OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

[asmd]

Been following this on my news ticker for the past couple of days.
My heart goes out to the families of those onboard.
What amazes me is that in this day an age, they can lose an airplane. Lost, just like that.
Initially thought to have gone down in the South China Sea, now there are reports that after it went off radar, it made its way to the west coast of Malaysia, the Malacca straits with all communications and transponders switched off? (i didnt know it was possible to evade radar over water by flying low.) Theres also the mystery of the stolen passports.
This is turning out to be more of a Robert Ludlum novel.

[kevin007]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

It is more likely it was shot down. They have some very powerful weapons that could had blown it to tiny bits and would never be found under the ocean.

Sad but likely true...

Kevin

[winslow]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

I don't know what happened, but it is very sad.

[JeffKnob25]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

It is more likely it was shot down. They have some very powerful weapons that could had blown it to tiny bits and would never be found under the ocean.

Sad but likely true...

Kevin

Wouldn't there still be parts left over that would float and therefore be seen?

[billfitzmaurice]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

Wouldn't there still be parts left over that would float and therefore be seen?

Yes. It either went to the bottom intact or they're looking for it in the wrong places.

What amazes me is that in this day an age, they can lose an airplane. Lost, just like that.

Radar is a line of sight device. Even with an antenna on high ground and the plane at 35,000 feet it can't see more than 100 miles or so past the coastline. Mid ocean the only way it might have been seen is if there were naval vessels close enough to track it. If there had been we'd have known about it by now.

[asmd]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

no wreckage has been found yet.
Unlikely it was shot down. It was near cruising altitude if im not mistaken and the region is pretty conflict free.
it must have been a catastrophic failure of some sort like what happened to twa800.

[blaube]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

My suspicion is that it's sitting on some country's tarmac. Several things about the whole situation do not add up. If it were shot down, debris/bodies would be washing up on shore somewhere. The stolen passports and the buyer from Egypt paying with cash situation does not help either. Plus, the pilot only has 230 flight hours. The terrorists who hijacked the planes at 9/11 went to flight school just to learn to fly the planes into the buildings. One terrorist could have gone to school to learn to fly an airliner to an undisclosed location. Also, one Texas company has 20+ employees on it as well. Several pieces of the entire situation makes everything here fishy.

Yes, a plane can fly low and avoid radar. In the Gulf War, the Air Force sent in F-15E (my favorite!) and F-111 fighters which are not stealth to bomb radars stations undetected. Fly low in the mountain ranges and you're virtually invisible! After the radar stations were taken out, they sent in the useless F-117 Stealth Fighter to bomb targets the news can report about. A pilot can certainly hide from radar if he really wants to.

[tyger23]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

My suspicion is that it's sitting on some country's tarmac. Several things about the whole situation do not add up. If it were shot down, debris/bodies would be washing up on shore somewhere. The stolen passports and the buyer from Egypt paying with cash situation does not help either. Plus, the pilot only has 230 flight hours. The terrorists who hijacked the planes at 9/11 went to flight school just to learn to fly the planes into the buildings. One terrorist could have gone to school to learn to fly an airliner to an undisclosed location. Also, one Texas company has 20+ employees on it as well. Several pieces of the entire situation makes everything here fishy.

Yes, a plane can fly low and avoid radar. In the Gulf War, the Air Force sent in F-15E (my favorite!) and F-111 fighters which are not stealth to bomb radars stations undetected. Fly low in the mountain ranges and you're virtually invisible! After the radar stations were taken out, they sent in the useless F-117 Stealth Fighter to bomb targets the news can report about. A pilot can certainly hide from radar if he really wants to.

Sadly,

This is my current suspicion. I expect the plane was hijacked, transponders turned off or jammed, and the plane is sitting somewhere awaiting further use. Many families of those missing are reporting that cell-phones are still ringing. Odd that no-one has used the "Find-my-iPhone" feature yet, or at least hasn't reported that location to the media.

[kevin007]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

I dont know. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it is most likely shot down. Let me tell you why...

1. There might had been suspected terrorist on board.
2. Many countries like China would have no problems shooting down a plane full of people to get at one or two guys.

Do you al' remember in the 80's when Kadaffy had his line of death? Reagan sent in the 6th fleet over his line and Kadaffy used a airliner full of dead bodies and a Jihadist to go on a suicide mission to dive in and aim for the aircraft carrier. One of the weapon systems the Navy has is called the Phalanx. It is a 20mm Gatling gun that spit out 3000 rounds a minute and is tied into a radar guided system. They turned the Phalanx on and it blew the airplane to pieces in just a second or two of burst. There was something they didnt expect. The Phalanx was so finely tuned it went after individual pieces of shrapnel 12" and bigger. It fired for 28 secs and there was nothing left. It was only because they were right under it that they were able to find pieces of the plane.

