Posted on 03/17/2014 1:37:17 PM PDT by blam
What Pilots Think About The Crazy New Theory That The Missing Malaysia Jet Used Another Jet To Hide
Alex Davies
March 17, 2014
Not surprisingly, the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 with 239 people on board more than a week ago has led some people to come up with very interesting theories about what might have happened.
On his Tumblr, self-identified hobby pilot and aviation enthusiast Keith Ledgerwood put forward the most elaborate and interesting suggestion we've heard yet.
He argues the 777 could have flown over India and Pakistan, avoiding military radar detection by turning off its communications systems and following a Singapore Airlines 777 so closely the two aircraft "would have shown up as one single blip on the radar."
In the post, Ledgerwood established that the Singapore Airlines flight was in the area.
The collision avoidance systems installed on all modern airliners operate using the transponder, which someone on the Malaysia flight could have turned off. So the Singapore crew wouldn't have detected a plane on their tail, Ledgerwood speculates.
"Once MH370 had cleared the volatile airspaces and was safe from being detected by military radar sites in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan," Ledgerwood writes, "it would have been free to break off from the shadow of SIA68 and could have then flown a path to it’s final landing site."
We asked Michael G. Fortune, a retired pilot who now works as an aviation consultant and expert witness, if that would be possible. After a lengthy pause, he gave us a skeptical "maybe." It would depend on what kind of radar equipment the Singapore 777 had on board, he said, and would require some serious aviation skill to find and stay behind the plane.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Probably a specific drone flying WAY up high watching everything, and another and another so there will be complete 24/7 coverage, plus satellites, HUMINT being inserted nearby and the Avon Lady crew will be activated to drop by.
In any event as soon as it starts to do its rollout its gonna get disintegrated.
news headline next day, “Massive explosion at Iran airfield, witnesses say it was of a nuclear magnitude”
One puzzlement and you may have seen it ... The co-pilot had been looking at aircraft insignia information. For what purpose, I do not know. Think the information was on Facebook and co-pilot had bookmarked a site. Might be another blind alley. By any chance did you see the info anywhere? I appear to have lost that information.
Here’s a recent article on that subject (cellphones and the flight) ...
Questions Over Absence of Cellphone Calls From Missing Flight’s Passengers
I keep seeing references to 45,000 ft and to changes in altitude.
I have never seen any substantiation.
Without a transponder operating on mode C, radar can not determine altitude.
Or at least it could not when I was flying.
I am sure there are sophisticated military radars that can do things I don’t know about, but how much of that is in that area other than on our warships?
So the point is, how do you know what altitudes that aircraft used?
In addition, it was at night and I doubt passengers were even aware of the airplane’s altitude or attitude.
Theory:
This was a theft of an aircraft, with the pilot being the thief but for reasons in which he was misled. Of all the parties involved, he had motive, means, and opportunity.
The pilot is dedicated to Malaysian opposition leader, who is thrown back into prison.
The pilot has committed to help in any way the leadership deems necessary.
Opposition leadership contacts pilot prior to leader’s sentencing, that he may be called upon to perform an act. Planning is undertaken.
The pilot believes this is for ideological reasons, but the reality is someone in the opposition leadership has sold the plane to a criminal enterprise for the purpose of stripping the plane for parts (black market spares sold as new to 3rd world airlines, with maintenance crews pocketing kickbacks)
Pilot’s scheduling lends itself to night of 3/7, morning of 3/8, which is a weekend with lesser air traffic and ATC staffed with ‘B’ crews on weekend duty. The lesser qualified co-pilot will be easier to remove during the act, Beijing run is of sufficient length to achieve alternate destination with some additional fuel, the request of which does not appear out of the ordinary.
Pilot’s family is spirited away prior to the act. Plan is for pilot to be reunited with family in a 3rd country following delivery of aircraft.
Prior to departure an agent for the criminal enterprise, trained in 777 systems is placed aboard the aircraft - waiting in the necessary compartment - for the purpose of disabling necessary systems at designated times (X minutes after wheels up).
Flight deviates from plan during hand-off from Malaysia to Vietnam.
