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Malaysia Airlines 777 has gone missing

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by old_tony, Mar 7, 2014.

  1. Stoney

    Stoney Well-Known Member

    Then, out of curiosity, what are the most conceivable theories here?

    To me the whole premise of a jetliner containing hundreds of people disappearing without a trace seems "inconceivable" in an age with today's advanced satellite and GPS tracking technology, when virtually anyone can be tracked down by the location of their phone, when any joe schmo can look at nearly any spot on earth through their laptop, etc. Yet it's somehow happened.
     
  2. PCLoadLetter

    PCLoadLetter Well-Known Member

    Oh, it's a damn interesting story. The whole thing is fascinating.

    Reality is, oceans are really freakin' big, and if the plane went off course and didn't explode, finding it can be really hard. That, to me, seems the most likely scenario at this point. Could be terror. Could be a suicidal or crazy pilot. I don't know.

    A secret undetected terror base that can land a 777 seems about as likely as the disappearance being Rapture-related.
     
  3. Stoney

    Stoney Well-Known Member

    But how does a jetliner go down without any distress calls from the pilots or anyone else on the plane, and without being able to track the spot where it went down? Today we can pinpoint the location of anybody who leaves their cell phone on, but not a friggin huge jetliner containing hundreds of people?

    I'll just say that nearly every theory I've heard is one that would've seemed nearly inconceivable to me a couple days ago. But one of them has to be true.
     
  4. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    Go read about the Air France crash. No distress call from the pilots. Just disappeared. Took a few days to find the wreckage. Took a couple of years to find the black box, which revealed pilot error as the main cause.
     
  5. Iron_chet

    Iron_chet Well-Known Member

    One of the pilots on an avaition board I frequent said that the ocean around the area that it was lost in is only about 200 feet deep. He was saying that it is conceivable that the plane is embedded into the ocean floor.

    I would think that there would be some wreckage in this scenario, may be that they just have not gotten around to searching the right area.

    It is also possible to turn off the transponder from the flight deck. Pilots could have turned off the transponder and then lowered below radar however it would have to be pretty low because it is flat and wide open there.
     
  6. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    NBC News said tonight that once you are 125 miles off shore, you are pretty much on your own.

    I have a hard time believing, though, that our military does not have everything in the sky pinpointed every second of everyday. But our military probably is not hoping to show all their cards on this flight.
     
  7. Football_Bat

    Football_Bat Well-Known Member

    Captain Sullenberger, who knows a thing or two about emergency situations, chimes in:

    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/captain-sullenberger-on-why-malaysia-airlines-jet-may-not-have-let-out-distress-signal/
     
  8. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    That's a really good point. Can't imagine the U.S. wouldn't know if a plane was coming from, say, Russia until it was just 125 miles offshore.
     
  9. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Without knowing the technical details of how they would accomplish such a disappearance -- but knowing they do a lot of stuff the rest of the world doesn't know about and doesn't know how to do -- I would not put anything past the Chinese government. That includes shooting down the plane if they thought someone on it was a threat.
     
  10. JayFarrar

    JayFarrar Well-Known Member

    BBC reporting that the holders of the fake passports were Iranians.
     
  11. qtlaw

    qtlaw Well-Known Member

    All of the reports I've read indicate that when the tickets were purchased for the two "stand-ins"; no specific flight was requested.
     
  12. Rusty Shackleford

    Rusty Shackleford Active Member

    So what are the options here? There seem to be only a few really:

    1) The plane crashed, and authorities just haven't found the debris field yet. The Pacific is big, folks. Might take a while, especially if it went way off course for a while before crashing. They might not even be close to the right area, and until some fishing trawler stumbles upon some floating debris somewhere, we'll never know.

    2) The plane crashed, but somehow the ocean swallowed the wreckage. But is this even possible? Like was posted, Columbia exploded 200,000 feet up and left a debris field. Even if the plane slammed into the ocean nose first at high speed, something would have had to float to the surface, right?

    3) It has been hijacked and taken somewhere. Seems unlikely, given that it just vanished from radar. Even if there was somewhere to take it, which I find unlikely, it still would have been trackable to that location via radar. And what country doesn't watch its borders enough that a plane could cruise through its airspace undetected and land at a mystery airport?

    4) It has been downed, perhaps by a government or military, and there is a coverup to hide it. If this is the case, I suspect we'll find out eventually. Somebody had to pull the trigger, and you don't do that alone generally. Someone will talk.

    5) It was downed by a terrorist explosion. Again, where's the debris field? Or has it just not been found?

    My suspicion, based on Occam's Razor, is that it veered way off course and crashed for some reason (terrorists? pilot error? pilot suicide?) and the debris just hasn't been found. If it went down nose-first at high speed, there might not be much debris, but there's gotta be something.
     
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