[Drango]

No idea said the pilots.

Interesting...

[Rokurota]

Everything is easy if you know how to do it.

[al baby]

Great now they are in on the cover up

[exinnj]

Senior pilot was a tech geek who had his own flight simulator at home...

[colorado tanker]

This thing just gets curiouser and curiouser.

[Yossarian]

Which leads to the question which I've had for along time…

…which is: just how well are we checking out everyone who's servicing the planes?

[mountainlion]

The Korea pilots had no idea on how to land a plane without the computer. I suppose one of the stolen passports holders could have been an electronics expert for that model of plane.

[Revolting cat!]

It’s time that somebody brought up an Occam’s Razor to this investigation.

[Izzy Dunne]

the plane's satellite antenna appears to have kept communicating for at least 5 1/2 hours after Malaysia Air MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers' radar.

That's news to me. I heard it was about 4 hours after disappearance, or 5 hours after takeoff, and that was disputed by Boeing and Mal Air anyway.

[Izzy Dunne]

"So, to do this, you'd have to have some degree of premeditation and a lot of knowledge of the aircraft," he says.

That's an incredibly mundane thing to say.

[Vince Ferrer]

From another article...

...And Captain Zaharie was said to be so keen to maintain his high professionalism that he had even set up a flight simulator in his own home.

[Izzy Dunne]

Does anybody think that NPR is worth the money poured into it?

[chrisser]

I don’t know if this story is accurate or not, but, could it be that any pilot who would speak to NPR possibly isn’t the brightest of the bunch?

I know if NPR called me to talk to me about my job, I’d tell them to go pound sand.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

The more I read about this, the more convinced I am that it was some kind of freak, once-in-a-million-years occurrence, and that nothing sinister is involved.

[Unknowing]

There is no such thing as signal intelligence.

There is no such thing as electronic warfare.

There is no such thing as “spoofing.”

Therefore pilots cannot learn anything about that stuff.

[Izzy Dunne]

From a CNN story:

If Malaysia Air Flight 370 was indeed commandeered, the person or people responsible for it knew enough about civil aviation to know how to turn off the transponder. Of course, this is exactly what happened with three out of the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11 so it's a technique that is not unknown.

[Georgia Girl 2]

“That’s caused many to speculate that somebody tried to make this plane vanish,” Brumfiel says. “

And it worked. :-)

[tophat9000]

So the satellite sends out a “Hello” packet... wonder if its a general multcast type hello to all aircraft on net and each aircraft id itself in its reply..because this case is so so strange I'm wondering if someone would “spoof” that aircraft to make people think it was still in the air

[Smokin' Joe]

Let me put it this way. It is strange sometimes who knows how to do what, and who doesn't. Just because someone doesn't have a certificate on their wall and a card in their pocket does not preclude the sort of intensive, almost fanatical study that will have them know a system, a piece of equipment, a program better than perhaps everyone but those who engineered it.

What these pilots know or don't only indicates that whoever turned those systems off (provided someone did) had taken enough time to do their homework and learn how, and that (at least some) pilots normally don't bother or need to learn these things. Their not knowing doesn't preclude someone else knowing, it just indicates the knowledge is apparently not common knowledge among the pilots.

[Jet Jaguar]

A very little bit of studying, it would be very easy to pull the circuit breakers of any/all comm equipment. In heavies, they are accessible by the pilot and crew.

[stlnative]

Can anyone explain this? (Was a experienced pilot flying at this point or not?)

The New York Times, quoting American officials and others familiar with the investigation, said radar signals recorded by the Malaysian military appear to show the airliner climbing to 45,000 feet (about 13,700 meters), higher than a Boeing 777's approved limit, soon after it disappeared from civilian radar, and making a sharp turn to the west. The radar track then shows the plane descending unevenly to an altitude of 23,000 feet (7,000 meters), below normal cruising levels, before rising again and flying northwest over the Strait of Malacca toward the Indian Ocean, the Times reported.