Quote:
Originally Posted by Clouddancer
It is a strange mystery that one day, soon I think, will be solved.
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I hope you're right, but I'm not as optimistic as you that the mystery will be solved anytime soon, if at all. The authorities and investigators may be able to offer little more than conjecture until the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder (commonly referred to as "black boxes") are found. Remember, it took almost two years to find the "black boxes" from the Rio-Paris Air France flight that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean a few years ago. And we had found some debris and had a pretty good idea of where it went down.
All that seems clear at this time is that the aircraft took a sharp turn to the west and overflew the Malay Peninsula, and that it climbed and descended wildly for unknown reasons. Engine-monitoring satellite pings also continued for several hours, although I understand that it can't be ascertained with 100% certainty at this time that all the pings came from the subject aircraft.
Many people seem to assume that with all the technological advances of recent years, we have some sort of radar net that covers the entire globe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Vast expanses (such as most of the Indian Ocean and other oceans) have little coverage.
Some have speculated that the intention of the pilot(s), or whoever commandeered the airplane, was to fly it to some remote island strip where it could be repurposed as a huge flying bomb and used in a 911-style attack. But where? The only airstrip in that archipelago of islands south of Myanmar remotely capable of handling the landing and takeoff of a Triple 7 is under the control of the Indians. (Good luck with that!) If the pilot tried to double back toward Indonesia, the authorities there would surely have picked it up. Turning the transponder off does not make the aircraft invisible to radar, particularly military radar.
Although the 777, fueled for a Beijing flight, would have had the range to go to someplace like Pakistan, it would have had to make a big detour or overfly Indian airspace. In other words, that almost certainly didn't happen. That's why I think that although anything we can say now is obviously conjecture, I believe the probability is extremely high that the plane is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Clouddancer
Now, I ask, after 911, what is the likelihood that passengers would sit still while some nutcases hijacked their aircraft?
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Pretty slim under any normal set of circumstances. But I think it's important to remember that the airplane climbed to approximately its service ceiling at one point, and apparently for no good reason -- unless the pilot donned an oxygen mask and induced quick hypoxia by dumping the cabin pressurization while maneuvering the aircraft through wild attitude gyrations, thus disorienting and incapacitating all the passengers almost instantly. I could envision circumstances where that may have been done even before the passengers knew that the plane had been hijacked -- especially if the "hijacker" was actually one (or possibly both) of the pilots, which many observers now believe to be the case.
In any event, this is quite a bizarre mystery. Almost nothing can be completely ruled out, and we may not know much more unless the black boxes are found.
One more note: Many people ask why all that voice and flight control data are confined onboard instead of being transmitted continuously and in real-time via satellite. After all, we obviously do have the technology to do that.
As is the case with almost everything else, the reason is money:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles...-planes#r=read
But in the aftermath of all this, I'll be surprised if there aren't renewed calls for the implementation of this type of monitoring.
This sort of thing has substantial national security import for the U.S. and many of our allies. The financial costs of having the U.S. Navy (and other navies) frenetically scouring the Indian Ocean are rather substantial, too.
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