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March 16, 2014

Vanishing Jet: Admit It, You Knew Where It Would Lead [Bumped]

abadat.jpg

Malaysia Airline MH370: 9/11-style terror allegations resurface in case of lost plane - Telegraph Evidence of a plot by Malaysian Islamists to hijack a passenger jet in a 9/11-style attack is being investigated in connection with the disappearance of Flight MH370.
An al-Qaeda supergrass told a court last week that four to five Malaysian men had been planning to take control of a plane, using a bomb hidden in a shoe to blow open the cockpit door.... In evidence in a court case last Tuesday, Saajid Badat, a British-born Muslim from Gloucester, said that he had been instructed at a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan to give a shoe bomb to the Malaysians.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at March 16, 2014 3:39 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

A "supergrass" is not a stronger version of marijuana, it is Brit Slang for an informant.

Posted by: Fat Man at March 15, 2014 4:08 PM

Pilot:"The plane does not have enough fuel to make it!"

Terrorist:"Allah will make it fly."

P:"The Plane does not have enough fuel..."

T:"ALLAH WILL MAKE IT FLY!"

P:"When pigs fly."

Still why hasn't someone claimed responsibility or come out and allah allah akubar, etc etc. Don't the muzzies want people to know they mean business?

Posted by: Todd at March 15, 2014 4:44 PM

Why no claim of responsibility?

Easy.

The operation is not yet finished.

Posted by: vanderleun at March 15, 2014 4:48 PM

SilkAir185 and EgyptAir990 both were pilot suicides by airliner. I suspect one of the legitimate pilots simply steered the aircraft out to sea, deliberately away from normal route, to delay or prevent a timely wreckage recovery. Whether he disguised the nature of the suicide to collect on insurance for family or something else isn't clear yet.

Another reason a Muslim pilot flying an aircraft full of Chinese passengers might not want to confirm the aircraft disappearance as suicide, is to prevent Chinese retaliation against Malaysia or Uighers.

The ocean under the normal flight route is relatively shallow(100-300 ft), so wreckage would be recovered. The ocean under the normal route is chocked full of fishermen (night/day) and oil rigs. So there would be eyewitnesses to explosion or crash, thus requiring diversion FAR away from normal route.

I just don't see the *Chinese* assuming an unidentified bogey to be nothing. The only way this aircraft gets to suspicious regions in the ares is t fly for *hours* through Chinese airspace.

Reports of he Captain having a home flight sim are not suspicious. He was a regular member of FlightSim Forums discussing his sim among other simmers. In the last few years there has been a revolution in the quality of flight sims available for personal use. This Captain was involved in this revolution centered around MS FlightSim and PMDG 777 ad-on. Search YouTube, there are many people with home setups nearly equivalent to basic commercial flight training devices. You could do this yourself for $10-20k, including physical hardware that duplicates everything but the actual seats used in an airliner. The Boeing 777 and 737 have been the focus of this sim revolution.

Many of the press reports are wildly and recklessly confusing Inmarsat satellite "pings" and the ACARS, Rolls-Royce Engine Monitoring, Boeing Health Monitoring, and other systems. About half of the info spread by the media has been retracted and some announced, retracted, reinstated.

Despite the NSA stories of late, there is not a God's Eye View of the world present everywhere and all of the time. Many, many people are assuming everything everywhere is seen and then conclude govt conspiracy since we didn't know location of aircraft within 24 hours. This is why it's a type of poison to use movies, tv shows, and novels as news.

I conclude one of the pilots, or both, turned off transponder and ACARS deliberately,(and probably Emergency Locator Transmitter) may have "switched off" cabin pressurization long enough to kill or incapacitate passengers, no more United 93s, and flew until fuel exhaustion far away from any likely search and rescue effort. No evidence the aircraft has landed. If the aircraft has landed then it incredibly penetrated Chinese airspace not far from India and it eluded detection and interception near a possible source of intruding aircraft. This would be like NATO not noticing the USSR driving tanks through the Fulda Gap.

There are other much, much easier ways to get a flying missile if that's the goal of this episode. You buy any of the thousands of former airliners parked around the world. Or you hire a cargo company to fly you, your cargo, fuel, and aircraft wherever you go. There is no good reason to try to snatch and hide a full airliner if your plan is something besides killing the passenger on the aircraft. Rather than hijacking this 777, landing it in a rare location for future use, refueling it and flying it back into civilization is unnecessarily complicated. This aircraft was already going toward the juiciest targets in godless China. Another crazy idea is the aircraft was hijacked by remote-control. That must be in some recent movie, it's all over some of the forums. All but impossible, but it fits recent fears and unrelated news hysteria s.

