Missing Malaysia Air plane MH370 - Part 3

[KenAdams]

Thread 1

Thread 2

But if the other planes can't see MH730 on the TCAS because its transponders are turned off so effectively in flight mode. Then how could MH730 use the TCAS to sneak up on the Singapore airlines flight? Surely it needs its transponders on so the TCAS knows where it is and in turn where surrounding planes are?

Also, I thought Goldie said that the TCAS would just show you other a/c locations to avoid collision and not any information about the other a/cs identity?

that theory sounds incredibly plausible (piggy backing behind the other 777) and correlates a lot of the unexplained issues.

without technical knowledge though i have zero way of knowing whether 'sounds' plausible is the same thing as actually 'is' plausible iyswim. will be very interesting to see what is said about this theory by those who do have that technical knowledge.

if it is possible then yes, it all becomes a lot more worrying.

can someone confirm whether you can change the identity of a plane? i mean that if it had managed to land somewhere and had all of it's electronic signature type stuff disabled presumably that could be replaced with another signature? one would hope though that a 777 is still a 777 and a plane can't approach a country without them knowing and realising it is not approved to be approaching. not sure that makes sense.

In the unlikely but conceivable event that the passengers are alive and that the hijackers want to make use of them, they may need all the time they can get in order to move the passengers around to different remote locations to make it more difficult for ground troops to locate them?

"I have a feeling the engine data is a red herring"

quite a few engineers and investigators might disagree with you on that one...

But I agree I don't think those passengers and crew members are alive.

Fatima, I don't know the answer but I'm assuming Keith does and it's a fairly massive gap in the theory if they couldn't follow the other plane! Then again, who can you trust in this whole drama?

It may not tell you identity but with a bit of research you will now which planes are on which flight paths and at what times (subject to delay obv). Maybe Singapore Airlines as a very good time keeping record! So you would pretty much know that dot was what it was...and corroborating by actual looking.

beaverfever the air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic wasnt discovered for nearly two years i believe , and they had a rough idea where that happened.

frumpet the air france was discovered within a few days. just the black boxes were not recovered for 2 years

Cyber-hijacking being discussed on R4 - sounds terrifying

Yes the Air France gave up debris within 48 hours and Atlantic not as deep.

"In these days where you can look on Google earth and see satellite images so close that you can tell what car or what animal it is, how are satellites not finding this?"

Suppose someone hid a valuable fountain pen of yours somewhere randomly in the streets of your nearest big city, and the only way you could find it was going over every square foot and taking photos as you went along. You then had to go home, download the pics onto your computer and analyse each one of the millions visually for clues of your missing pen... basically that's approx the scale of the task for finding the plane. Also, I'm sure it'll be hidden in a hangar somewhere by now.

Someone up the thread a bit mentioned about electrical faults which could cause a fire in the cockpit.

If this has happened, which would explain the loss of communications, why are people thinking it 'purposefully' flew on?

Its got to be one or the other. If there are any other reasons for this plane to be missing other than hijack, why are the Malaysians blaming hijack 100% ?

I'm not so worried about someone stealing it for nefarious purposes as I believe the US and other nations have the capabilities to find something like this very easily...

I'm more concerned that it could be part of a bigger plan by someone like the US to create a false flag

which of course 9/11 never was

But even saying that feels quite wrong, as though tempting fate somehow.

Seems a bit odd to have taken a plane in this manner when it would be easier to get one elsewhere if you needed a plane...without causing all the media attention etc.

Unless media hype is all part of the plan. Getting folk to join in the hunt on satellite searches, making it such a huge news story everywhere.

I feel like we're either being scammed here or it'll just go quiet and never be found.

I am probably wrong on both counts. I hope so anyway.

Burmahere What are they saying about cyber hijacking? Does it sound feasible?

Also I am a nutjob and get freaked out easily so don't listen to me

Don't want to freak anyone ELSE out.

That is a very plausible theory of Ledgerwood's in my opinion.

I've not managed to follow this as closely as I would have liked over the past 48 hours as my parents have been visiting (& they already thought I was borderline obsessive/knew quite a lot )

I could not figure out when Malaysia first announced that ACARS & the transponders had a fourteen minute gap between each of them being turned off. Given that ACARS had "reported" at 1:07 & wasn't due to do so again until 1:37, I couldn't see how they could accurately pinpoint exact turn off time. The Malaysian now seem to be referring to ACARS being switched off in the same time frame as the transponders & not highlighting any gap between them.

Back to Ledgerwood's theory, unfortunately, although it seems a good hypothesis, I don't believe that investigators will seize upon it & try and prove or disprove it. I think there will be a great deal of primary radar readings from all the countries they believe the MH370 could have flown over, being cross-checked with known aircraft flight positions so that all "blips" on the screen can be accounted for. Only when there is an unaccounted for dot on the screen, can they hypothesise it was MH370.

I doubt very much that the countries in question will just hand over raw data obtained from primary or secondary radar, as there may be tracks from aircraft/things involved in a particular country's national security. Thus, air investigators will have to heavily rely on co-operation from others with no idea how rigorous any cross-checking has been/how much any radar data they are subsequently given has been cleaned up.

Basically, we are absolutely ages from any search being more focused/being able to investigate Ledgerwood's hypothesis.

