based on Inmarsat and UK air accident investigators' analysis of the data relayed between the plane and ground station by satellite.

Who was on board?

The 12 crew members were all Malaysian, led by pilots Captain Zaharie Ahmed Shah, 53 and 27-year-old co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid.

Police have searched their homes and a flight simulator has been taken from the captain's home and reassembled for examination at police headquarters.

It is now believed that co-pilot Hamid spoke the last words heard from the plane, "All right, good night" - but it it not clear whether this was before or after the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) had been deliberately switched off.

There were 227 passengers, including 153 Chinese and 38 Malaysians, according to the manifest. Seven were children.

Other passengers came from Iran, the US, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, India, France, New Zealand, Ukraine, Russia, Taiwan and the Netherlands.

Two Iranian men were found to be travelling on false passports. But further investigation revealed 19-year-old Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad and Delavar Seyed Mohammadreza, 29 were headed for Europe via Beijing, and had no apparent links to terrorist groups.

Among the Chinese nationals was a delegation of 19 prominent artists who had attended an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia Airlines said there were four passengers who checked in for the flight but did not show up at the airport.

The family members of those on board were informed by in person, by phone and by text message on 24 March that the plane had been lost.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26503141

[pErvinalia]

Could they communicate via radio with anyone out there if they wanted to? I'm just wondering if there was perhaps an ongoing struggle of sorts for control of the plane between different parties. If it was terrorists, and the comms still worked, then you'd expect they'd send some sort of SOS or distress signal. But if comms were out or not effective, then that could explain something. It just seems frankly idiotic to fly all the way out there to suicide. The could have simply ditched it into the ocean well before that or slammed into a mountain or the ground somewhere.

[FBM]

You'd think that if it were terrorists they'd have claimed responsibility by now and cited their grievances.

[macdoc]

Not now it doesn't seem so idiotic

Now there is a motive....

I always thought that jaunst to 45,000 ' was to kill the cabin crew and passengers.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/missing- ... zqn4p.html

snip

The Herald report suggested Captain Zaharie may have taken the Boeing 777 for a "last joyride", doing things in a plane he had previously only been able to do on a simulator, before crashing into the Indian Ocean.

"He's one of the finest pilots around and I'm no medical expert, but with all that was happening in his life Zaharie was probably in no state of mind to be flying," the friend told the newspaper.
His comments contrast with official statements from Malaysian authorities, who have said that the focus of the investigation was moving away from Captain Zaharie and his co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27.

Rumoured marital troubles: The captain of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

The friend claimed that Captain Zaharie was "terribly upset" when his wife, Faizah Khan, told him she was leaving. The couple have three children and, although they had separated, had been living in the same Kuala Lumpur house.
The friend also claimed that Captain Zaharie was experiencing relationship problems with another woman he was seeing.
He claimed Captain Zaharie may have incapacitated the co-pilot and other flight crew to keep them out of the cockpit before taking the Malaysia Airlines plane to a part of the world he had never flown in before.
"It is very possible that neither the passengers nor the other crew onboard knew what was happening until it was too late," the friend told the Herald.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/missing-mal ... z2x2QVreGZ

[pErvinalia]

It's a big step from suicidal after marriage troubles, to mass murderer. Do such cunty people really exist in the world?

[macdoc]

That co-pilot in the Atlantic tunneled one in with all aboard.

Might take a while to know...we might never know.

[mistermack]

What's the chances of finding it, or ever finding out what happened?
Less than one percent, I reckon. If they don't get an incredibly lucky hit in the next few days, I'd say the chances are almost nil.

Could it have gone north after all? Not a chance. Firstly, people would have been able to use their phones flying low over land, and if it flew at any reasonable height, it would have been seen by multiple radars.

So it's got to be in the Indian Ocean, at a depth of 10,000 feet plus.
They would need to be very close to over the top of it, to pick up the bleeps. And they have no clue where to look. Once the battery runs out, I don't think they have much chance of finding it with subs.
The possible search area is just too vast, and the ocean floor is pretty uneven.

Sorry for all the relatives, but it's almost certain that they will never know what happened.
Even if they do find it, by some miracle, they probably won't find out who did what. The voice tape will be just blank, having recorded over the original incident. My bet is suicide by the number one pilot. But it's only a hunch.

(now that I've said that, it'll probably turn up tomorrow, just to be awkward)

[rainbow]

I still say it was an alien abduction.

[cronus]

Probably suicide, possibly damaged control systems via some unspecified incident. Guy had a improvised flight simulator - took his work home. That's geek anal behaviour. Low empathy threshold necessary to treat the passengers as cargo and focus on his task over the years could have got the better of him after the government trial he'd faced?

[piscator]

Probably suicide, possibly damaged control systems via some unspecified incident. Guy had a improvised flight simulator - took his work home. That's geek anal behaviour. Low empathy threshold necessary to treat the passengers as cargo and focus on his task over the years could have got the better of him after the government trial he'd faced?

Try again. I and almost every other pilot I know has MSFS. It's great for checking out new airspaces and airports, if you're into airports...

[rainbow]

Probably suicide, possibly damaged control systems via some unspecified incident. Guy had a improvised flight simulator - took his work home. That's geek anal behaviour. Low empathy threshold necessary to treat the passengers as cargo and focus on his task over the years could have got the better of him after the government trial he'd faced?

So what really happened is that the Nbiruans used a mind-controlling beam to lure him into the Mothership.

Things would have been so different had he been wearing the tinfoil hat.