Malaysia Airlines loses contact with passenger jet (239 0n board)

[kidynamite]

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Ok rna basta buhi mga pasahero.

[lhorenzoo]

Investigators look for motive in Malaysia plane disappearance

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Police are combing through the personal, political and religious backgrounds of pilots and crew of a missing Malaysian jetliner, a senior officer said on Sunday, trying to work out why someone aboard flew the plane hundreds of miles off course.
No trace of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, but investigators believe it was diverted by someone who knew how to switch off its communications and tracking systems.
"We are not ruling out any sort of motivation at the moment," a senior police official with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters.
Satellite data revealed by Malaysia's prime minister on Saturday suggests the plane could be anywhere in either of two arcs: one stretching from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, or a southern arc heading from Indonesia to the vast southern Indian Ocean.
A source familiar with official U.S. assessments said it was thought most likely the plane had headed south into the Indian Ocean, where it would presumably have run out of fuel and crashed. Air space to the north is much busier, and the plane would likely have been detected.
As authorities desperately try to re-focus the multinational search, India said it was suspending operations around island chains northwest of the Malay Peninsula, at the request of Malaysian officials.
Indian defence officials said Malaysia wanted to reassess priorities. Malaysian officials coordinating the search could not be reached for comment.
The disappearance of Flight MH370 has baffled investigators, aviation experts and internet sleuths since the plane vanished from civilian air traffic control screens off Malaysia's east coast less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing.
For relatives of those missing, the wait for any firm news has been agonising.
At a news conference on Saturday, Prime Minister Najib Razak said investigators believed somebody cut off the plane's communications reporting system, switched off its transponder and steered it west, far from its scheduled route.
Electronic signals it continued to exchange periodically with satellites suggest it could have continued flying for nearly seven hours after being last spotted by Malaysian military radar off the country's northwest coast.
DELIBERATELY DIVERTED
Najib said that in light of the mounting evidence that the plane was deliberately diverted, the investigation into the aircraft's crew and passengers would be stepped up.
Within hours, special branch officers had searched the homes of the captain, 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and first officer, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid, in middle class suburbs of Kuala Lumpur close to the international airport.
An experienced pilot, Zaharie, has been described by current and former co-workers as a flying enthusiast who spent his off days operating a life-sized flight simulator he had set up at home.
"With Zaharie, the flight simulator games were looked at closely," the senior police official said, adding that they appeared to be normal programmes that allow players to practice flying and landing in different conditions.
Postings on his Facebook page suggest the pilot was a politically active opponent of the coalition that has ruled Malaysia for the 57 years since independence.
A day before the plane vanished, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to five years in prison, in a ruling his supporters and international human rights groups say was politically influenced.
Asked if Zaharie's background as an opposition supporter was being examined, the senior police officer would say only: "We need to cover all our bases."
Malaysia Airlines has said it did not believe Zaharie would have sabotaged the plane, and colleagues were incredulous.
"Please, let them find the aircraft first. Zaharie is not suicidal, not a political fanatic as some foreign media are saying," a Malaysia Airlines pilot who is close to Zaharie told Reuters. "Is it wrong for anyone to have an opinion about politics?"
Co-pilot Fariq was religious and serious about his career, family and friends said, countering news reports suggesting he was a cockpit Romeo who was reckless on the job.
DAUNTING TASK
Malaysia said the latest analysis of satellite data showed the last signal from the missing plane at 8:11 a.m. local time, almost seven hours after it turned back over the Gulf of Thailand and re-crossed the Malay peninsula.
The data did not show whether the plane was still flying or pinpoint its location at that time, presenting searchers with a daunting task. Seven hours' more flying time would likely have taken it to the limit of its fuel load.
Experts from the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority and National Transportation Safety Board have been working with Malaysian authorities to analyse the data from geostationary satellites operated by Britain's Inmarsat.
India had been searching in two areas, one around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and a second further west in the Bay of Bengal, both in the direction the plane was heading when it dropped off Malaysia's military radar at 2:15 a.m. local time.
Both searches have been suspended, but may resume, defence officials said on Sunday.
The Indian Ocean is one of the most remote places in the world and also one of the deepest, posing potentially enormous challenges for efforts to find wreckage or the flight voice and data recorders that are the key to solving the puzzle.

Yahoo! News

[M.A.D.]

Possible motive is getting the plane to be used a some sort of flying bomb in the future. Another motive is the 20 Chinese semiconductor engineers on board who have specialized knowledge in advanced semiconductor technology. It's possible the military may be involved in sequestering some defense-related technology secrets.

This could be a proxy black op that will look like it is china vs. malaysia but the US may not be far behind.

[lhorenzoo]

Scenarios: What could have happened to flight MH370?

The week-long search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 took a major new turn Saturday as evidence indicated that its communication systems were manually switched off and the airliner was deliberately diverted.
The first concrete, verified lead as to the possible reason behind the disappearance has fuelled speculation over how and why MH370 might have been commandeered -- and its likely fate.
Here are some of the possible scenarios being weighed up by experts.

THEORY ONE: Terror attack
WHY: As the theory that the plane was deliberately taken over gains traction, questions over the involvement of terrorist organisations have come back to the fore.
The presence of two passengers travelling on stolen passports fuelled early fears of a terror link.
Authorities now believe the two Iranian men were simply illegal migrants, but CIA director John Brennan has said a terror attack has not been ruled out.
The search area covers a massive region -- a northern corridor from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan through northern Thailand and a southern corridor from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean -- with no potential target or destination pinpointed so far.

