I am not enthusiastic about jumping into speculation land, but I would be interested in knowing if the possibility of this being a accident followed by auto pilot is possible or totally disproven<p>My default assumption was they took off, an accident occurred that damaged cockpit and forced a turnaround, the damage was so great that the crew were unable to survive and turned on autopilot to stop an immediate crash, which then flew for seven hours till fuel ended, presumably with passengers pounding on the locked and hardened cockpit door.<p>So whilst I am in wild speculation territory I would like to know if there are some experts who might be able to say "bird strikes cannot disable radios" or "oxygen canisters do not leak" or "stewardesses can open the cockpit door" or some such.<p>I tend towards cockup not conspiracy myself.<p>(I recognise I may have missed discussions covering this and apologise if it is obvious)
The folks over at airliners.net have pointed out that the 777's collision avoidance system only works if both planes' transponders are turned on. That doesn't mean this scenario is impossible, but it does raise the level of sophistication required.<p>Sadly, I feel like whatever happened, the amount of sophistication involved increasingly points toward the involvement of one or more state actors. If that's the case, I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever find out what happened to this plane...
There is a realistic possibility that those piloting the plane used this and/or other stealth techniques and landed intact. There are lots of groups around the world that would love to have a working $250M aircraft. Maybe there is a massive airplane chop shop that this went to, or someone wants to load it up with explosives and fly it to some country they disagree with.<p>Unfortunately, whether it landed or not, the odds that the passengers are alive are very small. A ransom demand would have been made by now.
> <i>There are too many oddities in this whole story that don’t make sense if this theory isn’t the answer in my opinion.</i><p>Confirmation bias?<p>Slow burn fire randomly taking out communications systems and electronics undetected over a long period of time. Pilots freak out and head West for the coast, program way points on autopilot. Fire then cracks the hull, leading to a slow depressurization, incapacitating crew. Plane heads into the Indian ocean with all onboard unconscious or dead, until it runs out of fuel, and crashes into the ocean.
"Snuck" is a strange American word, the same as "dove" instead of "dived", eg. "he dove into the pool" instead of "he dived into the pool". I would read "snuck" as "sneaked". Another weird word is "gotten".
And another strange and irritating phrase that is sneaking its way into English over here is "for free", but "free" is not a price so instead of "buy 3 eggs for £2.00", you get weird phrases "sign up now and get this egg for free", whereas it should be "sign up now and get this egg free" or "sign up now and get this egg for nothing".<p>Always interesting the difference between the languages over time.<p>With reference to the flight, I truly hope they find it somewhere safe.
Good theory. Yours is as good as anyone's at this point in time. Incredible, how we think that our tech is so advanced yet a commercial jet can go completely missing.<p>MH370 makes for an incredible setup to 'Lost'.
A theory is that the cargo area of the plane contained valuable goods: gold, silver, diamonds, etc and that's what the hijackers were after.<p>From this:
<a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-15/missing-malaysian-flight-mystery-deepens-pilot-investigated-foul-play-suspected" rel="nofollow">http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-15/missing-malaysian-f...</a><p>the 777 can have up to 25 tons worth of cargo payload.<p>25 tons of gold is worth ~ $1B, that's quite a bit more than the value of the plane itself.
Good analysis, but I'm skeptical that this is not already accounted for in the military radars. Given that so many flights fly everyday in almost every route, it becomes really easy for any country to sneak an aircraft anywhere. Such a glaring loop hole should not exist. And we are talking about crossing the borders monitored by multiple countries here.
I really wonder how much of this rampant speculation is just people desperately wanting 300 people not to have died, either at all or just for no reason at all. Secret terrorist masterminds secretly hijacking a plane is more comforting than "sometimes shit happens and people die and there's nothing anyone can do".
Nice idea, however I'd hope that modern radar is able to detect two aircraft of that size flying close together.<p>Unless the perpetrators know the various limitations of each radar installation?
An interesting theory and article, but I can't help but feel like this reads too much like one of the classic conspiracy theory articles about 9-11/lizards/aliens/Area 51, etc.
Finding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is a problem google could solve by crowdsourcing the search on the google doodle<p>They could use an algorithm to generate different satellite images through the possible search images as the google doodle, they could put a toggle button, 'anything look like a plane or wreckage here?' Yes/no. For every yes, show it to more people, see if they agree<p>I’m sure google has better algorithm experts to figure out what the best images to show are than I can figure out,<p>but google can find that plane<p>I've already submitted this to google via email at proposals@google.com as suggested on <a href="http://www.google.com/doodles/about" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/doodles/about</a><p>I suspect there are people on HN who are fewer degrees of seperation from who figures out the google doodle than I am though<p>If you happen to be one of those people, who might be able to send a personal email, or send a text, or make a phone call to someone who could advocate for that being the google doodle, I would appreciate that<p>needless to say, if google was able to help solve this mystery, I would imagine that would be pretty good publicity for the company<p>Thanks for your consideration<p>(sorry for the spam)
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7414422" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7414422</a>
It may be seen as heartless for the victims, but I still find comforting that in this day and age of widespread surveillance technology, one of the most tracked thing on earth can still disappear and leave everybody clueless.<p>It gives me hope that there will be still a chance for a resistance movement when the time will come.
I remember reading that when the Israelis mounted their daring rescue mission at Entebbe in Uganda their three aircraft flew in formation so that it would appear as a single airplane on radar.