The "ringing cellphone" stories are bunk, thoroughly debunked by cellphone engineers and airliner experts. This isn't the old days of landlines when if you heard ringing on your Bell telephone another Bell telephone was ringing elsewhere. The ring you hear on your cellphone is a signal to YOU "we are trying your connection, please wait." It does not mean when you hear ringing another cellphone elsewhere is ringing.

Weather was good to excellent at the time. The aircraft flew for hours after last contact, so most of it's systems were operating normally. This could be some sort of Payne Stewart ghost plane, except for the turning off of certain equipment and diversion almost 90 degrees from intended course. Helios 522 is an interesting parallel if one wants to read about an airliner when the pressurization fails.

Posted by: Scott M at March 15, 2014 5:15 PM

Scott, golfer Payne Stewart was killed when the plane he was flying in depressurized, it flew until it ran out of fuel and crashed in South Dakota.

Posted by: Potsie at March 15, 2014 6:02 PM

Scott M., good comment with much good info.

Your wroye, "You buy any of the thousands of former airliners parked around the world. Or you hire a cargo company to fly you, your cargo, fuel, and aircraft wherever you go. There is no good reason to try to snatch and hide a full airliner if your plan is something besides killing the passenger on the aircraft."

Unless the destination is Iran and the cargo is a nuke.

Posted by: Donald Sensing at March 15, 2014 6:25 PM

Scott M., good comment with much good info.

Your wroye, "You buy any of the thousands of former airliners parked around the world. Or you hire a cargo company to fly you, your cargo, fuel, and aircraft wherever you go. There is no good reason to try to snatch and hide a full airliner if your plan is something besides killing the passenger on the aircraft."

Unless the destination is Iran and the cargo is a nuke.

Posted by: Donald Sensing at March 15, 2014 6:25 PM

Yes, Potsie. That's correct. His LearJet was flying from Fl to GA, IIRC. The aircraft's modulating valve had been the subject of some maintenance. This valve controls part of the pressurization system. The aircraft apparently was either never pressurized or the pressurization failed in such a manner the pilots didn't properly react. The aircraft then flew until fuel exhaustion and crashed in the Dakotas.

That was my inital theory of what happened here and it explained the lack of wreckage. No wreckage was found early because the aircraft didn't crash near point of loss of contact. On some routes and at some airlines the procedure when detecting loss of pressurization at altitude is donn O2 masks for pilots, select heading change and select lower altitude. The idea is you don't just descend quickly, pilots call it "high dive", but you sometimes turn 45-90 degrees away from cruise path so you don't endanger aircraft below you on the same route. My initial theory was the aircraft had pressurization problem and will be found perpendicular to flight-planned route at a point where fuel was exhausted.

But early on it was learned transponder was turned off. In the absence of other system failures that is a deliberate act for various reasons. That was when I settled on either pilot suicide, jump-seat hijacker, etc.

Posted by: Scott M at March 15, 2014 6:31 PM

Scott M., good comment with much good info.

You wrote, "You buy any of the thousands of former airliners parked around the world. Or you hire a cargo company to fly you, your cargo, fuel, and aircraft wherever you go. There is no good reason to try to snatch and hide a full airliner if your plan is something besides killing the passenger on the aircraft."

Unless the destination is Iran and the cargo is a nuke.

Posted by: Donald Sensing at March 15, 2014 6:45 PM

GVL, I think the reason for no claim of responsibility is explained by 1 or 2 reasons.

1) pilot suicide. If he suicides in an ambiguous manner his family, and others, may still collect insurance.

2) pilot suicide, with 160 Chinese nationals, as revenge for Chinese oppression of Uighers, but ambiguous circumstances don't warrant a Chinese crackdown on Uighers.

3) if reports of pilot being supporter of govt opposition leader turn out to be true, ambiguous pilot suicide disguised as accident, but far away from obvious crash location, would besmirch the competence of the current govt, and pay pilot family insurance.