The pilot either:
1. has lured the co-pilot out of the cockpit (because a system is offline... he is dispatched to investigate, and is then killed by the stowaway agent). Or maybe just to fetch some comely lasses for a ride in the cockpit.
or
2. Attempts to kill the co-pilot outright. A struggle may have ensued which accounts for the deviations of altitude.
or
3. Co-pilot, being locked out of the cockpit attempts to organize the passengers for a retake of the aircraft
The pilot takes the plane to higher altitude for purpose of asphyxiating or freezing everyone. Rapid ascent/descent is used to keep those trying to retake the plane off balance. This may not have been a primary objective of the plan, but was a contingency. The stowaway agent from the criminal enterprise is also killed by this action.
The pilot sets the new course to fly across Malaysia to the NW flight corridor. There could be some bribery (or use of other ideologues) involved here for Malaysian ATC and/or military radar to ignore the deviation. Otherwise, they just took the chance that no one would notice. With this much planning however, ‘taking a chance’ seems unlikely.
Once the aircraft is in the NW flight corridor, it is assumed by any other ATC or military to be a flight that has lost it’s transponder. Since ‘this sort of thing happens’ and the aircraft is not deviating from the corridor, no one gets excited.
The flight continues across Myanmar, over the Himalaya’s to land in a former Soviet republic. The aircraft lands at a yet to be identified strip, which for this purpose could be make-shift since there is not goal of flying the plane again.
The pilot delivers the plane to the new owner.
Several hours pass while a debrief occurs and the plane is cleaned of the dead.
The pilot restarts the plane and taxis to to a final destination in the clandestine airstrip. [The final ping from the engines occurs]
The criminal organization then kills the pilot.
The aircraft is currently being stripped. From this point forward, unless every spare placed onto a 777 is serial number matched by Boeing, parts from this aircraft may never be identified as they are destined for 3rd world airlines. I would think there is a good likelihood that Malaysian Airlines will at some point buy a spare part that came from stolen 777.
Conclusion: Crew and passengers lost. Plane stripped of parts. Pilot’s family disappeared (dead). Maybe a team can take out the criminal enterprise, but it’s doubtful anything will ever happen. Final report will be plane lost at sea due to pilot making a political statement.
Need to ask snowden. He probably knows.
My Bad, you’re correct.
Wouldn’t it be easier for China to grab them when they landed in Beijing?
********************************
Yes it would ... they are the only asset I see as worth grabbing ,, the plane is useless and we don’t know what’s in cargo... to me it’s a political statement or a grab for the engineers.
My question is- what if it was not pressurized... would that be a way to subdue those on-board?
Can they choose to de-pressurize it? Is it only a sudden de-pressurization that causes the air masks to fall?
If so, then there is not enough oxygen at that altitude to survive more than a couple of minutes isn’t there?
(The pilot would have to wear oxygen)
I can’t cite the articles (plural) but there were several a few days ago that stated pretty unequivocally that the plane ascended to 45,000, then descended rapidly. I don’t recall (and probably wouldn’t understand) how they determined this.
The answer is that they can not.
No transponder on mode C, no altitude reporting.
Radar in that part of the world is not even up to the standards of US ATC radar.
I have only flown in the US, so I know nothing about ATC in that part of the world except what I read and nothing I read impresses me either with the equipment or the expertise.
Keystone cops comedy.
I’m not sure why it would be necessary to subdue any of the passengers. It’s at night and they can’t see where they’re going. Most of them are going to be asleep, anyway. How do they have any idea of what the heading of the aircraft is?
As far as how much time there is for the oxygen to the passengers ... I read elsewhere that the oxygen output lasts for 12 minutes.
But I haven’t read anywhere that the cabin can be depressurized on purpose - at least not without blowing a hole in the plane ... :-) ...
Pilot on Rush just now repeated that the plane went to 45,000 feet.
This from a very long thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/20fnuz/nyt_malaysian_military_radar_data_shows_missing/
Can a Boeing 777 even make it to 45,000 feet?
