Malaysia Airlines loses contact with plane carrying 239 people

Search and rescue has just released an update on their search efforts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Someone was on Reddit.

 

In all seriousness though, why is the search still being held in the water north/west of Vietnam when the Malaysian military confirmed they lost contact with the plane when it was flying west over the other side of the country, opposite of its intended route?

Finally a perspective with some sense:

 

Cutting Through the Bullshit Surrounding Flight MH370

 

 

Sometimes planes crash. But in a post-9/11 world, that story isn’t quite interesting enough. We can't just report that Flight MH370 crashed and we don’t know where or why yet; instead, we have to be able to relay the plot of exactly what happened, using whatever scraps of information we can find.

 

Sprawling news organisations struggle to feed 24-hour news channels and rolling liveblogs with the meagre rations available, each morsel sniffed and inspected and toyed with hour-after-hour until every last drop of flavour has been extracted from it. And when the facts run out, you can always rely on the efforts of experts-cum-story-tellers, spinning yarns from the thinnest and most fragile of evidence.

 

The Boeing 777 is the nearest thing to real magic that most of us will experience in our lifetimes. It contains three million parts from 500 suppliers, working in perfect harmony for millions upon millions of miles, maintaining a safety record any car manufacturer would kill for. To call it a miracle would be an insult to the skill and effort of the thousands of engineers responsible for building the craft, but each time one of these contraptions makes a successful flight it should be hailed as an extraordinary achievement.

 

It’s a testament to how safe modern planes are – and how skewed our sense of risk is – that a single crash has generated more headlines than the nearly 2,000 people who died on Britain’s roads last year. The loss of Flight MH370 is undoubtedly a tragedy and an utterly horrible thing for the passengers and their families to go through. But how many lives are lost and how many families are affected each day in accidents involving cars, motorbikes and bicycles?

 

That’s not the only thing the press have failed to comprehend in their race to build stories and attract readers. Probably the most damaging misunderstanding has been around the stolen passport story, which has been used in the last three days to build an absurd "terrorism" narrative around the disaster on the basis of basically zero evidence whatsoever.

 

Two passports used on the flight were discovered to have been lost or stolen, suggesting the passengers were travelling under false IDs. That, along with the large Muslim population in the region, was enough to prompt theories about the disappearance being related to terrorism, and for the Telegraph to talk about a "terror fear" – the ultimate combination of fear and terror – over "mystery passengers".

 

Even as Interpol confirmed that two passports used on the flight matched records in its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (STLD) database, they also pointed out that up to 40 million IDs could be in circulation, and that checks in most countries were so lax that “passengers were able to board planes more than a billion times without having their passports screened against Interpol's databases”.

 

It turns out that bogus passports are surprisingly common, but even if they weren’t, do terrorists generally even use stolen passports? The 9/11 hijackers didn’t.

 

However, none of that stopped the media from clinging doggedly to their narrative. By Tuesday, "air security expert" Philip Baum, appearing in the Daily Mail, had pieced together – albeit hypothetically – a scheme that had the East Turkestan Islamic Movement at the heart of a militant plot to down the aircraft. “Could it be that ETIM, having failed to gain international publicity through its domestic attacks, has decided to go international?” If so, they’re keeping pretty bloody quiet about it.

 

One of the more ludicrous theories was the accusation, promoted by the Mail, that 20 employees from the semi-conductor firm Freescale lost on the flight were involved in some kind of electronic warfare experiment. “This could include ‘cloaking’ technology that uses a hexagonal array of glasslike panels to bend light around an object, such as a plane, according to a report in Beforeitsnews.com,” the paper speculated, neglecting to mention that other stories on the site include gems like, “Alien Technology Discovered in Man’s Tooth?!”

 

At the farthest end of the making-shit-up spectrum sits Mike “Health Ranger” Adams, the author of Natural News – a site that specialises in peddling bullshit quackery to anyone dumb enough to take the link bait plastered up on Facebook. Slate’s Brian Palmer observed recently that Adams has become adept at exploiting the social network, with “an uncanny ability to move sophisticated readers from harmless dietary balderdash to medical quackery to anti-government zealotry”. Natural News has its own take on Facebook: “Worse than meth: Facebook is altering your mind and turning you into a slave” – which sounds like something Susan Greenfield might say when she’s drunk. Natural News posts on Facebook probably won’t enslave you, but they may make you an idiot.

 

Adams has his own theory about Flight 370, if you can call six brain-farts and a non-sequitur a "theory". As with most conspiracy theories, it takes a series of barely-connected, context-deprived "facts" – drawn largely from the observer’s own ignorance – and adds a strong dose of paranoid finger pointing, but fails to draw any sort of cohesive framework together to hang a plausible story on.

 

To the pseudo-religious mind of the conspiracy theorist, the failure to find the black box or floating debris after four days isn’t simply a sign of how difficult it is to find a tiny box in a vast deep sea (the flight recorder on Air France flight 447 took two years to locate), but evidence of dark, mysterious forces at work.