@Donald Sensing

I don't think this aircraft would have the fuel to reach Iran. First, airline would have a record of this Captain taking on unusual fuel amount for Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight. Weather was good to excellent with light winds. No good reason to take extra fuel

IF, IF, IF Malaysia military reports are true, and they have been particularly unreliable, this aircraft changed altitude and flew a zig-zag path. This burns precious fuel if you are planning to fly it near its max range with KL-Beijing fuel load, like to Iran. Getting to Iran means flying through China's airspace or flying a much longer radar-evading route. I conclude it would be much easier to ship a nuke in any of the millions of sea containers traveling the world. I think the least likely outcome is that this aircraft has landed anywhere in one piece. The closer you get to landing places the more likely it shows up on military radar. The most friendly landing places for terrorists are VERY far away and landing there implicates a nation for retaliation. The only evidence this aircraft didn't crash is no signal from the crash- or water-activated Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT). The ELT has a switch that can be turned off. More likely a pilot or accomplice knew to turn it off than an aircraft a little smaller than a 747 is hiding on some remote airstrip, IMO.

If the pilot manipulated the pressurization system he could incapacitate the passengers while they slept. This was a red-eye flight to Beijing. Incapacitated passengers keeps their cellphones from being much nuisance and a passenger revolt.

Posted by: Scott M at March 15, 2014 6:52 PM

The ELT on aircraft these days transmit on the old frequency that has a shorter range AND a higher frequency that will be detected by satellite. The receivers on satellite piggyback on a network of satellites that have worldwide coverage. They might piggyback on GPS satellites, but if not, worldwide coverage is assured. A pilot with enough help/knowledge to turn off his ACARS system, would know about the ELT.

One more thing, it's frequently asked why transponders or some other equipment can't be wired to not allow pilots to turn them off. The answer is FIRE. Everything in the aircraft is wired through an on/off switch and a circuit-breaker so that in event a short-circuit starts a fire you must be able to turn it off. If the device is expected to be turned on/off by the crew it gets a switch and it's also protected by CB in case crew or switch fails. Fire is much more likely over the life of an aircraft than a hijacking. You don't want to crash a $1-150 million airplane because a $2k device shorts out. That's also why coffee-makers for airliners cost a thousand or more. The FAA won't certify for aircraft installation a device, such as all 8900 models of cell phones for the last few decades, unless it is proven to not have a failure-mode that under the worst condition won't endanger the aircraft/passengers.

Posted by: Scott M at March 15, 2014 7:16 PM

Posted by: Joan of Argghh! at March 16, 2014 5:40 AM

Scott M

As your observations/analyses above are the best I've seen so far 'midst the speculation on both the MSM and the Intertubes, I wonder if you'd mind considering this piece of idle speculation:

If you were a top security official of the Indian Government and your military and civil sources reported that a rogue Boeing 777 had turned from it’s scheduled run towards China and altered its course in your general direction – and that the Islamic pilot (or someone else) had turned off its transponder; what would you do? And just supposing that you did what was necessary to protect your cities from a possible flying bomb, would you necessarily tell the rest if the world how you had obviated that risk? And if, in the aftermath of such a defensive action, the rest of the countries in the area continued to search for the plane, would you join in?

Note:
It is reported that the Indian authorities have stood down their their search effort, pending further information.

The only contra indication to my inference, is that in those circumstances it might be politic to continue to search, as a red herring – making sure, of course that you avoided certain areas where you knew debris might exist. No country would relish shooting down a plane loaded mainly with innocent passengers – well – no civilised country, anyway, with the possible exception of the Iran, N Korea or -ahem – the US.

As far as I have seen or heard nobody has asked the Indian authorities whether they were on ‘high alert’ and if they were not, then why not? – given the high state of tension between India and its Muslim neighbours!

Posted by: Frank P at March 16, 2014 7:05 AM

Scott M - I said awhile ago that the plane would have to make an intermediate stop to reach Iran (though not in this thread), which I repeated in my latest take, online this morning.

Posted by: Donald Sensing at March 16, 2014 7:06 AM

Gerard, check your email for a link.

It's quite possibly a socio-political drama with Islam and sodomy at its very heart. I wish I were kidding.

Posted by: Joan of Argghh! at March 16, 2014 7:12 AM

Joan of Arrgghh

Yep, the Daily Mail's report agrees with you. The buggers are everywhere.

Posted by: Frank P at March 16, 2014 7:16 AM

Probably not a good idea to allow Muslims near airplanes until such a time as their civilization is capable of independently inventing one. Otherwise, they are liable to use it as a time-travel machine, from the 21st back to the 11th century.

Posted by: Gagdad Bob at March 16, 2014 9:15 AM

Or better yet, just discover civilization.