Just a quick question, but I'd have thought the number of airports where a plane the size of MH370 could land would be quite small.<p>Is it not possible to work out the number of airports within it's range, and examine those?
If it was really hijacked then where are all of the calls from frantic passengers calling family members like on 9/11. I am calling BS on the hijack landing scenario. Do we really live in a word where our first thoughts are always terrorism.<p>I guess the government propaganda machine is really working when our only conclusion to things is it must be terrorism. More funding for the spooks!
I'd really like to hear another knowledgeable person's analysis of this theory. At least its different than the endless hijackers/bombing/suicide/aliens run around.
What surprises me the most: In today's world, doesn't someone have access to global, real-time satellite data that goes down to 1-3m resolution? I thought we already accepted this as fact. Wouldn't such data provide visuals?
Interesting, but this would seem to chiefly expand the space of possible explanations for what went wrong by showing how the plain could have gotten into central Asia. It explains some of the bizarre behavior of the plane, but not all of it. So it's eliminated some of the burdensome details about the flight behavior at the cost of introducing burdensome details about complicated, secret, and successful planning. As a result, I'm even less sure about what happened to the plane now, but of course if that reflects my actual state of knowledge it's a good thing.
I think Keith is on the right track (excuse the pun).<p>1. The weather. Check on that. On a clear night it is possible to sneak up behind and tail an aircraft. Night Fighters did it all the time in WW2. And they had to get close enough and hang on and to check "friend or foe"!
2. Not sure where the FIR boundary was, but if it was close to their westward track (last radio call was a handover) more doubt on the ground.
3. They could have listened in to the radio calls of SIA68 with their radio. That would have given them height and position info too. So long as they did not transmit, nobody could have picked up anything from that.
4. If they had also switched off all the navigation lights nobody on the ground, or in SIA would be likely to have seen anything - rear view from a commercial aircraft is nil! Two aircraft at 35000 feet sound the same as one.
5. Timing on one other score was perfect. Night flight when radar operators are dozy, landing just before dawn - time to camouflage the plane from satellites, and a diversion of a China sea crash to confuse everyone.<p>Good thinking, keep it up. Looking forward to more insights!
This is not an hijack terrorism. Terrorism is all about showing off, theatrics, fear. No one would make a plane disappear for the sake of terrorism. I have only two theories<p>1. China or some other country shot it down by mistake and trying to cover up.
2. Something of immense importance was present on that plane or may be a person.<p>In either cases substantial involvement of some state needs to be there.
All these theories... It's obviously at the bottom of the ocean. If not, it's here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzlG28B-R8Y" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzlG28B-R8Y</a>
Waiting for a crossover of this route with this <a href="http://project.wnyc.org/runways/" rel="nofollow">http://project.wnyc.org/runways/</a>
Anybody else noticed that "Keith Ledgerwood" has exactly one post on his Tumbler blog? Conspiracy theorist looking for five seconds of Internet fame?
I understand there will always be crackpot theories but why are they getting up-voted.<p>State sponsored? WTF. This would be an act of war. If you want to go to war why wouldn't you just attack the other countries. Why screw around stealing 300 international citizens first?<p>Pretty simple stuff, most likely an accident.<p>Or possibly a political/mental act by a very small group/one person that got lucky.
This notion that mh370 was flying behind the Singapore jet to avoid radar is far fetched. Is the simple explanation much more likely that primary and secondary radar were both tracking the Singapore jet and the data wasn't matched properly? If the two jets were flying in tandem as you suggest, wouldn't you expect two hits on primary radar?
If they shut off the transponder, which we know they did, how would they get the traffic information on their NDs? It goes away when you turn off the transponder. To the best of my knowledge that applies to both Mode-S interrogations and ADS/B ones.
How secure is the 777s flight management system? Could you hijack the controls (remotely or with temporary physical access) and prevent manual overrides when the change is noticed?
Isn't it possible that one passenger may have left his cell phone on?<p>Maybe if you get all of the passengers numbers and check if any of the phones connected to a tower you could locate it?
FYI CNN just discussed this theory on-air, of course didn't discuss any technical details, just called it "outlandish" and didn't give any credit to OP.
Doing this is sure cheaper and easier than building a bomber capable of deploying a nuclear weapon or another type of WMD. Definitely cheaper than building an ICBM.
Why are we still looking for this damn plane? Thirty countries involved? Thirty nation's worth of ships, planes and satellite analysts, flying and sailing around and for what, some debris and a box? To buy the families closure of some sort? Maybe a defect in the 777? To keep hope alive that the passengers might be alive and safe somewhere captured by reasonable terrorists with a lot of food?<p>Doesn't seem worth the fuel.<p>These black boxes from what I heard stop pinging after a month. Can we stop then, and just move on in life until one day some seat cushion washes up in California and have a moment if silence? Without it pinging, just how wide an area can a ship in substantial depth detect a wingtip?<p>I realize you didn't, but if you ask me, they should just frame that copilot, say they found on his flight simulator evidence that he intended to make that "deliberate" turn every night, disabling the transponder with the ctrl+shift+T combination and purposefully crashing hours later each time in a different location, with known Islamic terrorists on his WhatsApp and Skype, or a suicide note, then call off the hunt, pay the families off for failing to screen this guy effectively, bam, there's your closure, problem solved.<p>/insensitivity