 

“If we never find the debris, it means some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet, which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence,” Adams postulated. “If there does exist a weapon with such capabilities, whoever controls it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power. “

 

It’s easy to mock internet conspiracy theorists, but what they’re doing isn’t that far removed from the psychology at play in the mainstream media. They’re all filling the vacuum with their own stories; it’s just that some restrict their stories to slightly more plausible territory. There’s just as little evidence for a terrorist attack as there is for a missile strike, and both stories have been built around the idea of a monster under a bed. For conspiracy theorists, it’s the US government or the New World Order; for the Daily Mail, it’s Muslim extremists with scary-sounding names.

 

The whole scenario sounds almost religious, and perhaps, in a way, it is. It all seems to come back to a deep-seated need for somebody – some unseen hand – to be in control of events. As David Aaronovitch pointed out in Voodoo Histories, the alternative is, in many ways, more frightening – that the universe doesn’t really care whether we live or die, that it has no respect for the narratives we build around our lives and that death can simply just happen, random and unplanned.

 

The irony is that, buried in this avalanche of speculation, there are some really interesting stories that have been largely ignored. How is it, for example, that for all the supposed increases in airline security in the wake of 9/11, checks at airports are so bad that people with stolen passports can apparently travel at will? And why is it that in an era of high speed 4G broadband, when 40-year-old technology can transmit data back from beyond the edge of the solar system, we still have to send ships and divers to retrieve data from a plane, rather than simply transmitting it in real time?

 

To me, these questions – and others – are far more interesting than invisible Muslim militant groups or government laser beams.

 

MORE FROM VICE – Cutting Through Even More Bullshit Surrounding Flight MH370

 

@mjrobbins

Written by: Martin Robbins

Mar 11 2014

 

Original Article

Someone was on Reddit.

 

In all seriousness though, why is the search still being held in the water north/west of Vietnam when the Malaysian military confirmed they lost contact with the plane when it was flying west over the other side of the country, opposite of its intended route?

 

Because it has not been confirmed it did.

 

Chinese satellite images that were said to show debris from a missing Malaysian airliner were released by mistake, Malaysia's transport minister says.

 

Hishammuddin Hussein also denied a US report that the Boeing 777 might have flown for hours after contact with air traffic control was lost.

 

Mr Hussein told reporters at Kuala Lumpur International Airport that the Chinese embassy in the Malaysian capital had said the satellite images were released by mistake and "did not show any debris from MH370".

 

The grainy satellite images were released by China's State Administration of Science on Wednesday.

 

Mr Hussein also denied a report in the Wall Street Journal that the plane had sent engine data to the ground for more than four hours after it lost contact with air traffic control.

 

He said that his team had spoken to Malaysian Airlines and Rolls-Royce, the engine's manufacturers, who both said the report was "inaccurate".

 

"The last transmission from the aircraft was at 01:07 which indicated that everything was normal," Mr Hussein said.

 

How long does it take for these people to find their house keys in the morning?

Engine maker saying the plane flew for 4 more hours after they dissapeared off radar.

Engine maker saying the plane flew for 4 more hours after they dissapeared off radar.

Oh ffs you lot are just as bad, check my post above yours. Roll Royce say inaccurate.

Finally a perspective with some sense:

 

 

 

Original Article

 

 

OK... So the author is lamenting the fact that a missing plane with 250 people on board is NEWS? Plane crashes are ALWAYS news. Because they happen RARELY, which makes them NEWSWORTHY.

 

This one is especially NEWSWORTHY, because, unlike most air crashes, WE HAVEN'T FOUND THE fcuking PLANE YET!!! And that leaves a wide array of possibilities to the imagination. Some are more out there than others, but they are a bit fascinating.

 

Third of course is that this plane took off from one of Global Terrorisms favorite regions in the fcuking world. Is it proof of terrorism? Of course not, but suffice it to say, its worth looking into.

 

Finally, the carnival that has been the Malaysian Governments response to all this is itself NEWSWORTHY.

 

Then he goes on to attack every freakshow webpage on the net, as if anybody gives a flying shit what FREAKSHOW WEBPAGES HAVE TO SAY, except, apparently, the author himself.

 

Yes... Its a big fcuking ocean, and finding a plane under these circumstances takes time, but other than saying "I'm just cooler than all of you because Im so detached and above it all", I dont really know what he brings to the conversation?

 

He laments the circus by becoming a lion tamer?

 

 

Oh ffs you lot are just as bad, check my post above yours. Roll Royce say inaccurate.

 

Did Rolls Royce say that (I don't even know what "not accurate" means.... Does it mean "not true" or does it mean it flew for 3 hours instead of 4?). I don't know who to believe any more... Every ten minutes somebody says "hey, look at this possibility" and Malaysia says "no". They really look like they're trying to hide something at this point, which is weird...

Wall Street Journal says yes (source cited as "US Investigators")

 

Malaysia (who seems to be more confused than I am) sais no

 

and

 

"Boeing and Rolls-Royce have yet to comment."

 

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/S...0MDEwMzExNDMyWj

 

No doubt this whole thing is confusing as crap. The information changes twice a day and seems to always contradict itself.

OK... Its becoming obviously clear what's going on here.