It could not fly on for 5-7 (?) hours with a fire in the cockpit! The pings to satellite show it flew on for a very long time.

Posted this on the other thread, not realising part 3 had been started early.

This is a good article about the pilot's political views for the uninitiated. His political stance is totally mainstream here (many might say the majority, but the ballots... well, that's a different story).

If the cockpit had caught fire an hour after leaving home, the pilots would have put down at the nearest airport. If they were unable to do this, the plane wasn't in a fit state to continue flying for 4-7 hours.

xpost, Merry

Beaver they were saying that it is unprecedented but in theory could happen as this plane was one of the first 'smart' planes i.e. everything is run by computer rather than hard controls.

I think she was trying to play things down a little so as not to alarm people unduly massively.

If there had been a fire in the cockpit I'm sure there would have been a Mayday call although I know they try and deal with the problem first and then communicate.

Why didn't they say 'hello' to Vietnam when they entered their airspace if it wasn't intentional deception?

Ok, so definitely not cockpit fire.

Other things that have been mentioned early on were:

Accidental missile from Korea? I guess that can't have happened now either

Something to do with the Chinese on board?
This was my original thoughts, especially after that group killed 29 random people in China.
Could there be anything in this?

A couple of things have occurred to me reading these threads:

The emphasis on the pilot's apparently 'fanatical' support for Anwar's opposition party seems misconceived to me. That is a mainstream political party dedicated to democracy and peaceful change. I don't think that even fanatical support of it is necessarily an indicator of involvement in a dreadful act of terrorism.

I wonder if we are all unconsciously gravitating towards theories that the plane has landed somewhere because it is more comfortable to think that somebody is in control of it than to believe things went horribly wrong in a series of bizarre events (and more sensational and interesting, horrid as that sounds). We cannot exclude hijack gone wrong or even just awful combination of accident and incompetence. Look at this contribution from the Mark L Berry blog linked above:

Eric says:
03/17/2014 at 2:01 am

I have a theory on the missing Malaysia airliner. If the plane lost pressurization and the pilots failed to properly preflight their oxygen masks thinking that the oxygen was turned on when in fact it was turned off could be one event. I have encountered this myself with the oxygen turned off and the lines still pressurize people think that their oxygen is on which is why I bleed all the pressure out of the lines when I turn the O2 off. The pilots now euphoric before they passed out fumbling around the cockpit (FO) turning the transponder off, changing the code to squawk the proper emergency code while the Captain turning the airplane around. If the plane continued on flying and ran out of fuel, what would the autopilot do when the engines quit running (maintain airspeed and sacrifice altitude) and how would that Aircraft impact in the ocean? Slightly nose down glide impact and sunk to bottom. Passengers oxygen along with flight attendant oxygen is not under pressure demand and only last for 15 minutes. They would’ve all passed out eventually too. If this theory is not good I’m going to go with the aliens! Just food for thought.

Events

1. Pilots O2 turned off.
2. Pilots did not properly preflight their O2 masks -or-
3. Pilots Preflighted their O2 masks and failed to ensure the O2 was turned on and the tank was full.
4. Flight loses pressurization, Pilots don their O2 masks and have minutes of O2 in the line before they run out of O2.
5. Pilots brief Flight Attendants and Flight Attendants are at their stations with their O2 masks on and assisting passengers as needed.
6. Most passengers are sleeping and confused.
7. Passenger O2 only lasts 15 minutes and is not under positive pressure.
8. Captain turns Aircraft back while the First Officer changes the transponder code to emergency code. Prior to changing the Transponder code pilots are taught to place the Transponder to standby when changing the code. First Officer may have simply forgot to turn the transponder back on.
9. Pilots O2 runs out Pilots pass out plane flys on until out of fuel.

10. Autopilot still engaged, plane descends into ocean intact and sinks to bottom.

Lots of people all over the web are posting to ask how it is possible a plane could just disappear, don't satellites cover the entire surface of the Earth, surely the Americans with all their scary Stealth tech know where it is etc. Nope.

Turns out you can just lose a plane, there is no such thing even now as foolproof tracking or aviation security, and that's the most frightening thing of all.

Just reading the news and it looks like another Chinese gang have killed 6 more people just a week later.

can someone confirm whether you can change the identity of a plane? i mean that if it had managed to land somewhere and had all of it's electronic signature type stuff disabled presumably that could be replaced with another signature?

Honey Goldie said that this was possible on one of the previous threads. However, the "signature" you mention isn't disabled just by turning the transponder or ACARS systems off. Each plane has a unique "squawk" & the box in the plane that contains that, costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to obtain &/or a very highly skilled (software?) engineer to change it's ID.

I'm more concerned that it could be part of a bigger plan by someone like the US to create a false flag

Rooners, some of the tin-hatters have put forward theories that do stack up, once you take out the hyperbole (I've spent all morning on Snopes, and now apologise for insisting on the significance of Freescale passengers!)

Ten years ago, I'd have rubbished those ideas - but, thanks to FOI and the 30-year rule, I've learned that large governments do indeed carry out complex & ruthless programmes for very peculiar reasons.

What's the betting we won't find out how this investigation's really going for 30 years? :(