<p>I’m chalking all the misinformation, and conflicting information up to the fact that the information is coming from Malaysia. We are accustomed to a higher lever of expertise here in the US. I’ve also decided to take comfort in believing that the US is working very quietly behind the scenes, and we will find that airplane before it finds us.</p>
<p>“Wasn’t it a redeye? It couldn’t have gone missing during the day.”</p>
<p>But, IIRC, the last satellite ping was at 8:10am, so it appears it was still flying after sunrise. </p>
<p>The Maldive’s low altitude sighting apparently occurred at 6:30 or so AM (assuming that this is accurate and that it was the missing plane). </p>
<p>Not sure if it would have had enough fuel on board to get from there to Pakistan. </p>
<p>I still think that plane needs to be found, if only to make sure it isn’t sitting in Pakistan or some other place ready to be used as a weapon of mass destruction.</p>
<p>“I’m chalking all the misinformation, and conflicting information up to the fact that the information is coming from Malaysia. We are accustomed to a higher lever of expertise here in the US”</p>
<p>Yes we are. If this had happened here, the investigators would have been able to tell you what was in the pilot’s stomachs after the first day. The airline’s GOC could have told them exactly how much fuel was onboard and how far it could possibly fly (depending on the winds), in about five minutes.</p>
<p>My hope is that they actually have a huge amount of information already, and they are only announcing little bits of it to the press, making everyone speculate. But when the officials make big, stupid pronouncements and generalizations as if they KNOW something they can’t possibly know, or it turns out to be wrong, I don’t think that helps at all. I can barely even watch this, and might turn off the tv for a few months until they actually have some facts.</p>
<p>The Maldives are comprised of about 1200 islands of which only 200 are inhabited. I think the speculation was that this had been planned for a very long time. The plane landed on one of the uninhabited islands to refuel and then continued on to Pakistan. A bit of a stretch in my mind but this is what was postulated on a talk radio show.</p>
<p>How could a 777 land on an uninhabited island with no runway, let alone refuel with no fuel depot?</p>
<p>I think what haunts so many of us following this story is the thought of that huge plane flying through the night and into the breaking day with a planeload of passengers almost surely already dead (as evidenced by the complete absence of cell phone traffic).</p>
<p>I think I heard a bit ago on the radio that the plane, those in the Maldives saw, has been determined not to be the missing plane. </p>
<p>3Trees the speculation was that the those things were part of the long range planning and were there specifically for this plane. I am of the opinion that unfortuatnely this plane is at the bottom of the ocean.</p>
<p>The New York Times just reported that Malaysia has asked the FBI to review the pilot’s flight simulator and get back the data he deleted. Apparently the FBI can reconstruct this data better than anyone. It was suggested in the article that his deletion on February 3 may simply have been part of his “housekeeping” on the simulator – nothing nefarious. </p>
<p>Hard to imagine you could covertly construct a 13,000 ft runway without being picked up by satellite. Ever seen those satellite photos of suspected nuclear fuel sites in Iran? You can pracitcally count the buttons on the shirts of the guys walking around.</p>
<p>I agree, this plane is mostly on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.</p>
<p>Next we’ll find out the plane over the Maldives was a Cessna 150. A 777 is a very large aircraft, and would need a long runway that was stressed for that kind of weight to takeoff and land. I really doubt anyone could or would build such a runway on an uninhabited island for that purpose. The idea that someone is planning on using this aircraft for no good is the most unlikely scenario in my mind (except for perhaps the aliens theory). You wouldn’t hijack an aircraft going the wrong direction and then fly it 7-8 hours to your destination, extremely low on fuel. Why not hijack an aircraft closer to your destination, so you can spend less time trying to hide and be able to land while it’s still dark?</p>
<p>There are reports on the CNBC website and elsewhere the the Maldives’ sighting is/has proved to be false.</p>
<p>The comments accompanying the article are not uplifting, as every nutcase in the world is apparently focused on this situation. Signs the apocalypse is upon us.</p>
<p>I am always dismayed at these situations because the people who report the news constantly reveal how truly ignorant many of them are, not to mention some who are not very bright. </p>