 

The Malaysian government and Malaysia air are in full damage control mode. Nobody knows what happened to the plane but none of the scenarios is good for the government or the airlines, with varying degrees of embarrassment/culpability on their part. Finding the plane is secondary to saving face at this point.

 

 

OK... Its becoming obviously clear what's going on here.

 

The Malaysian government and Malaysia air are in full damage control mode. Nobody knows what happened to the plane but none of the scenarios is good for the government or the airlines, with varying degrees of embarrassment/culpability on their part. Finding the plane is secondary to saving face at this point.

 

 

 

that sounds about right

Finding the plane is secondary to saving face at this point.

 

 

 

Agreed, but they are doing a horrible job of saving face as well. They are apparently denying that they raided one of the pilots homes now as well.

 

 

OK... Its becoming obviously clear what's going on here.

 

The Malaysian government and Malaysia air are in full damage control mode. Nobody knows what happened to the plane but none of the scenarios is good for the government or the airlines, with varying degrees of embarrassment/culpability on their part. Finding the plane is secondary to saving face at this point.

 

Exactly.

The relatives and family at those news conferences seem to have had this same thing figured out days ago. Throwing water bottles at these turkeys should be just the beginning. What a nightmare.

Agreed, but they are doing a horrible job of saving face as well. They are apparently denying that they raided one of the pilots homes now as well.

Third world governments are usually terrible at this shit. In a lot of these cultures, saying "we dont know", is a sign of weakness, and looking weak is an invitation for trouble. Plus, they aren't used to dealing with a free and hostile press. The press says, "could it have been terrorism?", instead of saying, "we cant't comment on that, because we just dont have the facts yet, and its an open investigation", they say, "No!" Because thats enough to tell the local press. "shut up and dont ask us again, its bad for tourism and makes us look bad," plus they think they sound decisive, authoritative and command respect when they say it.

 

The rest of the world hears that reported by the independent press and thinks "country run by morons."

 

 

OK... Its becoming obviously clear what's going on here.

 

The Malaysian government and Malaysia air are in full damage control mode. Nobody knows what happened to the plane but none of the scenarios is good for the government or the airlines, with varying degrees of embarrassment/culpability on their part. Finding the plane is secondary to saving face at this point.

 

Even the Chinese turn around and say the satellite images that were coughed up yesterday weren't even supposed to be released. This is a clusterf*** beyond comprehension. Seems like its a never-ending exercise in trying to save face.

 

I have no problem with a search of this scale taking time with the miles they have to cover, most of it being moving and changing ocean water. That is understandable. What is the time frame for an objective organization to come in and take over? ICAO, NTSB? Problem is, would the Malaysians even consider this seeing as how they want to limit any embarrassing details about their handling of the investigation?

Third world governments are usually terrible at this shit. In a lot of these cultures, saying "we dont know", is a sign of weakness, and looking weak is an invitation for trouble. Plus, they aren't used to dealing with a free and hostile press. The press says, "could it have been terrorism?", instead of saying, "we cant't comment on that, because we just dont have the facts yet, and its an open investigation", they say, "No!" Because thats enough to tell the local press. "shut up and dont ask us again, its bad for tourism and makes us look bad," plus they think they sound decisive, authoritative and command respect when they say it.

 

The rest of the world hears that reported by the independent press and thinks "country run by morons."

 

 

Malaysian Airlines has had some serious financial issues lately, and since they picked up their A380s they are BURNING through cash. The Malaysian government essentially tells MAS what do to...they forced MAS to pick up A380s as trophies...

 

So yeah, view MAS and the government as one in the same, doing damage control.

 

I just dont see how a 777 can be flying around and nobody on the ground is paying any attention to it. This "we lost contact" is pure bullshit because nobody on the ground was obviously watching it or paying attention to it in the first place. Its obvious that the way they realized it crashed is because the plane never showed up to its destination, not because they noticed it fell off radar or went radio silent.

I just dont see how a 777 can be flying around and nobody on the ground is paying any attention to it. This "we lost contact" is pure bullshit because nobody on the ground was obviously watching it or paying attention to it in the first place. Its obvious that the way they realized it crashed is because the plane never showed up to its destination, not because they noticed it fell off radar or went radio silent.

 

 

Theres two ways. 1. Its not over ground. Its over ocean. And there just arent radar batteries in the middle of the water. And. 2. Transponder went off. No transponder, theres nothing to see. Atc radar is about routing known objects to keep them from hitting each other. It goes off the premise that there are people controlling those objects that also dont want to hit each other. So they leave their transponder on and follow atc instructions.

 

Military radar are looking for Unidentified objects. But in peacetime, yeah. Nobody is watching a plane that isnt acting like a threat.

Meanwhile in Iran, *facepalm*

Truth appears to be anything that is denied.

Planes communication shut down separately. Mechanical failure not a factor. Shit just for real.

Planes communication shut down separately. Mechanical failure not a factor. Shit just for real.

 

Source?

Planes communication shut down separately. Mechanical failure not a factor. Shit just for real.

 

I saw that on the cnn article. Comms went down at 107 and transponder not till 121 or something. Gets crazier everyday.

who ever said cover up is on to it.