Edit: After many attempts on my flight simulator, I got to about 43,000 feet before I stalled the jet.
Edit 2: I tried to build speed by diving the plane. A 20 degree dive from 35,000 feet to 30,000 feet didn’t create enough airspeed to successfully get to 45,000 feet using 15, 20, and 25 degree up angle climbs. I stalled miserably around 39,000 feet.
Edit 3: After dumping all but 24,000 lb of fuel (roughly one hour’s worth) and getting rid of 33,000 lbs of passengers, the plane stalled at 46,000 feet! It wasn’t easy. It took me 10 minutes of careful flying to climb the last 5,000 feet. I know this scenareo is unlikely but I wanted to see what a skinny 777 could do.
Edit 4: It took me 1 minute and 15 seconds to lose 40,000 feet of altitude from a starting altitude of 43,000 feet by doing a 60 degree dive. By the time the plane pulled out of the dive and leveled off at 2,000 feet, it was doing mach 1.117 (769 mph)(1,239 kph). It took me around 3 attempts to successfully do this test. Pulling out of the dive too hard will result in structure over-G and a wing coming off. The plane in this test did not dump fuel and it did have all of it’s passengers. I did fully throttle down during the dive. I let gravity do the work.
American official is right, a lot of this doesn’t make any sense.
REQUEST: If you have a flight simulator, please try to recreate the tests I have done and post the results.
permalink
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/malaysia-plane-up-to-speed/
To demonstrate how this BS got going:
Report: Plane flew low to avoid radar
Malaysian officials on Monday denied knowledge of a newspaper report that the plane may have dropped to an altitude of 5,000 feet to defeat commercial radar coverage. “We are not aware of that report, and that’s a thing the investigative team has to look into. It does not come from us,” Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told reporters in Kuala Lumpur. CNN could not immediately confirm the newspaper’s account.
The report, published Monday by Malaysia’s New Straits Times, said the flight dropped to 5,000 feet after turning back from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route on March 8 and quoted unnamed officials as saying “it’s possible that the aircraft had hugged the terrain in some areas that are mountainous to avoid radar detection.” New Straits Times Editor Farrah Naz Karim told CNN’s “New Day” that the newspaper spoke to sources close to the investigation and asked how flying at that altitude could be done. She added that this is one aspect that investigators could be looking into but it’s all speculation at this point.
Rush’s pilot, who had flown 777s, said that it was in fact possible, and would be one of the options to try to put out a fire. And yes, it is near stall altitude.
When the copilot signed off with the “Good Night”, the aircraft was already out of range of the radar.
And he had already made the turn. This is known from the data link with the aircraft systems.
This was disclosed by a high official with the FAA who appeared on Megan Kelly’s program last night and who stated that this information came directly from FAA investigators on the scene in Malaysia.
Had he been in radar coverage, the controller would have immediately asked him his intentions.
OK, the aircraft is out of radar coverage, they don’t even know at that point that he has made the turn, but they can tell you at what altitude he was flying with radar that does not have that capability?
“The radar used to track the flight after its transponder went dark Saturday morning was no more sophisticated than that used almost 75 years ago by London’s defenders during the Battle of Britain.”
And operated by people who are so irresponsible that they did not question what they did see and who lied about what they did know.
The plane was on fire but flew for for another 7 hours?
The 45,000 ft. thing is like global warming. Say it often enough to enough of the uneducated and it becomes a “fact.”
I have heard the theory that he made the turn as an emergency move to land at an airport.
One does not nonchalantly say “Good night” when the airplane is on fire. Further it has been clearly demonstrated that the crew was intimately familiar with the area, but in going to the airport supposedly to be used for an emergency landing, they overflew an airport that would have met their needs to go to an airport another 140 or so miles farther away.
Pilots on fire don’t think that way.
And on top of that, they have recalculated the turn and new heading and the recalculation does not put it on course to the airport that was to be the emergency landing spot for the fictitious fire.
Now they may have crashed on fire, but it was not for any of the reasons put forth so far.
The aircraft was hijacked, either for something on board, someone on board or to be used for some scheme yet to be discovered.
oooooo k.
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