Posted by: Gagdad Bob at March 16, 2014 9:54 AM

Whatever explanations emerge, they are tainted beyond reasonable belief with no responses other than "it is thought" and "authorities have pieced together".

I'll bet it is some tacky scenario such as Joan implies rather than the stuff of which heroes or martyrs are made.

Or they got the guys that faked the moon landing to cobble something up. no no no, just kidding.

Posted by: chasmatic at March 16, 2014 10:01 AM

Chasmatic

Joan wasn't kidding; according to the Mail on line the pilot was incensed because of an alleged fit-up of a top Malaysian Opposition politician who was convicted of sodomy. Colleagues of the pilot describe him as a political fanatic - allegedly!

Posted by: Frank P at March 16, 2014 10:13 AM

Maybe it is time for Penn Jillete's airport security. "Bacon and a kiss" Before anyone gets on a plane you have to eat a piece of bacon and kiss someone of the same sex.

Posted by: Potsie at March 16, 2014 10:15 AM

I saw the uk daily mail on Friday night with the little blurb about Anwar's "sodomy" trials and I thought, of course, it's going to be about buggery. How perfectly droll. But it could just be about political smears using sodomy as a pernicious obstacle to a dissident. Either way...

When I read more about the interest so many world leaders had in finding this airplane, I saw that it matched up with the many world leaders apparently worried about Malaysia's "progressive" standing w/ Islam's elites. Trust me, Islam is still about hanging the buggerers, but it serves them well to offer up Malaysian Muslims as a sacrifice to the greater good -- so they pressure them to accept the homosexual agenda as a human rights issue and a show of Islam's good faith and democratic spirit. Or something.

/tinfoil hat

Posted by: Joan of Argghh! at March 16, 2014 11:09 AM

Frank, gotcha. Never doubted her, Joan is solid. Tacky scenario gets my vote. we're all tangling webs and seeking conspiracies, must be the Illuminati or some über-muzzies or Snowden's grassed everyone and ...

Most murders are so banal, so very basic, like: "Awright Frank, why'd ya kill her?" "She kept looking at me". Basic triggers such as jealousy, fear, hurt will prevail cloaked with implications of mass murder, Muslim wheeling-dealing, the whole gay thing and the Air Force over-killing. (I say it's the Malays).

Posted by: chasmatic at March 16, 2014 12:32 PM

Here are a couple of home cockpits you can build and fly for less than the price of a new car.

"First Class" Home Cockpit
http://youtu.be/I3h0B1H6JwY

"Coach" Home Cockpit
http://youtu.be/y1jfSS7MgmY

The MH370 Captain's home flightsim is a lot more like the second than the first. The more extensive cockpit in the first video probably costs about $15-20k.

Posted by: Scott M at March 16, 2014 1:06 PM

@ Donald Sensing

I read the updated post at you site. Sorry I missed the part about refueling AND THEN GOING TO IRAN. Yes, you can land the 777 on a pretty short runway once most fuel is used. To help this theory, a pilot with lots of experien.ce in his a/c AND a good sim is exactly who you need to accomplish this. The major problem remains leaving said runway. Getting fuel would be no problem and you don't necessarily need to remove pax & bags. They are nearly a trivial eeight compared to fuel weight. I think it will be pretty easy to look at runways in the area, even by satellite. You would be looking for 5-8k foot runways, the takeoff distance with enough fuel to arrive elsewhere.

See next entry.

Posted by: Scott M at March 16, 2014 5:54 PM

@ Frank
In your theory the Indians shot down MH370. First they would need a fighter with very long "legs" to get to it. The fighter would not shoot from a range preventing visual ID. It is easy to see it is airliner, which would almost assuredly stop it from being fired upon. But, mostly I discount the idea because MH370 could not get but about half way acrosd Indian Ocean. Airline reports it took a normal KL-Beijing fuel load. I have my doubts India has 24/7 military search radar looking in that direction. I also doubt it has fighters with range to get even halfway across Indian Ocean. Granted India did not know if bogey had little, much, or no fuel.

Posted by: Scott M at March 16, 2014 6:07 PM

The Indian scenario is plausible, one does not need a plane to huff it out to the middel of the Ocean. Any missile cruiser could so the trick once the bogie was painted.

The delay/confusion on the part of the Malaysian authorities is a red herring. Yes, this was a terr operation to the casual bystander from day one once the news of the transponders being switched off hit the air. The wealthy and political are buying time to move personal wealth from off to onshore, from on to offshore, for illiquid to liquid, from liquid to portable. For when the facts line up, the scrutiny on wire transfers, email traffic will make accessing ones wealth difficult. If I had some spare cycles, I would look to see how much Malasian all cash deals for Dubai real estate happened in the last 3-6 days just to prove out this thought.

