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/

[J Diddy]

So I'm confused. With all that's been reported what's the percentage likelihood that it crashed?

[Eleazar]

So the plane was stolen, flown to *-stan, to be used in a terrorist attack on Malaysia in response to their treatment of this political dissident.

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by Dick Bull

So I'm confused. With all that's been reported what's the percentage likelihood that it crashed?

I still think that's the dominant theory, but it's not completely out of the question that it could be out there somewhere.

[threebag]

Was it close to Whitefish Bay?

[GloryDayz]

Originally Posted by threebag02

Was it close to Whitefish Bay?

There's the whole issue of those 15 miles, and Gitche Gumee...

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Buck

I read on another forum that they found the pilot was practicing low elevation flying in Desert/Mountainous terrain on his simulator, but they didn't post a link so I don't know if it's true.

Originally Posted by Baby Lee

That pilot attended the sentencing of a political dissident the day before, and apparently his wife and kids moved out of the house that day.

Doesn't sound good.

This is a fairly comprehensive overview

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-sodomite.html

Very interesting. The pilot was an unlikely suspect to me at first, but things are starting to look sticky for him.

I still think the plane is out there somewhere. If the pilot was practicing low-level desert flying, that would argue that he was planning to sneak over India (which is a pretty desert-looking place if you haven't been there), sneak into Australia, or make it to Somalia or Pakistan over the water. I still think the latter two are his best options.

I find it really hard to believe that this thing is crashed, unless the pilot did this as a truly last-minute unplanned thing. He's going to know how much fuel he has, and other than fuel or suicide there's no reason to suspect that the plane would crash. And if he's doing this for political reasons, he's not trying to do the quiet suicide thing.

The head-scratcher is that if it's political, it would argue that he wasn't working in concert with terrorists, which means that he didn't have people meeting him in Australia to steal the plane, and people in Pakistan or Somalia are going to be surprised when he shows up.

Somalia is such a pit that no civilized being would go there unannounced. The logical conclusions would be that he's trying to fly to Pakistan or Afghanistan, or that he was going to do a suicide dive-bomb. Obviously the second thing didn't happen.

So if he was heading northwest, was he going to sneak over India? Maybe you can do it if the country has a sleepy military or if you can get the element of surprise. The big risk is up in Srinigar, but even then there's going to be commercial traffic and the default judgment would be "Eh, that's obviously a commercial flight having a communications problem". Most people don't want to be the guy who accidentally shoots down an innocent passenger jet.

The south option continues to seem unlikely to me. The only possible reason for doing that is the "silent suicide" option. I guess I wouldn't rule it out, but if that's the case then why was he supposedly practicing low-level desert flying?

[Jimmya]

This is getting nuttier by the day!

[TripleThreat]

I heard that theres "black boxes" in every plane like the boe777 that are supposed to be dam near indestructible so if anything happens to the plane they can locate it..

What are these boxes and have they not found them yet? are there tracking devices in the boxes?

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by TripleThreat

I heard that theres "black boxes" in every plane like the boe777 that are supposed to be dam near indestructible so if anything happens to the plane they can locate it..

What are these boxes and have they not found them yet? are there tracking devices in the boxes?

I think the challenge is that you have to find them first.

My biggest learning in this episode is that it's possible to actually lose a plane. I had no idea that was even possible. I figured that they were constantly broadcasting their location, and that if they crashed the black box would broadcast its location. I guess not.

[Buck]

Best Theory I've read yet.

http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comment...flight/cg2uht6

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by TripleThreat

I heard that theres "black boxes" in every plane like the boe777 that are supposed to be dam near indestructible so if anything happens to the plane they can locate it..

What are these boxes and have they not found them yet? are there tracking devices in the boxes?

Every plane has a black box, yes, and yes, they're virtually indestructible. However, they add relatively little to the effort to find the plane.

And if they'd found it, we wouldn't be discussing where the plane is.

[In58men]

They can track your phone, but can't track a Boeing-777?

Dafaq

[Mojo Jojo]

Why is it even possible to manually turn off the transponder?

[Discuss Thrower]

Originally Posted by Mojo Jojo

Why is it even possible to manually turn off the transponder?

Same reason you can turn off a radio.. Irregular transmissions can cause issues.

[arrowheadnation]

A guy on my cousin's Facebook list (big time conspiracy theorist) thinks a terrorist group has the plane and that they're retrofitting it as some sort of biological weapon and are planning to fly to/crash it into some large city with the passengers as hostages. That way if the world discovers them before they can complete the act, the world will have to make the choice of shooting it down and killing the hostages or calling their bluff and hope the weapon isn't real.