<p>
FINALLY! Now we are involved. I don’t care if the deletion may have only been housekeeping. The FBI will be able to figure out if the pilot was planning something.</p>
<p>Why do some of you think the plane is in the Indian Ocean? I’m asking because I don’t understand why the plane would have flown for 7 hours before dropping into the ocean. Why not head for the ocean immediately? This of course is assuming that all the passengers were killed soon after the left turn was made and the plane reached an altitude of 45,000. I just don’t understand going to all that trouble, and flying under the radar, and then just giving up and dropping into the Indian Ocean.</p>
<p>“Hard to imagine you could covertly construct a 13,000 ft runway without being picked up by satellite. Ever seen those satellite photos of suspected nuclear fuel sites in Iran? You can pracitcally count the buttons on the shirts of the guys walking around.”</p>
<p>I don’t know 3Trees but things do seem to go missing, at least in that part of the world. I do agree busdriver11, that if the objective was to crash the plane, it is odd that whoever was in control flew it for 7 hours and then took a nosedive into the ocean. But I am thinking that maybe that was the purpose of the ascent to 45,000 feet - an attempt to render everyone, including the pilot unconscious. Then if you are programmed to auto-pilot you just cruise until you run out of fuel. A painless suicide. What ever happened to the report that the pilot’s family had moved out the day before the crash?</p>
<p>Media has covered hijacks, fires, shadowing and alien abductions, even Lost and Tintin flight 714 parallels which we briefly mentioned in page 7 of this thread but can we touch on Boeing failure or question the standard operating procedure in the case of all communication systems failure?</p>
<p>If there was a mechanical failure I question the redundancy of the systems because it seems ACARs and transponders can both fail or be switched off. No ELT signal has been detected. The only thing we have is Malaysian and Thai primary radar detection (which took a while to be reported btw) and the plane’s satellite handshakes with Inmarsat. Does the plane have to be flying for the satellite handshakes to occur? Can the plane be on ground and powered up and its SATCOM link can still ping Inmarsat? Sort of like my car’s NAV is working as long as I started the car but I don’t have to be actually moving the car. </p>
<p>If the pilots are incapacitated for whatever reason and cannot send distress or location signals and if the systems in the plane fails to transmit its most recent location and no backup system to that system then how can we prevent the MH370 fiasco from happening again? If any of the systems for tracking is optional because it’s a paid service, shouldn’t it be required to be active especially during times when a plane is flying over a dead zone area where there is a handover from one country’s Air Traffic Control to another country’s ATC? I guess commercial planes are not monitored and tracked closely during the entire flight. Is there a way to find out which airlines subscribe to a service where the aircraft automatically sends location data at certain periods? This tragic event just breaks my heart for all the families affected.</p>
<p>If there was a catastrophic event on board that aircraft, it would have had to be one that immediately took the plane out of the air. Otherwise, as in almost every other catastrophic situation, there would be some window of opportunity, no matter how small, for the pilots to put out a distress call. Since it is clear from search efforts that the plane did not go down within an hour and a half after take off, and in fact changed course and flew for quite some time, my mind leads me to rule out the catastrophic event theory.</p>
<p>Harvestmoon, based on the pings we can safely rule out an immediate catastrophic event for MH370 but I’m still not ruling out busdriver’s initial decompression theory prompting the pilots to enter an alternate route but became incapacitated thereafter, systems malfunctioned but the plane went on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.</p>
<p>My current theory is that this situation was created in order to bait the “news” media into ignoring the Crimea and Putin’s de facto invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine agreed to give up nuclear weapons in exchange for recognition of its borders. Now they and many other nations must be thinking that nukes are the only safeguard. (It was either this or a sex scandal.)</p>
<p>.The big problem with all those emergency-diversion theories is that apparently the last radio communication between the co-pilot and Malaysian ATC, which was completely anodyne, occurred 12 minutes after the plane had veered sharply off course.</p>