So I would think that many countries would have weapons like this and could had shot it to pieces and you would never had found it.

Sad but maybe true...

Kevin

[fastbike1]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

Seriously? Your evidence/conjecture doesn't even rate as flimsy.

Not to mention that you fabricated your 6th fleet / airliner incident. The Libyans sent several patrol boats out against the fleet on multiple occasions. The Navy sunk two of the patrol boats. Check your facts.

Further, the Phalanx is a close-in weapons system. A hostile aircraft won't get that close because of the combat air patrol and the picket ships.

I dont know. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it is most likely shot down. Let me tell you why...

1. There might had been suspected terrorist on board.
2. Many countries like China would have no problems shooting down a plane full of people to get at one or two guys.

Do you al' remember in the 80's when Kadaffy had his line of death? Reagan sent in the 6th fleet over his line and Kadaffy used a airliner full of dead bodies and a Jihadist to go on a suicide mission to dive in and aim for the aircraft carrier. One of the weapon systems the Navy has is called the Phalanx. It is a 20mm Gatling gun that spit out 3000 rounds a minute and is tied into a radar guided system. They turned the Phalanx on and it blew the airplane to pieces in just a second or two of burst. There was something they didnt expect. The Phalanx was so finely tuned it went after individual pieces of shrapnel 12" and bigger. It fired for 28 secs and there was nothing left. It was only because they were right under it that they were able to find pieces of the plane.

So I would think that many countries would have weapons like this and could had shot it to pieces and you would never had found it.

Sad but maybe true...

Kevin

[r-carpenter]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

I dont know. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it is most likely shot down. Let me tell you why...
1. There might had been suspected terrorist on board.
2. Many countries like China would have no problems shooting down a plane full of people to get at one or two guys.

There's a terrorist in soup. Wait for the official and un-official conclusion. There's no solid information on anything yet.
Besides, it's not only China who has no problem downing plane full of people. Iran Air Flight 655 rings a bell? 290 people blown to bits.

[kevin007]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

None of what I said was fabricated. My dad was a engineer for general dynamics and worked on the Phalanx project. It was widely known that this incident indeed happened. Because he was tasked along with hundreds of others to solve the issue of the Phalanx going after the shrapnel and wasting thousands of depleted uranium rounds.

So please refrain form calling someone a liar when you have no idea about what your talking about...

Kevin

Seriously? Your evidence/conjecture doesn't even rate as flimsy.

Not to mention that you fabricated your 6th fleet / airliner incident. The Libyans sent several patrol boats out against the fleet on multiple occasions. The Navy sunk two of the patrol boats. Check your facts.

Further, the Phalanx is a close-in weapons system. A hostile aircraft won't get that close because of the combat air patrol and the picket ships.

[kanemack]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

i'm thinking it's time to open the x-files back up.

[billfitzmaurice]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

None of what I said was fabricated. My dad was a engineer for general dynamics and worked on the Phalanx project. It was widely known that this incident indeed happened. Because he was tasked along with hundreds of others to solve the issue of the Phalanx going after the shrapnel and wasting thousands of depleted uranium rounds.

What you're re-telling is a scene from the movie "The Sum of all Fears", only it was Soviet MiGs attacking a US carrier, and it did get hit. In real life nothing gets closer than within 100 miles of a US carrier battle group without being thoroughly checked out, nor within 30 miles without being met by an escort. That's if they passed muster with IFF. Bad guys get taken out long before that, and not by aircraft but by a missile from one of the picket destroyers. That's what happened to the Iranian airliner, when they weren't where they were supposed to be, and our attitude at that time regarding anything coming out of Iran was to shoot first and ask questions later, which would have been the same off the coast of Libya had this actually occurred. But it didn't. That I know from friends I still had at Langley back in the day. There were a few incidents in the 80s when Libyan saber rattling did result in some of their fighters being shot down, but the notion of filling an airliner with bodies for a suicide strike makes no sense. You don't try a kamikaze attack with a 600MPH airliner, you do it with a 2100MPH MiG. And what would be the point of filling it with dead bodies? Even Tom Clancy wouldn't use that plot.

[Ron_E]

Re: OT - Malaysian airlines MH370

Trying to find a debris field in a big body of water takes time. When Air France Flight 447 went down in the Atlantic it took five days to find the first wreckage and it took almost 2 years to recover the black boxes. I once saw a Nova show about an airline crash investigation and they figured from the time the pilots made an error about some bad instrument readings until they had the plane in a position that they could not recover from was less that 2 minutes. Until there is some real evidence all these theories are unfounded speculation.

Ron