Posted by: Alex C at March 16, 2014 7:15 PM

Ockham's Razor still applies. Banal trumps grand conspiracy. The plane went so high to depressurize and permanently knock out the pax and crew. Even the pilots don't have enough oxygen for a 7-hour depressurized flight. So the most likely scenario is the suicidal pilot pointed it south, put it on autopilot, and took himself off oxygen. In a couple of weeks, debris will start washing up on Aussie shores.

There's no way that plane penetrated Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, China or Indian airspace without notice. To land at a remote airport where crazed jihadis are waiting. The pax were dead, there's no doubt, but there's too many actors to make this happen to escape notice. The secret would have leaked.

Once is an accident, twice coincidence, three times now (Egypt, Silk, and Malaysia) is enemy action. I foresee software changes coming soon to all modern airplanes, to make it practically impossible for pilots carrying pax to do this kind of shit.

Posted by: John A. Fleming at March 16, 2014 9:55 PM

Here's a problem or more with the 'Indian Navy shoot down' theory of MH370, They would have shot it down far, far, far from India, much closer to Malaysia. A bogey a couple hundred miles off coast of Malaysia does not look anything like a threat to a ship or India, even at the airliner's lowest altitude. Second, we have no reason to think India's Navy had such ships near MH370.

If you start with the idea India's Navy did shoot it down you can come up with some complicated explanation for everything. But why START with the India Navy shoot-down theory to start with? There is just as much reason to believe a sea monster snatched MH370 with one of it's 20 mile long tentacles.

IIRC India's aircraft carrier in in port after a recent cruise.

Posted by: Scott M at March 17, 2014 12:22 AM

@ John A Fleming

The aircraft apparently flew across the Malaysian peninsula without triggering alarms. I don't see Thailand or Burma being on a much more aggressive footing about a single bogey on their radar, if it was turned on. I've been reading over at a airline pilot's message board and was surprised to see the story of how little the military radars in the region are actually operating. They definitely do not operate 24/7 unless they have heightened tensions underway. One confounding matter for the idea of MH370 flying off to the badlands is that China's airspace would be penetrated, and not just for minutes, but probably hours. Now, the Chinese I expect are operating military radar 24/7.

Posted by: Scott M at March 17, 2014 12:31 AM

Here's an interesting lead and some breadcrumbs to find MH370 I saw on CNN:

CNN keeps showing a map of the Indian Ocean-Malaysia region with 2 big red swipes, one sweeping north and one sweeping south. Those ARE NOT routes of flight, but under one of those red sweeps MH370 pinged an Inmarsat satellite. That ping happened at about 8:11 local. String all of the Inmarsat pings, along with their own arcs and it will give a direction of travel. Just one or two of those earlier pings would isolate MH370 to either the northwest or the southwest limb of the last ping radius.

If MH370 went south, it's virtually certain it ended in the water, probably without so much as any fire because the fuel was consumed. If MH370 went northwest it's possible, more possible than I thought last week, that it could have landed somewhere or ditched after fuel exhaustion. Once on the ground, if it ever landed, I expect that's the last of the Inmarsat pings as they would be disabled by whatever welcoming party or on-board mechanic.

Posted by: Scott M at March 17, 2014 12:45 AM

Putting together what details I've been able to find while obsessively reading various aviation message boards, here's what I suggest happened:

Captain became, or was influenced to become, motivated to hijack his own aircraft. First Officer, may or may not be involved. Nothing I've seen requires his participation. Aircraft TO normally and proceeds on course toward Beijing. Accomplice disables ACARS system just before last radio transmission. Malaysian ATC follows MH370 to the point when they issue their "change to VietNam ATC" message and it is acknowledged by someone. I presume it was the Captain. This pilot turns off transponder, turns to new course toward the west and manipulates the pressurization controller and air conditioning packs to create hypoxic cabin altitude while he dons his O2 mask in the cockpit. Not many passengers were alert at the time since the flight is a red-eye heading for Beijing. Hijacker/pilot leaves cabin altitude high long enough to assure passengers are dead (30-60 minutes). Passenger cellphones are over water and out of range of Malaysian cell towers soon after hijack begins. Even if a few passengers had sat phones, they are either dead or in coma. What happened after MH370 gets west of Malaysia is a mystery to me. If it went toward the NW, I see the possibility of a cellphone belonging to any number of dead/incapacitated passengers making contact with some cell tower during the next few hours. If MH370 went SW after crossing the peninsula there is little to no chance of an inadvertent cellphone ping from one of the hundreds of cellphones.

