Another Flight 370 post
Authorities have finally agreed that the plane was intentionally diverted and someone who knew how to fly a plane was still piloting it for some time after contact was lost.
I think authorities need to give up on the idea that the plane crashed somewhere and devote all of their resources to treating this as an act of piracy or terrorism. There is no evidence of a plane crash; there is only evidence of a missing airplane. If someone just wanted to crash the plane, they wouldn’t have bothered with all the secrecy and turning off the transponder and other communications devices. And I don’t think that someone would go through all of that effort if he didn’t know how or where to land the plane. Every day, hundreds of thousands of planes land all over the world, I don’t see why it’s so hard to believe that the stolen Boeing 777 didn’t also land somewhere. You don’t even need an official airport, you just need a one-mile straight stretch of highway.
Malaysian authorizes haven’t even searched the pilots’ homes yet. That’s pretty inept. The most likely hijacker is one of the pilots themselves. They should be the number one target of the investigation.
Lion of the Blogosphere 
I suspect that you’re probably right.
JayMan
March 14, 2014 at 4:20 PM
A one-mile stretch of highway might work, however given the 777’s 200-foot wingspan it would have to be completely clear of trees or other obstructions for quite some distance on either side and on either end.
And what exactly would be the point in stealing the aircraft? If some third-world airline suddenly started operating a 777 people might wonder. Commercial airliners have quite the paper trail. Selling the parts would yield a great deal of money, except for the fact that all significant parts are stamped with serial numbers and are easily traceable.
Peter
ironrailsironweights
March 14, 2014 at 4:20 PM
People always underestimate the creativity of criminals and terrorists.
Lion of the Blogosphere
March 14, 2014 at 4:30 PM
Seconding Peter. How many uninhabited islands have a runway that can support a 777?
The Undiscovered Jew
March 14, 2014 at 8:16 PM
“Seconding Peter. How many uninhabited islands have a runway that can support a 777?”
The Northern Territory of Australia does, and it’s pretty sparsely populated. Maybe they landed it on a highway there.
Dave Pinsen
March 15, 2014 at 3:02 AM
To use it for a future crime or terrorist attack?
Dave Pinsen
March 15, 2014 at 2:55 AM
The Northern Territory of Australia does, and it’s pretty sparsely populated.
But Australia would know about it. That leaves only islands owned by third world countries.
The Undiscovered Jew
March 15, 2014 at 12:37 PM
To use it for a future crime or terrorist attack?
Yes. Fill it up with explosives and then fly somewhere into a building.
The Undiscovered Jew
March 15, 2014 at 12:38 PM
First Officer on Flight 370 Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, has been described as “a good Muslim,” so we can rule him out.
Mark Caplan
March 14, 2014 at 4:23 PM
And if he ever was to be accused as a suspect, this would not matter, as the jet is probably now dissipated and the people are all dead.
JS
March 14, 2014 at 5:29 PM
If he’s a “good Muslim,” then he’s the primary suspect.
sciences with lisps
March 14, 2014 at 8:14 PM
I thought ‘bomb’ at first, but looking at the data about it still transmitting hours after it’s supposed to have gone missing, I agree with your ‘hijack’ theory. Question is, what has been done with the passengers?
This doesn’t feel like normal criminal activity. I suspect that the plane is having its belly packed with explosives somewhere. There can only be a limited number of places they could do something like this unseen. Fuel range of plane overlapping with airstrip big enough to land the plane, but private enough to disembark and deal with the passengers.
mathilda37
March 14, 2014 at 5:29 PM
Assuming the plane didn’t crash, I wonder what happened to the passengers. If this were terrorism, I’d suspect someone to have taken credit by now, so the most likely motive seems to be a financial one if the plane didn’t crash. I’d like to think that even really bad bad guys wouldn’t be ok with murdering 230+ people at once for money, but who knows.
Robert
March 14, 2014 at 5:49 PM
cui bono?
Daniel
March 14, 2014 at 6:57 PM
Aren’t these Malaysian authorities all affirmative action hires?
jef
March 14, 2014 at 8:29 PM
OT, but i think interesting.
Why is there a paucity of women in tech? In order to answer this, let’s look at the jobs in which women are abundant.
Women are most abundantly found in jobs of an auxiliary nature — Secretary, nurse, air-host, etc. What all these jobs have in common is that the holder of the job is directly subordinate to an alpha-male.
As a secretary, your work directly for a high-flying lawyer who probably has good college cred and amassed a small fortune. As a nurse, you work directly for a doctor; and as a air-host, you work directly for a pilot.
Why would a woman go into tech, and thus surround herself with beta-males, when, on the other hand, she can work as a secretary or an air-host, and thus work directly for and with alpha males?
Women only have a small window in which to conceive, so it makes sense for women to have an evolutionary drive that sub-consciously gravitates them towards alpha-males.
Beta males in the tech industry are a repellent to this evolutionary drive; and therefore a paucity of women find there way into tech.
I doubt IQ differences explain the gap, so this theory is needed.
anon
March 14, 2014 at 9:19 PM
Evolution wants women to have as many grandchildren as possible, and historically nerdy men may have been more likely to become grandfathers.
