Malaysia Airlines loses contact with plane carrying 239 people

[ShowtimeSBMVP]

Malaysia Airlines says it has lost contact with a plane with 239 aboard enroute from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The airline said in a statement early Saturday it was attempting to locate the Boeing 777 after it lost contact with Subang Air Traffic Control at 2:40 a.m. It was scheduled to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m.

China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported the plane was lost in airspace controlled by Vietnam, and did not make contact with Chinese air traffic controllers.

The plane is carrying 227 passengers, including two infants, and 12 crew members. The airline said it is working with authorities to locate the plane.

Boeing said on its Twitter account it is monitoring the situation, and "our thoughts are with everyone on board."



http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03...ing-23-people/









Malaysian jet probe sharpens focus on passengers, crew as new clues emerge


http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03...-indian-ocean/

[SAUTO]

Originally Posted by alnorth

Saw a few other articles looking at that flight SIA68 shadowing theory. Most experts first take a moment to praise him for coming up with this very clever idea, but then go about debunking or pointing out serious problems with it. First, it might not be that easy to "break away" as the article says without being noticed. The biggest problem is the runway, a 777 will need about 5,000 feet to land, a way to hide a 200 foot wingspan, and a fully-fueled 777 will need 8,000 feet to take off for whatever evil plans they may have. There are no known runways that large in the area around China to Kazakhstan which are not under government or military control, and you can not land it in the desert without destroying the plane.

The most likely scenario, by far, is a pilot who wanted to kill himself and leave an enduring mystery without anyone finding out about what he did. He probably killed the other pilot, disabled the people in the cabin, and set it down in the 2nd-deepest known region of the oceans west of Australia.

Then why did the co pilot get on the radio after everything was shut off?
Posted via Mobile Device

[GloryDayz]

Originally Posted by Donger

Not from me. I don't even know what that means.

Read 660.... See what you started...

[htismaqe]

Originally Posted by GloryDayz

Read 660.... See what you started...

[SAUTO]

Both pilots had to be in on it
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[alnorth]

Originally Posted by Donger

Do the pilots have the ability to de-pressurize the cabin?

I don't understand why they should, but the answer seems to be yes.

[alnorth]

Originally Posted by JASONSAUTO

Then why did the co pilot get on the radio after everything was shut off?
Posted via Mobile Device

I don't understand what you are asking. If you don't want to tip off the ATC while they are letting you go, you'd obviously act as if everything was normal.

edit: the transponder was not shut off until after the co-pilot talked to ATC.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by AussieChiefsFan

One doesn't simply sneak a Boeing into Australia.

Well, yeah, probably. I meant no offense against your fine peoples.

I was trying to come up with some rationale for going south if you weren't killing yourself and had been training on desert flying. I wondered if there's anything like the US salt flats in Australia where you could land a plane without a runway and refuel surreptitiously with the help of some terrorists with fuel trucks, and then move on. But the problem with that is that you'd expend more effort getting to Australia to refuel than to fly to your destination in the first place.

[alnorth]

Originally Posted by JASONSAUTO

Both pilots had to be in on it
Posted via Mobile Device

There is no reason at all why they would both "have to be in on it". Also, the two pilots did not in any way ask or arrange to be assigned to work together. Whichever pilot wanted to do whatever was done ought to be able to take out the other pilot first since they would not be expecting anything.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by alnorth

Those people are dead. They are either in the water, or killed by whoever took the plane. They would not have waited this long if they wanted to ransom them off, its a pain in the ass to care for that many people and make sure none of them fight back or escape.

Yeah, pretty much. If it ended up in some bad guy's lair, I could see them keeping the Americans and any other westerners as hostages. But regardless of the scenario, all those Chinese people are wearing the red shirts on Star Trek, unfortunately.

[dirk digler]

Originally Posted by alnorth

The most likely scenario, by far, is a pilot who wanted to kill himself and leave an enduring mystery without anyone finding out about what he did. He probably killed the other pilot, disabled the people in the cabin, and set it down in the 2nd-deepest known region of the oceans west of Australia.

I discounted the suicide angle because it seemed like he did alot of work just to kill himself but you make an interesting point.

[alnorth]

By the way, I suspect the first officer (or "co-pilot"), I don't think the pilot did it. The pilot was a family man in a gated community with a comfortable happy lifestyle. People are making a big deal about his "flight simulator", but if you do any research at all in the flight simulator game genre, you'll find that elaborate setups with multiple monitors are very common, hundreds of thousands of people do it. The pilot's setup might actually be a little tame compared to how some people go all-out on their flight sim gaming rig.

The co-pilot was just some young guy who we don't know much about.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by GloryDayz

Read 660.... See what you started...

I still don't get it, and probably don't want to....

[Donger]

Originally Posted by alnorth

I don't understand why they should, but the answer seems to be yes.

Based on what?

[Eleazar]

Originally Posted by alnorth

The biggest problem is the runway, a 777 will need about 5,000 feet to land... 8,000 feet to take off for whatever evil plans they may have.

Are those the regulations or the true limits? It could be possible to land it on a shorter runway, shouldn't it?

At any rate, there are a lot of problems with that theory as you say. If you just wanted to make a flying bomb or crash it into the petronas towers or whatever they might do to Malaysia, you wouldn't need to hijack something as large as that.

Besides, if they had the plane stolen, why try to fly it somewhere and land it, hide it, refuel it and etc, then attack elsewhere? The right time to do it would have been while they were originally in the air.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by alnorth

By the way, I suspect the first officer (or "co-pilot"), I don't think the pilot did it. The pilot was a family man in a gated community with a comfortable happy lifestyle. People are making a big deal about his "flight simulator", but if you do any research at all in the flight simulator game genre, you'll find that elaborate setups with multiple monitors are very common, hundreds of thousands of people do it. The pilot's setup might actually be a little tame compared to how some people go all-out on their flight sim gaming rig.

The co-pilot was just some young guy who we don't know much about.

The co-pilot definitely fits the profile better. It's just weird that the pilot ended up moving out of his house and having his political guy get arrested all right before this happened.

I've also wondered a little bit if the bad guys knew about the co-pilot's propensity to let women into the cockpit. Find an attractive terrorist who offers him a little fun in the cockpit, and perhaps he ends up letting the wrong person in.