|
Three Olives posted:They just wrapped up the latest press conference, first there were two stolen passports, now there are at least 4 and they are reviewing the entire manifest. You'd think if it were terrorism, some group would've claimed it by now. But then I looked up the airline and there was a mysterious hijacking in 1977 in which there's no actual information available about who was responsible for it.  Cthulu Carl posted:Like what, though? I mean, a proof of concept attack seems like a massive security risk for an organization. Also, I was under the impression that people do dry runs just to get on the same plane and map out how they're going to bring it down in the future. There's no point in doing a rehearsal hijacking in which the hijackers themselves die, because then they can't pass on any information.
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2014 05:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 17:11 |
|
|
Arakan posted:This is not even close to accurate. First you apply for an entry visa in the country you're coming from at the Chinese embassy. Then your visa is checked by the airline before you board the plane. If you make it into the plane with a valid visa there's no chance you will be rejected in Beijing, unless you're like not the same race as the person whose visa you stole. On Airliners, someone posted that Beijing has a 72-hour visa free policy. They said that it's possible to forge a return ticket leaving within those 72 hours and there would be no need for a visa: "airlines don't usually verify if the onward ticket is genuine or not. A fake print out of the onward ticket will do the job."
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2014 05:57
|
|
|
According to the New York Times, there's no evidence of an explosion: "Using a system that looks for flashes around the world, the Pentagon reviewed preliminary surveillance data from the area where the plane disappeared and saw no evidence of an explosion, said an American government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the subject matter is classified." Okay, my reasoning that it wasn't likely to be terrorism because terrorists love to claim their work isn't really a good reason. After poking around, it seems there are some examples of terrorist attacks where nobody claimed responsibility (but some blame was able to be assigned anyway). Lockerbie was never officially claimed but everyone still put the pieces together. Al-Qaeda didn't actually claim 9/11 at first, yet I remember seeing pictures of the suspected hijackers and their affiliation on the New York Times website just an hour or two after the second tower collapsed.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2014 12:19
|
|
|
Hugh Malone posted:e: seriously, surprised no one else brought up that possibility. It's listed as a possibility on Airliners, but many people dismissed it because drug trafficking carries a death sentence in Asian countries. Also, if you're bringing drugs, you don't want to have a bunch of connections like these guys—just more chances for the drugs to be sniffed out. They might some other kind of smugglers, though. Or they could also just be illegal immigrants. Supposedly, if they had no official travel documentation at all then they couldn't get deported from their destination.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2014 19:16
|
|
|
Some aviation nerd on Twitter says it's likely to have landed (not crashed) in Iran, there was a pilot involved (as in, nobody from outside stormed the secure cockpit and took over), and that all the passengers are dead. Furthermore, it's not going to be filled with explosives, refueled and hitting the skies again—it was taken for whatever desired cargo was on board (not for hostages) and is now probably cut up (tail/wings removed) and hidden somewhere. How come India didn't notice a plane? I don't know. But it sounds like the plane was operating relatively normally (not erratic enough to set off anyone's alarms): "Because the pings between the satellite and the aircraft registered that the aircraft's satellite communications system was healthy and able to transmit, the data did not immediately raise any red flags in the hours after the jet's disappearance."
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 01:00
|
|
|
Dusseldorf posted:I would agree and say this is almost certainly true. I feel like I am a nutjob for even considering the possibility that somebody stole a plane and took it to Iran (sure, they're embargoed but clearly they've had ways of getting things that don't involve stealing planes), but what else exactly is left? The official story is that it didn't crash, it flew for several hours with a last ping in a certain area, and the plane's sophisticated equipment was tampered with in just the right way. A GIANT PARSNIP posted:too bad nothing unscheduled flies over the India-Pakistan border without being shot down What if the flight path was actually lower and managed to cut over the ocean from India and up into Iran without hitting Pakistan or Afghanistan? samizdat fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Mar 16, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 01:17
|
|
|
A GIANT PARSNIP posted:the alternative is that someone tried to take it somewhere that didn't involve crossing over multiple countries with military radars that would take note of a 777 sized object coming over unannounced Sorry, made a slow edit to my last post and didn't hit post until now. What if the flight path was actually much lower and managed to cut over the ocean into Gulf of Oman from India and then up into Iran (without hitting the border and crossing into Pakistan or Afghanistan)?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 01:29
|
|
|
Jacobeus posted:I just don't think even Iran is stupid enough to attempt something like that. Yeah, Iran as a government seems to be able to get whatever they want and don't have to resort to stealing planes. It's not that they're not stupid enough, it's just that it doesn't make sense to me. I just don't know anything about various other organizations (cartels?) that might not have the same power in that particular region.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 01:33
|
|
|
The Biscuit posted:Wouldn't that still be a hot-zone for unrelated surveillence? Yeah I'd assume so, someone has to be out there in the water.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 01:40
|
|
|
A GIANT PARSNIP posted:china's entire foreign policy is based on "countries can do whatever the gently caress they want in their own borders". in the un they abstain from any symbolic action against iran, and they veto any actual action against iran. why would iran hijack a plane full of chinese citizens? It seems like occasionally there's tensions between the two countries, but yeah. Jacking a plane doesn't make sense as official Iranian business.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 01:57
