[breaking] Malaysian Airlines loses contact with Beijing-bound flight, 239 on board

Good point. I was thinking more along the lines of a hijacking with the possibility of actually landing the plane, in which case they would need to be flying relatively close to a point they had secured landing (unless they did not intend to secretly hijack and land the plane and were instead preparing to land at any airport -- why did it turn back without saying anything?).

As for the plane blowing up at night. The plane was 150 miles off the coast when it lost contact with the ground. Not sure anyone on land would be able to see an explosion. Also, the US has reported they have found no evidence of an explosion from satellite data and it did explode in clear conditions at cruising altitude they would likely have caught it.

 

Taiwan says it received a warning about potential terrorist attacks in China, the South China Morning Post has reported.

The newspaper said that there were plans for atrocities at Beijing Airport and the city's subway system.

The warning on March 4 followed a knife attack at a railway station in China that killed 29 people.

 

Sorta not related but can anyone explain to me why terrorists want to go after China? I guess this started with the knife wielding train incident? What did China do exactly to piss off the terrorists?

 

Not sure if this answers you but a previously unknown group - the Chinese Martyrs’ Brigade – has claimed that it was behind the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

An email was sent to various journalists in China, saying: “You kill one of our clan, we will kill 100 of you as payback.”

But officials in Malaysia have said they believe the group's claim could be a hoax.

The email did not explain what had happened to the plane.

Malaysia’s acting transport minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein, said today: “There is no sound or credible grounds to justify their claims."

It is reported that the email could be designed to increase ethnic tensions between Uighurs and Han Chinese in the wake of a knife attack in Kunming on March 1 in which 29 people were killed and more than 100 were injured.

 

I don't think they have confirmed who was responsible for the knife attack, but they suspect it was likely a group of Xinjiang separatist. Xinjiang is home to a large population of Muslim Uighurs who have been upset with Chinese restrictions on their cultural and religion.

 

Don't see how people are making connections here, there is too much unknown. Usually terrorist groups are quick to make their claims when it is them....they all seemed a little slow toto the table. They also usually love naming their martyrs. To me its either pilot error or plane structural failure.

 

One thing that hasn't been mentioned by the media in regards to the Iranian that might be part of the case is that they smuggle a ton of people out Iran through countries like Thailand, Australia etc because Iranians can usually get visas to go visit those countries with tour groups.

This guy could be one of those middle men that arrange people to get out of Iran by way of these countries which happens all the time using stolen Passports. They get to Europe or other counties and then seek refugee status or asylum there to start new lives.

It could all be linked or it could be that since this happened they finally dug deeper and found those stolen Passports, otherwise the people would have just landed where they were trying to be smuggled into.

 

How could you possibly draw that conclusion? There isn't near enough evidence to support that. Oh wait, you're doing the same thing each of us are doing....SPECULATING? We are not investigators. We don't have to have credible evidence. We are simply working with what we have and offering possible scenarios that could explain what happened. No one will know for certain what happened for some time. They may not find the plane for quite a while, although it should be much much easier than the Air France which I believe sank to below 3,500 meters.

As you can see from the graphic above, the mean depth of the sea floor is 40 meters, the plane itself was 63 meters long. I would imagine it would be much easier to find than the Air France.

However, if it crashed near the edge of the Gulf, I would be worried that much of the debris could be thrown south into the South China Sea. Still don't understand why they're searching the West coast of Thailand in the Andaman Sea, wouldn't it have had to fly over multiple radar stations to get that far...that's REALLY far off course...

 

I think that is the only plausible scenario other than terrorism, for using stolen passports. They were purchased together, but I believe one was ending up in Amsterdam and the other some place else. Do you think that makes it more or less plausible that they were simply trying to get out of Iran. Could also explain why they didn't make the flights that would have used Qatar or UAE stops, maybe afraid of being caught and sent to Iran? I don't know, just throwing ideas out there.

Being an investigator would be really fun if you didn't have the pressure of an actual investigation...

 

Amsterdam is one location that a lot of Iranians end up. My own immediate family actually escaped and have been living there now for over 10 years. Thing like that happen all the time, and honestly most of the time the tickets that they buy are for wherever they can get you and you have the best chance to make it through and then have a chance of getting asylum there.

I know people that have escaped to any country they can to just get out of there and by any means necessary.

It was just a thought that could be plausible due to the countries in question.

 

While agree that at this point there are just theories, it is possible that this was just a trial run of something new before instantiated on a mass scale all at once. In that case, you'd stay quiet Or it could be a case of mechanical failure with 2 people trying to escape a country undetected. The real story is TBD but most points here have just as much weight as the next.

 

I read on the guardian that the guys with the stolen passports "did not look asian" and "looked like footballer Mario Balotelli"

http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...passengers-stolen-passports-not-asian-looking

 

PC way of saying he was black, I guess lol.

That makes me doubt any involvement of Xinjiang separatist, unless of course they had enlisted the assistance of Muslim Africans, which I doubt.

Stack24, if that's the case, then it is very likely that these two simply were illegal immigrants. Wouldn't it be even more suspect if you book two flights together, but one ends up in a different location? I dunno what investigators or watch dogs look for, just seems like this would raise some sort of flag, but with something like 80,000 flights everyday, I guess you can't investigate each one.

 

No I was trying to deduce the theory around why they haven't found debris yet.

Also, I was curious as to how plausible it would be by you people.

It sounds highly unlikely now. Still can't figure out why they haven't spotted what should be a large debris area. They may just be looking in the wrong place still.

 

It is quite bizarre. I think they found debris of Air France in a few days, if not sooner. It took them 2 years to find the main wreckage, but the depth range was over 4,700 m, whereas the range in the Gulf of Thailand is only 80 m (the length of the Malaysian Airline is like 64 m. for reference).

I am not at alllllll knowledgeable on this subject, but how is this possible? Compared to the South Atlantic, the Gulf of Thailand and even the South China Sea are essentially playgrounds. Those beacons are supposed to be able to transmit hundreds of miles away, in wreckage it is certainly diminished, but considering the maximum depth, it's hard to imagine that isn't being heard at this point.

Is it possible that whatever brought the aircraft down completely destroyed the blackbox/emergency responder?

 

You are still wrong. See below.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/03...ing-malaysian-air-flight-370-find-only-holes/

Several online flight-tracking services can locate airplanes in real-time, using GPS navigation data transmitted from the aircraft themselves. But in the case of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which disappeared from radar screens more than 48 hours ago, a hole in coverage maps means even these sites lack answers.

“We lost tracking for it pretty early on,” a spokesman for FlightAware told FoxNews.com.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, departed Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia on March 8 at 12:43 a.m. local time en route to Beijing, China, according to FlightAware, which published a minute-by-minute tracking log of the flight. The plane was at 35,000 feet at 1:01 a.m. Saturday morning.

One minute later, the site’s data ends.

“Government regulations prohibit live flight-tracking in the area,” the company explained. “Quickly after take-off, it was outside our coverage range and we had no live position.”

 

Is it possible that the plane traveled a significant distance after losing contact and crashed at a remote location far from where they're searching?