Vanished

[Speeddog]

This appears to be the official search area, based upon all facts in evidence:

[ungeheuer]

US Navy is now (reportedly) deploying USS Kidd to search the...

Indian Ocean.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/13/malaysia-airlines-usa-search-idUSL2N0MA1DO20140313

As each new piece of "information" is discounted.... as the search becomes ever wider...

the only evident fact is that "they" have no clue where the hell this aircraft is.  No idea in what direction it headed after last contact, or for how long it flew.   Yet... it was in somebody's airspace...  even with transponder disabled....  other onboard systems report back to base....  It didn't ever show up any military radar after it vanished from civil sytems??

How can a commercial airliner suddenly become so stealthy that no bastard knows where it went, in which direction or for how long

[Scoober1103]

This appears to be the official search area, based upon all facts in evidence:

Lots of large open uninhabited areas one could land within that area but surely it would show up on someones damn radar! It's not like we are talking about a Cessna 182! There would be people in dark rooms looking at live feed satellite imagery as well.....has to have gone down in the drink?

[Ddan]

I read an interesting article that brought up the possibility some countries might have info they're reluctant to share because it would indicate a technological capability that they may not want to be common knowledge.
From the CSM:

Is it confusion or is it obfuscation?

The Malaysia military may really be struggling to identify the the blips on their radar screens early last Saturday morning. Or, they may be deliberately hiding their radar capabilities.

"The first thing we don't know in the public domain is what the military ground radar were seeing," David Gleave, a former air crash investigator, told The Telegraph.

"We have an area of relatively high tension politically, so we have Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Burma, Singapore - could all have their radars working but we don't know what they've seen, and one reason for not saying what they've seen is that it would be to declare their military capability to the other people around them," said Gleave, who now works as an aviation expert at Loughborough University. "However this aircraft should have appeared on several military radars for a considerable period of time," he said.

I'm sure there are other countries with more advanced capabilities that would prefer they be kept unknown

[Skybarney]

One of the conspiracies going around:

apparently there were 20 passengers on board that were part of a team that was working on making planes truly invisible.....

20 high-tech electronic warfare workers boarded Malaysia plane. Electronic weapons can cause a plane to appear to vanish
Malaysia Airlines

March 9, 2014

Did Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 with 239 people aboard tragically disintegrate in mid-flight, as official investigators postulate? Or has it been disappeared with electronic weaponry used in electronic warfare that at least twenty passengers' employer is contracted by the Department of Defense to make, as this reporter posits?

Link to story  http://www.examiner.com/article/malaysia-jet-hidden-by-electronic-weaponry-20-ew-defense-linked-passengers

[red baron]

One of the conspiracies going around:

apparently there were 20 passengers on board that were part of a team that was working on making planes truly invisible.....

Link to story  http://www.examiner.com/article/malaysia-jet-hidden-by-electronic-weaponry-20-ew-defense-linked-passengers

Who's got the tinfoil hats?

[Speeddog]

Who's got the tinfoil hats?

I think DP has the latest version of tinfoil hats in stock.

[ungeheuer]

I'm amazed that airlines don't satellite track their expensive hardware.   So that once their investment substantially deviated from its intended route they begin to act.  Or at least enquire.

Of course, if the flight data recorders were available we'd be in little doubt what occurred. 

But they're inconveniently lost along with the plane.  Its not a great system - you first have to locate what's lost from whatever inaccessible place it ends up... in order to begin to understand how and why... 

Isn't it about time that flight data was continuously uploaded to ground-based servers, readily accessible should the awful need arise?

[Speeddog]

Seems the industry has the mindset of days gone by.....
Before there was anything like engines preparing a summary report of the last hour's realtime data to satellites, to then be relayed to the airline and/or engine manufacturer.
Hour by hour.

I suspect it's the relatively infrequent nature of bad events that fails to provide sufficient pressure on the organizations(s) to embrace a somewhat passe' technology.

[Popeye the Sailor]

For how often this happens there is no need to track the hardware-it doesn't buy you anything the vast majority of the time.

Odd it happened in the middle of an ATC handoff-if one were to want to steal a plane-that would be the time to do it, along with stopping the transponder.

If one were dealing with idiots taking over the plane, who then flew at a low altitude making the engines less efficient, it could've been a hijacking that they either crashed or the passengers forced down.


Personally I think it's right about under where the last known position was.

[ungeheuer]

I'm sure there are other countries with more advanced capabilities that would prefer they be kept unknown

The US seems... to believe that the plane is nowhere near the original search location (as first reported by DMF insider Kopfjager). 

Not east of Malaysia, not in the South China Sea...

The US seems to believe that the plane flew west for several hours.... 

"Despite authorities in Malaysia denying that the Boeing 777 flew on for an extended period after it was last tracked on radar en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, unnamed US officials have said the plane did send signals to a satellite for four or five hours after it went missing."

http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-deliberately-flown-towards-indias-andaman-islands-military-radar/story-fnizu68q-1226854092765

For how often this happens there is no need to track the hardware-it doesn't buy you anything the vast majority of the time.

True.  There is no need the vast majority of the time.   But it's the not vast majority of the time situations where the investment would return a dividend.

[hbliam]

The depressurization theory seems more plausible given the fact that if the plane flew three to four hours off course, and the passengers were aware of a problem, surely one of the nearly 250 of them would have sent an email, text, or made a call.

[ungeheuer]

The depressurization theory seems more plausible given the fact that if the plane flew three to four hours off course, and the passengers were aware of a problem, surely one of the nearly 250 of them would have sent an email, text, or made a call.

Maybe their phones were rendered inoperable when the Aliens invisiblerated the Earthling's plane.

Or 1500 other guesses.

Here aren't the facts as they unfolded:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370--a-week-of-confusion-20140314-hviqs.html

[Monsterlover]

[zooom]

I think it was circulating looking for the beacon of the stealth treadmill for to land on