|
|
|
Wandle Cax posted:There simply must have been a very good reason for this to have been done and since nobody has claimed anything publicly it was obviously a secret plan. There was a claim by some "Chinese Martyrs' Brigade" group, but no authorities are giving it any weight and it sounds like BS. However, not claiming it doesn't mean much either: "Credible perpetrators claimed responsibility for only 14 percent of the more than 45,000 terrorist acts that have occurred since 1998." While it sounds less effective to commit an attack and then not claim it, it'd make a lot of sense to watch it all play out while remaining a free person under the radar.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 02:05
|
|
|
SweetKarma posted:Do you have a source that says the plane didn't crash? All I've seen so far says that the prime minister says the actions of the plane were deliberate. That doesn't mean it was hijacked and it doesn't rule out pilot error and/or instrument malfunction resulting in a crash. So far, all I've got is an aviation dude/former reporter on Twitter who says the DHS told him the plane flew 3,675 miles total, or 7.5 hours total. His DHS source says that "It is unlikely #MH370 headed south and its exact direction of travel remains unknown to the RMAF (Royal Malaysian Air Force). We're (DHS) looking elsewhere.". "Elsewhere" presumably means to the north. This is the map from the Malaysian Prime Minister that helps put that last quote into perspective, taken from a recent article:  In favor of it landing versus crashing, he writes, "Since Monday DHS & NTSB have told me they have no evidence it crashed, but just the opposite." The only people who were saying definitively that it has crashed are China's state news agency, Xinhua. That's it. Somehow nobody else has detected this "seafloor event" supposedly caused by a plane crashing into it. I'm speculating on my own after reading various tweets and posts on Airliners.net in order to say that 7 hours' worth of an accident is highly unlikely in this scenario. This plane was in the air for a little more than a half hour when it disappeared, and it promptly went totally off-course without raising any alarms. Because of these things, I think that the plane's diversion looks to be a deliberate series of actions on the part of a pilot who understood what they would need to do in order to become invisible to air traffic control without looking erratic enough to attract attention from authorities (allowing hourly pings to satellites). EDIT: Malaysia has asked India (possibly other countries as well, but this is coming from India) to stop looking for the plane as they (Malaysia) are currently "reassessing the situation," according to an Indian spokesperson. "(Malaysia) will figure whether they need to shift the area of search." samizdat fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Mar 16, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 06:41
|
|
|
Lolie posted:You're not near any cell phone towers when you're flying over open ocean. The technology exists to allow both data and voice calls at cruising altitude but it's a capability which would almost certainly be able to be disabled from the cockpit (pilots being unable to disable things in the cabin have resulted in nasty accidents in the past) and which not every carrier has adopted. Yeah it's possible but not likely that if they were low enough and near land with towers in range, a cell phone somebody left on could've connected. This is also assuming that it didn't run out of battery power, because if you leave your phone on in a place with no reception (airplane in middle of the ocean, Faraday cage, whatever) it'll drain the battery pretty quickly as it repeatedly tries to connect to a network.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 11:25
|
|
|
Just checked out the rest of the Twitter postings... Schizophrenia is a bitch.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2014 12:59
|
|
|
Al-Saqr posted:what kind of loving wizard ace pilot are we dealing with here?! did Malaysia secretly train elite pilots or something? Obviously just elite flight simulator skills
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2014 09:14
|
|
|
I'm loving jealous that he had a job that he loved so much that he'd pretend to do it while he was at home. How many people have dreams about being at work and wake up in the morning completely pissed off? Not this guy. Way to go, dude. Except for the part where he likely killed everyone.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2014 04:08
|
|
|
Twitter conspiracy theorist with various US government sources is ho-hum about latest debris discovery: "I hope Australia has found #MH370, but we've heard satellites have found debris 4 or 5 times, oil slicks, luggage and bodies for 10 days." "China thinks it went north, DHS [thinks] north, DoD north ... NTSB puts #MH370 in a small area 2300km west of perth. Something is wrong" This guy thinks it landed in Iran or in some -stan nearby (I want to believe because it'd be like political science X-Files poo poo) but I can't make his reasoning work until it's confirmed officially because most of it is from his Rolodex of anonymous sources, like "My primary DHS source says that they have a briefing indicating DoD has reason to believe #MH370 'could’ve landed in Pakistan.'" Bonus weird aviation nerd humor: 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2014 05:20
|
|
|
If I were living in Australia, I'd be paranoid as poo poo, too. There's an entire board dedicated to attempted world domination that begins with taking over the country because it's the simplest area to hold onto.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2014 17:11
|
|
|
Rusty posted:More CNN theory talk because I guess there is nothing more important to talk about. Don Lemon needed reassurance that it wasn't a black hole? drat. Actually it was a wormhole and it's a promotion for the new Farscape movie!! Anyway. Everyone is likely dead except pilot who has sold the plane for parts and has faked his death in one of the -stans. samizdat fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Mar 20, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2014 17:23
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 17:11 |
|
|
This recovery operation is not worth the millions being poured into it. Just accept that and let the airline pay the families.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2014 18:27
|
|