Search on after Malaysia Airlines flight vanishes

[cronus]

Have they still not found anything conclusive?

No, the opener was prescient.

[mistermack]

Have they still not found anything conclusive?

In a way, they have. They've found no debris, in the last contact area. That's fairly conclusive.
They've found the pings that the engine transponders kept sending. Some say for five hours, others say for seven. That's conclusive that the plane didn't ditch for that time. It might also indicate where the plane ended up.
And the crash indicator didn't send. So either it finally went into the water, or landed somewhere.
It's fairly conclusive that it either landed safely, or ditched, but didn't crash on land.

I think the relatives still have a faint hope.

It looks like something SMERSH might have done. Maybe James Bond is sorting the mess out now, if he can keep it in his pants long enough.

[Hermit]

It's a Russian plot. They want the Ukraine off the news.

[JimC]

A Russian pilot? I thought he was Malaysian!

[Faithfree]

There was one Russian on board, maybe he plotted to be the pilot?

[Warren Dew]

The next question is: Who hijacked it?

And why?

There's a wide range of possibilities isn't there. The crew? They must have had numbers to hijack a crew and control flight for several hours? They didn't want anyone knowing where they had gone? Was it a gold carrier? They may have used a decoy beacon to mislead authorities that it flew seawards? and actually landed it on a jungle based airstrip from WW2 that no one knows about. Shot the passengers and took 500 million in gold bullion. Could make a movie?

All of the old abandoned WW2 airstrips in the jungle I’ve seen now have trees growing out of them, and would not be long enough for a 777. The latest info suggests the plane was still transmitting pings for about 7 hours after the transponder was switched off. For some reason the satellite ping data is suggesting two possible corridors, one from northern Thailand to the Turkmenistan/Kazakhstan junction area, the other from Indonesia to a point in the southern Indian Ocean. The 7 hours suggests the plane flew to its full distance range (or was at least still switched on until that time), so unless it was circling or running on the ground, it is likely to have made it to the far ends of those corridors. The second corridor is a suicide route and makes little sense. If the goal was just to crash the plane to would have been more sensible to do it as early as possible, to avoid the risk of being overpowered. The second route could have plenty of potential hijack scenarios. The desert plains of Turkmenistan/Kazakhstan/whatever-stan have plenty of isolated dry lake beds etc where one might land a big plane. The crash beacon never went off. The 7 hours mean it might have been at least first light in those areas, much better for landing, though I haven’t checked that. Of course it was probably just alien abduction all along, and those anal probes are working overtime.

BTW the northern Thailand to Turkmenistan/Kazakhstan corridor is on a direct line to the Crimea, although the plane didn’t have enough fuel to get to there. Two passengers were Ukrainian, and one Russian. Probably just coincidence.

The corridors are based on calculations from the way the pings work.

The Turkmenistan/Kazakhstan corridor would be pretty consistent with hijacking by Uighur militants.

[FBM]

Wtf. Isn't anyone working out a way to blame the French?

[JimC]

Landing in the Turkmenistan/Kazakhstan corridor would allow this scenario, by islamic militants of one stripe or another:

1. Land, disembark passengers, camouflage plane
2. Execute and bury passengers
3. Refuel plane, and fill it with additional fuel and/or explosives (this may take time)
4. Take off, and crash into a nuclear power station in either Russia or China
5. Enjoy virgins

[macdoc]

Nuclear power station would shrug it off - they are meant to withstand that tho the rods in the pools would be tossed around and thats bad.
The reactor itself would not be touched....

There are other targets like major dams etc that are vulnerable....

A second strike on New York tho would be atrocious and the plane has the range.

[JimC]

Nuclear power station would shrug it off - they are meant to withstand that tho the rods in the pools would be tossed around and thats bad.
The reactor itself would not be touched....

There are other targets like major dams etc that are vulnerable....

A second strike on New York tho would be atrocious and the plane has the range.

Do you really think a Soviet era nuclear reactor, or a current Chinese reactor would survive a large plane, packed with explosives or fuel, diving at full throttle straight at the containment dome?

I think there would be a catastrophic breach of the core, and the release of a shitload of radioactive waste...

[cronus]

No one mentioned zombie attack yet? Surely that would explain the loss of contact for so long? Zombies on a plane....I have the movie rights....

[macdoc]

o you really think a Soviet era nuclear reactor, or a current Chinese reactor would survive a large plane, packed with explosives or fuel, diving at full throttle straight at the containment dome?

I think there would be a catastrophic breach of the core, and the release of a shitload of radioactive waste...

There are no reactors without containment domes.
People are overly fearful of radioactivity....it's hilarious how stupid they get about it.

We had dozens of air burst hydrogen bombs...something like trying to breach a nuke containment even if it was marginally successful would not even be a blip on the background radiation.

Now packing it full of dirty radioactive waste from hospitals etc and blowing up a downtown - that would be nasty to deal with.

For your amusement read throught this thread where fearmongering OP gets his ass handed to him by people that actually work with nuclear gear including decontamination.
I know Ben Burch IS a nuclear engineer and there are others with real world experience

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=274775

and another gets the same drubbing
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=275144

[JimC]

o you really think a Soviet era nuclear reactor, or a current Chinese reactor would survive a large plane, packed with explosives or fuel, diving at full throttle straight at the containment dome?

I think there would be a catastrophic breach of the core, and the release of a shitload of radioactive waste...

There are no reactors without containment domes.
People are overly fearful of radioactivity....it's hilarious how stupid they get about it.

We had dozens of air burst hydrogen bombs...something like trying to breach a nuke containment even if it was marginally successful would not even be a blip on the background radiation.

Now packing it full of dirty radioactive waste from hospitals etc and blowing up a downtown - that would be nasty to deal with.

For your amusement read throught this thread where fearmongering OP gets his ass handed to him by people that actually work with nuclear gear including decontamination.
I know Ben Burch IS a nuclear engineer and there are others with real world experience

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=274775

and another gets the same drubbing
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=275144

Our own MiM is a nuclear engineer. I've researched the engineering of nuclear reactors as part of the course I teach on nuclear physics.

Perhaps recent containment domes have been built with defences against such a terrorist attack, but in the past, they were radiation shields, primarily, and designed to contain internal blasts rather than external impacts of the magnitude involved. Not that that helped in either Fukishima or Chernobyl...

[mistermack]

They just released the information that one of the main transponders was switched off as the plane first reached the coast of Malaysia, before the final voice communication with the Malaysian air-traffic control. They said several days ago that the last voice message gave no clue that there was anything wrong, and sounded normal. Which sounds suspicious now that it's known that something irregular was already happening at the time.

That's obviously why they are now searching the homes of the pilot and co-pilot, and going through the pilots flight simulator. I'm surprised that they didn't do that earlier.

They need to analyse the recording of the last message, and make sure whether it's the pilot, or co-pilot, or somebody else.

[klr]

Surely some of the passengers must have been in mobile phone contact at some point? Even if they suspected nothing amiss, there should have been some outgoing text messages during those hours.