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

371–380 of 397 posts

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

#371

Post by jusben1369 »

philwelch wrote: post #340
gamblor956 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US bombed Yugoslavia pursuant to its commitments to NATO, which voted to intervene in the conflict.

Under heavy US influence. You use the tools at hand to achieve the goals you want.

Phil the Lewinsky affair (investigation/media sensation) went on literally for months and months (years?). Sit around long enough and the President of the US will do something that you can say "Look! A big decision. Clearly that's a distracting event!!" It's pretty intellectually weak buddy.

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

#372

Post by tomelders »

leoc wrote: post #320
exelius wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hijacking airplanes after 9/11 is much more risky. Until 9/11, there was never a plot that involved intentionally hijacking an airliner with the intent of using it as a weapon and killing everyone on board. The assumption was "Oh, if we just give them what they want they'll let us all live." Post-9/11, if anyone tries to hijack an airplane they're going to have every able-bodied male between the ages of 18 and 40 com…

True, but not necessarily decisive. If you're the pilot, or someone else with a way past that new-and-improved post-9/11 cockpit door, you can likely make it work for you. Or if you have some way of getting an automatic weapon or some other useful tool on board (far from easy of course!) you can still hold off large numbers of desperate, but unarmed, passengers.

Didn't the pilot have a penchant for allowing attractive young girls into the cockpit? That's was front page news here in the UK.

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

#374

Post by dandelany »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #273
joeguilmette wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twenty blatant murders in China might - MIGHT - make to the sidebar on HuffPo. Hijacking an airliner has captivated the attention of the entire planet. If they wanted to get rid of these guys stealthily this is not the way.

> If they wanted to get rid of these guys stealthily this is not the way. // Isn't it a "hidden in plain site" sort of stealth though. Everyone assumes that the plane was lost naturally and so there is no-one looking to find those you've taken. Meanwhile you can have the plane melted down, dispose of bodies and cargo and keep whatever it was you wanted without any one (or country) knowing you've got it. Stealthy.

Who assumes that the plane was lost naturally at this point? Almost no one.

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

#375

Post by kps »

keypusher wrote: post #360
ccozan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely like a modern William Gibson plot. Mystery and modern technology in the same place. Objects that do not want to be tracked. Definitively Gibson style.

No, you misunderstand. Stephenson actually had a hijacked 747 in one of his books shadowing another to avoid radar detection in the same way as described by this article.

In REAMDE, not a 747 but a small private jet.

The story also had the jet ‘disappear’ on the boundary between ATC zones. This was actually the first thing that came to my mind when I heard the first reports about MH370.

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

#376

Post by 001sky »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #279
001sky wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you get with this plane is huge fuel and cargo capacity not to mention unsupported range.

Neither of which are requirements to do serious damage, and as has been said numerous times before, there are plenty of other planes that meet that criteria that could have been obtained much more easily and not in full view of the public eye.

"Neither of which are requirements to do serious damage"

777-200-er has the range of a tu with hunreds of thousands of pounds more payload and it hold 20x the fuel of a citation x with 10x the mass. It also has double the range of a 777 freighter, with a similar maximum takeoff weight. So these are not interchangeble, but yes they are options.

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

#377

Post by gassit »

pedalpete wrote: post #98
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #77

I am not enthusiastic about jumping into speculation land, but I would be interested in knowing if the possibility of this being a accident followed by auto pilot is possible or totally disproven My default assumption was they took off, an accident occurred that damaged cockpit and forced a turnaround, the damage was so great that the crew were unable to survive and turned on autopilot to stop an immediate crash, whi…

I'm not familiar with the inner workings of planes, but from what I've gathered, the timing of disabling the two tracking systems, which are on either end of the plane, is just about the same time it takes to get from one end of the plane to the other, and disable the 2nd tracking system (blackbox). Therefore, it would be a great coincidence that both of these tracking systems would be disabled at the same time. It s…

Where did you hear the black box was turned off?

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

#378

Post by dandelany »

epochwolf wrote: post #317
danford wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's supposed to be easy to turn off the tracking mechanisms of planes.

It's called a circuit breaker. Just about every system, include the flight recorders, autopilot, and transponders can be independently turned off.

I did some research on this, expecting to find a breaker labeled "CVR" on the diagram of 777 cockpit circuit breakers. Instead I found this: "the practicalities of isolating the power from the CVR fitted to the B777 are not straightforward since the CVR circuit breaker is located in the electronics bay of the arcraft instead of on the flight deck. Access to the electronics bay from within the aircraft is via a hatch in the cabin floor adjacent to the front left door of the aircraft"

http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/Boeing%20777-...

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

#379

Post by cc439 »

jballanc wrote: post #45

The folks over at airliners.net have pointed out that the 777's collision avoidance system only works if both planes' transponders are turned on. That doesn't mean this scenario is impossible, but it does raise the level of sophistication required. Sadly, I feel like whatever happened, the amount of sophistication involved increasingly points toward the involvement of one or more state actors. If that's the case, I'm…

This whole affair is taking such a conspiracy laden turn that it makes me miss Tom Clancy.

Russians building up rhetoric and pushing tensions to a high not seen since the cold war? An airliner that mysteriously disappears with some evidence pointing toward an elaborate hijacking scheme? Tell me that doesn't sound like an outline for one of his books.

I'm not trying to be flippant with the fact that hundreds of people lost their lives or that friends and families are being crushed by the uncertainty. It's just a thought that springs to mind.

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

#380

Post by cc439 »

ianhawes wrote: post #258
exelius wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they were hijacking a plane to stuff it full of chemical weapons / radioactive material (think dirty bomb) with the intent of flying it over a major city and detonating it. It would be hard to do it in a western nation, but if you were aiming at a city near the "frontier" of India, Pakistan, etc. a bad actor could likely execute the plan before the jets they scramble could intercept the jet. There's a lot of bad s…

Except your plan has one fatal flaw: assuming the plane was stolen to be used as a missile. If this were ISI or a state level actor, the absolute riskiest part would be hijacking a plane in flight with passengers. You risk them uprising, getting the word out about the hijacking, and then you'd have to execute them once you land. Why not steal an empty plane at an airport or buy an older plane through an intermediary?

Why execute them when you can suffocate them at 45,000 feet? This is conspiracy theory gold even though I think it crashed.

My guess is that this bears the traits of the worst disasters, an unforeseeable and unique cascade of system failures that led to the pilots having some control of a crippled plane.

Post reply on HN