Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

keithledgerwood.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 397 posts

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#141

Post by confluence »

tomelders wrote: post #130
confluence wrote: post #40

> There are too many oddities in this whole story that don’t make sense if this theory isn’t the answer in my opinion. Confirmation bias? Slow burn fire randomly taking out communications systems and electronics undetected over a long period of time. Pilots freak out and head West for the coast, program way points on autopilot. Fire then cracks the hull, leading to a slow depressurization, incapacitating crew. Plane…

1. Zig Zaging flight path between legitimate waypoints after transponders were turned off, plus some pronounced altitude changes suggest that Autopilot was not engaged. 2. Pilots turned off transponders before their last communication.

1. Waypoints far west outside of primary are conjecture. Can be explained by autopilot shutdown due to onboard emergency.

2. Not proven. ACARS can fail without pilot intervention. That's confirmation bias.

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#142

Post by pajop »

_nedR wrote: post #44
redbad wrote: post #2

This is almost exactly how a plot device in Neal Stephenson's REAMDE plays out. In almost exactly the same part of the world. Bizarre.

Googled "Neal Stephenson README" expecting a thriller involving a government agency plot to inject malicious code into a open-source crypto-library, and the final commmit to the github project made by a hacker found murdered in front of the computer in his basement. Was disappointed.

that's probably CryptoLocker in real life - http://blog.malwarebytes.org/intelligence/2013/10/cryptolock...

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#143

Post by Implicated »

conformal wrote: post #129
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A team of freescale chip engineers for one. Also, the answer might well be "what" instead of who. Many people have pointed out that the cargo manifest hasn't been published, and that the airline declared 50 less seats as available for boarding than the plane had. This means it had several tons of cargo on board.

totally agree. it must be a what/who scenario by merit of the lengths to which they went to get the entire plane. this is surely a state-level intelligence action. the blocking off of passenger seats often indicates an especially heavy or oddly weighted cargo. something else that is notable is that you know several large world governments have continuous satellite tracking of this flight but are not sharing any infor…

> something else that is notable is that you know several large world governments have continuous satellite tracking of this flight

They do?

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#144

Post by fafner »

zmb_ wrote: post #122
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an easier way of getting people. If you want 20 people taking an additional 200 people and an airliner with them seems overly complex compared to, say, hitting them on the back of the head as they're walking home and bundling them in a van.

How is it easier to go around hitting 20 people on the back the the head and then figuring out how to drive them to North Korea at the back of a van without being detected? If your goal is to get a large team of semiconductor engineers against their will, I can hardly think of a more efficient way than simply flying the plane they are on to your country.

It is a lot easier. Of course you would use a ship or even the official Air Koyo flight from KL instead of a van...

The hijacking and stealthily flying it to North Korea are so complex it's beyond ridiculous. There are so many more details which could go wrong and a much bigger international backlash especially from China. And why would they fly back across Malaysia if they wanted to go to North Korea?

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#145

Post by nyrina »

justincormack wrote: post #95
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A team of freescale chip engineers for one. Also, the answer might well be "what" instead of who. Many people have pointed out that the cargo manifest hasn't been published, and that the airline declared 50 less seats as available for boarding than the plane had. This means it had several tons of cargo on board.

Gold? needs to be something worth stealing a plane for.

I don't think gold is valuable enough for stealing a whole plane and killing 220 passengers.

Gold, for it's weight, is very expensive. Transporting gold of high enough volumes for it to be worth killing so many people, steal a plane as well as making all of that possible wouldn't be worth it, I would say.

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#146

Post by jzwinck »

yannyu wrote: post #112
simias wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what the twenty Freescale employees have to do with anything and I keep seeing this fact mentioned in every discussion about MH370. How could they be important/valuable/dangerous enough to justify the hijacking or destruction of a commercial airliner containing hundreds of passengers? That sounds completely insane to me.

It's a bit Bond/cyberpunk-esque, but one could imagine a scenario where an evil villain could short a company's stock and then kill off 20 extremely valuable employees of said company. Not saying that's what happened here, but 20 of the right employees of a company could be very significant.

Probably not these employees, this company, or this time. NYSE:FSL peaked around $23 and is still around $22. There are 300 million shares, and from the chart it looks like recent volume of a few million, so the potential profit is probably less than what you could simply sell the 777 to the bad guys for.

Most companies with hundreds of billions in market cap would not send many important people on a single plane together. Freescale, not quite that large, arguably made a significant business mistake here, but the market impact so far seems limited.

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#147

Post by jzwinck »

mootothemax wrote: post #134
yannyu wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit Bond/cyberpunk-esque, but one could imagine a scenario where an evil villain could short a company's stock and then kill off 20 extremely valuable employees of said company. Not saying that's what happened here, but 20 of the right employees of a company could be very significant.

It's a bit Bond/cyberpunk-esque, but one could imagine a scenario where an evil villain could short a company's stock and then kill off 20 extremely valuable employees of said company When was the last time you heard of 20 employees of a company being murdered? To do so by killing 220+ other people makes such a theory even more absurd.

It happened to 13 separate companies on September 11, 2001 (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/twintowers/). It was sort of not targeted at those companies, but on the other hand it sort of was. And it certainly had huge market impact.

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#148

Post by ry0ohki »

justincormack wrote: post #95
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A team of freescale chip engineers for one. Also, the answer might well be "what" instead of who. Many people have pointed out that the cargo manifest hasn't been published, and that the airline declared 50 less seats as available for boarding than the plane had. This means it had several tons of cargo on board.

Gold? needs to be something worth stealing a plane for.

The plane itself is worth about 6 tons of gold

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#149

Post by Piskvorrr »

mittermayr wrote: post #104
Houshalter wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it's not like every patch of land is monitored at all times. A satellite can only point it's camera at one place at a time.

surely so, but in the odd case that even one single image might have a plane on it, on the path the OP currently discusses here, might be enough to confirm further travel. the full step-by-step transition of the plan wouldn't even be necessary. just one shot with that plane. from somewhere.

Global? Likely. Realtime? We're not quite that far into the future. Just try and estimate the bandwidth for the biggest security camera of all times: at 1-3 meters resolution per pixel, worldwide, that's a lot of pixels (about 510 072 000 000 000 per frame, give or take - that comes out at about half an exabyte per frame, if I'm not mistaken). Take ten of these, and you've generated as much data as the whole Internet does in a day. Oh, and you also need to store it somewhere, but this is a minor issue (in comparison to the above).

Re: Did Malaysian Airlines 370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?

#150

Post by locusm »

sschueller wrote: post #71

Isn't it possible that one passenger may have left his cell phone on? Maybe if you get all of the passengers numbers and check if any of the phones connected to a tower you could locate it?

You mean HLR? Its plausible that could turn something up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Location_Register#Home_loc...
Post reply on HN