My best friend and her husband are USAF veterans. This morning he posted a link laughing at some conspiracy site that claims we hijacked the plane … with an AWACS. Not because we have a beef with Malaysia, but apparently we were stealing some techie people that were aboard.
Conspiraceeeee!
Yes, we do have sattelites, but people don’t quite understand how many airlines fly per day and the range of those sattelites’ cameras . We cannot watch every flight from every airport. The whole radar system is based off transponder codes due to false positives coming back in. The ATC systems of the world literally ignore things without transponders because there’s SO MUCH up there that can bounce back a radar signal.
People here ascribe way too much power to the NSA. Power they don’t have. Just think about it like this: If every flight were covered at a resolution that would allow us to see every plane clearly, that means were would have upwards of 10000 sattelite cameras taking pictures at once. And they would have to be cameras, independently focusable and capable of IDing a plane AND knowing what plane it was AND reporting that information to the ground. All this would have to be monitored by at least a few hundred agents for when the computer kicked back a “false positive” or even a REAL positive.
It’s just not feasible. The world is very big and we have a lot of planes up in the air. It’s just hard to track them.
Aviators are great people! Pragmatism born of keeping a sharp edge on the survival instinct in the face of all the horse manure!
That’s just gross. The people are rightly offended.
Why are people talking about the NSA when they should be talking about the NRO and NGA? You are talking about photographic spy satellites, right?
They make a point of saying that now, in the pre-flight safety announcement. Possibly as a result of the 961 crash?
I assume there are a lot of analysts pouring over stills taken from satellites during the relevant time period. It’s not a question of expecting someone to be watching every plane in the air at all times. It’s that once we know there’s a problem, we can analyze the shots we have from that part of the airspace at that time to find the one plane that isn’t where it’s supposed to be. It’s looking for a needle in one specific relatively constrained haystack right over there. Not easy, but not impossible either.
I do think it’s about that time they started, yes …
Well, they have a lot of automated image analysis now - if a satellite could see (not obscured by cloud) … although it was dark … although surely they have infrared detection, to which a jet trail would stand out like a sore thumb …
If the search game here is real, part of it will be keeping secrets about the levels of capability of your observation tools. If you’ve determined the plane went down and no-one survived (no life rafts etc), you’d now just clam up. Nothing to gain by revealing your capabilities.
Malaysia has an interest in not backing the “flew westward” story - if it becomes clear, which it is increasingly - with evidence from multiple sources shoring it up - that a flag airline with 250+ individuals flew through Malaysian airspace without challenge (or apparently, anyone bothering to notice or act on it), then Malaysia gets a double hit: (1) the national airline has lost an aircraft - fault or not, it’s awful publicity, and (2) a strategic military vulnerability is highlighted - not particularly good if you’re arguing with other nations about oil access in the South China Seas.
Additionally - if the military were embarrassed about airspace invasion and decided to hush it up (not impossible - you can get executed for stuff like that in the wrong circumstances), then there is a massive risk of incredible antipathy being directed at Malaysia, particularly by the other nations with people on the plane. So in that scenario, the Malaysian military would ultimately have to confess to misleading or misdirecting an international search.
The increasing strength of evidence - for e.g. below (the beeb doesn’t run with thin facts most of the time) - seems to be causing the Malaysians to stay quiet.
Remember also the numbers of craft looking - and the costs involved - simply turning a large ship around is massively costly - and drawing military resource into searches means they’re not on the other highly important (open to discussion) missions they were there for in the first place.
Malaysia may end up with lots of egg on its face. And potential wrath if the plane did go into the sea and there were survivors.
heightening suspicions of foul play among investigators
Yep, those investigators are capable of anything.
Yeah, the crew. I think the captain did a Sullenberger. Close to retirement, and he saw an opportunity to do something which from his perspective looked amazing, so he took it.
So the US spoke up (Inmarsat) to shut up the Malaysian officials who said the plane didn’t transit the country.
And the US (remember, Boeing built the plane) has administered the first face-disgracing message I’ve seen:
Bob Francis, a former National Transportation Safety Board official, is one of several experts who have questioned how Malaysian authorities have handled the situation.
“The Malaysians are not doing a superb job of running this investigation,” he said. “And they apparently give you some information, and then they withhold information. How much are they relying on and listening to the Europeans and the NTSB who are there with more expertise? I don’t know, but I think you know we’ve got a mixture of a very strange situation that happens to be in an environment, a regulatory environment, that really isn’t capable or isn’t running an investigation the way it should be run.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/14/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
So there we have it. Everyone with any sense or capability thinks the plane was jinking along those corridors - waypoint to waypoint.
Fun fact: at any given moment in time there are upwards of a million people in the air.
This truck rental guy I knew used to dread the possibility that all his vehicles would come back at the same time…
By the way, the waypoint thing - anybody could pick up how to do that without going near an aircraft. I rather suspect hijack now.
Strange, the other BoingBoing post on this topic disappeared. The comment thread is still there, but the not-so-permanent permalink 404s.
BBC just had a broadcast on MH370, finishing up with a statement that people suspect Malaysia knows a lot more than it’s letting on.
That would fit the whole scenario.
i think this is another plot for a terrorist attack on the u.s i think the plane was hi- jacked and is going to be used to attack again
That works if they plane is intact, and has the passengers. You’d play chicken with air defence: Let us fly on, or all these (Chinese etc) people die.