Lion of the Blogosphere
March 14, 2014 at 11:06 PM
historically there were no nerdy men. the nerd is like obesity, an invention of the late 20th c.
jorge videla
March 15, 2014 at 2:50 AM
By the way, there are growing number of women who pushing their directives onto beta males in the tech industry. So anon is somewhat incorrect to say women only want a job that is auxiliary in a nature. They also want to take charge and give orders to the beta chumps.
JS
March 16, 2014 at 11:50 AM
I pay a girl to tweet my twitter account. What does that make me?
Tech industry does have alpha guys such as Steve Jobs, who of course, was an anomaly and an almost one of a kind, a complete 360 from the likes of Bill Gates (who look beta) and Mark Zuckerberg (an all around beta).
JS
March 15, 2014 at 2:45 PM
the pirate or terrorist theory is favored by those whose job it is to prevent such hijackings.
if hijacked why would it disappear? what’s the point of hijacking when no one knows it was you, or when there’s no money in it?
the plane disintegrated for purely mechanical reasons and the debris hasn’t been found yet.
jorge videla
March 14, 2014 at 10:59 PM
or like STENDEC it will be found decades later to have crashed into a mountain.
jorge videla
March 14, 2014 at 11:06 PM
This was the 1947 crash in the Andes Mountains of the airliner “Star Dust”. STENDEC was the last transmission sent in morse code, and no one has ever figured out what it meant. The pieces of the wreck were spit out by a glacier 50 years later.
CamelCaseRob
March 15, 2014 at 12:40 PM
hope we have some kh-11s with some spare time over burma
KevinM
March 14, 2014 at 11:36 PM
Mechanical failure is still the most likely situation, with hijacking/terrorism second most likely cause. Boeing should really look into GPS tracking of all it’s planes, my smart phone tracks it’s movement and GPS coordinates for many trips on end, not sure why planes aren’t tracked with something similar and more robust. Large passenger planes with hundreds of lives on board are not the type of things you want disappearing without being able to find them.
L
March 15, 2014 at 1:44 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/your-money/for-boarding-schools-an-evolving-financial-aid-philosophy.html
OT. A world gone mad.
Daniel
March 15, 2014 at 2:14 AM
Someone was self-actualizing on that plane.
MyTwoCents
March 15, 2014 at 2:25 AM
What’s the point of hijacking a plane filled mostly with Han Chinese and a handful of Muslims and then keeping it secret for a week or longer?
If you land the jet on a treeless and deserted one-mile highway where no one could possibly see and report your activity, how do you refuel and perform maintenance on a modern airliner so you get it ready for whatever nefarious purpose you have planned for it in the future?
Do you kill all the passengers after you get the jet on the ground or while in flight? Or are you holding them as hostages for some distant endgame?
How many hijackers are needed to control both the cockpit and the 240 passengers and crew, some of whom have personal communication devices that they presumably could use to contact someone on the ground and let them know what’s happening? Five? Six? More?
Pincher Martin
March 15, 2014 at 3:24 AM
Another theory. There is much enmity, even hate between Malays and Chinese. Malays constitute a little over 50% of the population, but they see Malaysia as their country. The Chinese make all the money and consider Malays to be lazy and stupid. Affirmative action polices are in place to make certain that Malays are not kept out of prestigious positions. Still, I can imagine the resentment of Malays towards Chinese, who are the brains behind anything productive in Malaysia. This flight was going to China, full of Chines Malays, maybe this Malay pilot was looking for vengeance for a lifetime of slights and humiliation.
Daniel
March 15, 2014 at 4:53 AM
You’re right. And Muslims are also more alpha than the beta Confucian Chinese, which exacerbates the situation. In China, there’s very little conflict between the poor and rich Chinese, at least not openly, because both demographics are betafied!
JS
March 15, 2014 at 3:12 PM
The pilot, who apparently knows how to avoid civil radar, likely landed the plane on some uninhabited Island in the Pacific Ocean, then shot all men on board and enslaved the women. Whenever he needs to sleep, he just locks himself inside the cockpit so he doesn’t risk getting his gun taken away by one of his female victims. If he’s careful enough, he might just hold out in his private emirate until his whereabouts are finally discovered.
Nicval74
March 15, 2014 at 7:46 AM
There’s this angle.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/missing-malaysia-airlines-jet-investigation-paying-special-attention-to-chinese-uighur-passenger-20140313-hvifh.html
Plus supposedly the plane was carrying a lot of gold.
Perhaps they should do targeted searches of no-longer-active airfields?
cliff arroyo
March 15, 2014 at 8:31 AM
There have got to be a pretty limited number that could take the plane and be isolated enough to conceal that they did.
mathilda37
March 15, 2014 at 11:52 AM
Could the plane have reached some former USSR republic?
cliff arroyo
March 15, 2014 at 8:32 AM
I think one of the pilots turned off the transponder and turned the plane in a new direction to hijack it. After some time, the other pilot noticed something was up and a wild fight ensued in the cockpit, resulting in the planes erratic behavior toward the end and its eventual crash into the ocean.
CamelCaseRob
March 15, 2014 at 12:44 PM