EXPERT VIEW: The extensive inside information and expertise needed to commandeer a plane for hours without detection would need an unprecedented level of pre-planning, says Gerry Soejatman, a Jakarta-based independent aviation analyst.
"If that was deliberate, we may be dealing with something beyond the mission planning for 9/11," he said.
While the southern corridor is less monitored, the northern zone would be bristling with radar. Dropping altitude to fly as low as possible would be one way to avoid detection, he said.
But the Malaysia Airlines scenario had too many loose ends for a terror attack, said Adam Dolnik, professor of terrorism studies at the University of Wollongong in Australia.
"Nothing from what I have seen points to that conclusion," he told AFP.
"For something this big, you would have somebody claiming it."

THEORY TWO: Pilot involvement
WHY: With Malaysia confirming that communications were likely switched off manually, pilot involvement -- whether intentional or under duress -- is a possibility, some experts say.
EXPERT VIEW: "For me there's only a few scenarios," says Paul Yap, aviation lecturer at Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore.
"First, the people involved in the deliberate actions...are the pilots, one of them or both of them in cahoots.
"Then we have a scenario where terrorists make the pilots change course and switch off the transponders under duress, maybe threatening to kill of the passengers.
"Or, we could have a scenario where the security protocol surrounding the cockpit is compromised."
Passengers have been prohibited from entering the cockpit during a flight after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
"It's certainly someone who knew what they were doing," said Chris De Lavigne, a vice president at business consultancy Frost & Sullivan.
"It could be the pilot, the crew, it could be passengers."
Malaysia Airlines has said it was "shocked" over a TV report that MH370 co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid had, along with another pilot, allowed two women into the cockpit on a flight in 2011.


THEORY THREE: Pilot suicide -
WHY: While rare, there have been cases of pilots crashing planes to take their own lives. In December 1997, a SilkAir Boeing 737 from Jakarta to Singapore plunged into a river in Indonesia with the loss of 104 passengers and crew. US investigators blamed pilot suicide.
EXPERT VIEW: A suicide bid "is possible and if that's the case there might not be a lot of debris because the plane would have come down in relative structural integrity", said Terence Fan, aviation expert at Singapore Management University.
"The airplane is not meant to float and if the airplane sinks in the water, water will go inside because the door seals are not meant to seal water."
Nothing has emerged to suggest any serious psychological problems with either of the pilots who were flying MH370.


THEORY FOUR: The plane landed and is hidden
WHY: The lack of debris and apparent absence of any data indicating impact have led to speculation that the plane may have landed safely and be hidden in a remote location.
EXPERT VIEW: The size of the Boeing 777 and the amount of space needed for it to land make it unlikely that this was the flight's fate, says Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at industry publication Flightglobal.
"The triple seven is a very large aircraft that requires a long airport-size runway to land... it's possible, but I think not probable."
But Yap believes that if those controlling the flight were skilled enough to evade military radar, "that person should most likely be able to land it safely as well".
"Evidence of deliberate action does open several new leads - including the possibility that the aircraft is not lost at sea," said London-based David Kaminski-Morrow, air transport editor for Flight International.
Soejatman added that most flights have enough fuel to cover an additional two hours in the air so, given the latest data, MH370 would have been close to running out.

THEORY FIVE: Cover up -
WHY: The apparent slowness to reveal key radar data has led to speculation that countries may know more about the plane's likely whereabouts, but are unwilling to share due to a perceived security risk.
EXPERT VIEW: The latest information on the plane's route poses more questions than it answers over how it remained undetected, says Soejatman.
"If it went through the northern corridor, it would have passed through so many countries. But why hasn't anybody detected it and said anything?
"It's extremely different to comprehend that so many countries might have seen it and kept it under wraps."
A path through the remoter southern corridor would explain a lack of radar coverage, but would bring the motive into doubt, he said.
"It is amazing that an airplane -- and not a little airplane -- could fly so far, over multiple overlapping jurisdictions, without being detected," Ajai Sahni, executive director of India's Institute for Conflict Management, a Delhi-based think-tank, told AFP.
"It makes one wonder, 'How much are we in control?'"


Yahoo! News

[M.A.D.]

This is the best precedent so far that civilian radar should have the same capabilities as that of military radar and there should be more radar installations scattered all throughout the globe to prevent such instances from happening again.

[leo_trams]

gitago gyud ni nila ang tinuod.

sa kadaghan sa mga spy/non-spy satellites, wala gyuy nakamatikod kung asa na ang eroplano?

ang mga gps devices sa mga pasengers, basin naay nagkalingaw ug activate sa ilang gps.
unya wala diay na gps ang mga eroplano?
like 24 hour tracking sa ilang mga planes?
naa man gani deri gps tracking sa mga fleet cars/trucks...unsa na kaha ang mga eroplano nga multi-million ang kantidad.
the authorities are hiding the truth.


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[M.A.D.]

US military and intelligence is keeping mum on this one. The Russians and Chinese know better. It's quite obvious this isn't the handiwork of a few iranians travelling on a stolen passport.

[-]chong<3]

IMO, this plane could\'ve landed somewhere. it\'s just impossible not to see any debris if it crashed in teh sea..

[ghostie2472]

As of this moment puro ra jud speculation ang nang gawas. Until makita jud ang eroplano (or what's left of it anyway) no one can really tell what happened to the plane.

Unya, asa naman tong Shaman nga nag bangga-bangga ug butong?

[DEMONOCIETY]

dugaya hangtod karon wa pa ghapon nakitan? na dako pa man unta ni sa balay ning butanga nawagtang pa jud possible limpyo ang pagka hi-jack ato