Worst-case, in my mind, MH370 was able to land and refuel. If it did that and departed quickly, we are screwed because the range could be up to 7,500 miles from the refuel. If it did land, I suspect it would be hidden for weeks before becoming a big problem later. My money for the moment is the hijacker ditched it after it ran out of fuel or crashed trying to land at a remote runway. The way I see it the bigger the runway it was trying for, the easier it is to locate. The smaller the runway it was trying for, the harder it would be to find but it would limit it's danger as short runway means shorter range after takeoff. The passengers and their bags are nearly a trivial weight consideration. It's the weight of the fuel uplift that determines the required runway. Also keep in mind, this is a jet with HUGE under-wing engines. The engines are larger in diameter than a 737 fuselage. Good luck operating those big vacuum cleaners into and out of a dirt strip. I think that works in our favor as we should look at hard surface runways, not some strip carved out of a jungle. Limiting our search to hard surface runways increase the odds of non-involved witnesses, as these long concrete runways are more likely to be near population or the newly constructed terrorist landing site has been under construction for a longer period and satellite reconnaissance would see it.

Posted by: Scott M at March 17, 2014 1:19 AM

Sorry, one more thing. What happened to First Officer? Either he participated or he was disabled, perhaps Captain was as well. But, say Captain/First Officer is complicit and other is not. The one guilty crewmember, or the hijacker riding in cockpit jumpseat waits until one pilot leaves cockpit and locks cockpit door behind him. The pilot, now locked-out, will wilt just like any passenger once cabin pressure is dumped. There are a few walk-around O2 bottles that pilots and flight attendants could use, but those would be exhausted in an hour, I suspect. In the cockpit there are O2 masks with their own supply. I won't guess about their duration, but with only one pilot they last twice as long.

If I had to bet big money, I guess the Captain is the hijacker and the First Officer was killed, before or with the passengers. 2 suspicious points disturb me about the Captain, if the reports are true, and they might not be true. 1) His family moved out of the home before this flight. 2) He's reported to be a strong supporter of a jailed govt opposition leader. The lack of claims of responsibility by jihadis and no frequent claims of "what a good Muslim he was" ease my mind a bit about this being Jihad. I think the motive is more likely to be against Malaysian govt. It's bad enough, even in the best-case.

Posted by: Scott M at March 17, 2014 1:42 AM

What happened to the passengers?

Posted by: ahem at March 17, 2014 10:27 AM

I'm still guessing it crashed. Either instrument malfunction, or the Malaysian Air Traffic Control screwed it up, or the terrorists thought it would work like Todd suggests up at the top. Flying a computer flight simulator, I suspect, does not prepare one to fly an actual jet.

Its even possible the passengers did a job on the terrorists like Flight 93 on 9/11 but nobody got a call out.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at March 17, 2014 11:08 AM

I suspect the hijacker/pilot killed them by dumping cabin pressure soon after he diverted course. It keeps them from staging passenger revolt or phone calls,if they were in range of cell towers.

Posted by: Scott M at March 17, 2014 5:34 PM

The silence is deafening. Nobody stepping up to claim the scalp, no official we're-not-shittin'-ya responses.

Even the theories brought forth by this august band of commenters do not satisfy and reduce and simplify and discount each other. At this point we don't need Ockham's Razor, a shovel handle and "jes' eyeball it" will do.

After the first 48 hours any cover stories were polished and any truths got whittled down to fit the script.

Cold case file, this one's done.

Posted by: chasmatic at March 18, 2014 5:43 AM

The Captain was a strong supporter of a Liberal politician. I don't see jihad in this. If it were jihad it would have been a spectacular crash, there would be claims of responsibility, and threats of future action.

I think only one or two people caused all of this and for personal or anti-Maylasia/China reasons.

Posted by: Scott M at March 18, 2014 1:08 PM

If you want to see how advanced and realistic modern home flight sims are look at this YouTube video. It is using the same type of aircraft as MH370 and shows you how to power up and use a 777 that is parked, called "cold and dark".

http://youtu.be/_tAJ4qz_BYw

Posted by: Scott M at March 18, 2014 1:10 PM

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