I don't see any reason to discount the odds of the plane having an actual major mechanical/electrical event and secondary (non-pilot) crew trying to make the best of the situation before eventually crashing in the middle of the ocean.
The plane passed back over land, so the absence of cellphone contact from passengers seems to rule out this idea, unless the plane was depressurized and everyone, or almost everyone, became unconscious quite quickly.
I'm thinking that some people would attempt to send text messages, which would be queued and automatically sent when the phone was in range of a tower again.
It only needs one person to do this, out of hundreds aboard, to give us a clue what happened. Nothing has been reported. If anyone had received a message, we should have heard about it.
The phones will ping just by being in range, you dont need to queue a message. Nothing in your argument makes (say) hijacking more likely than mechanical issues.
>The phones will ping just by being in range, you dont need to queue a message.
Yes, that's true, but it is not so useful, because it would not add much information to what we already know. A message from a passenger would give some clues about what happened.
>Nothing in your argument makes (say) hijacking more likely than mechanical issues.
In the absence of more evidence, I prefer the simplest theory.
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The simplest possible hijacking theory relies on one event:
1. A rogue pilot, acting alone, incapacitates the other pilot, disables the transponder, and incapacitates the passengers and crew by depressurizing the plane.
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The malfunction theory relies on an event that has all the following complex series of effects:
1 disables all communications ability suddenly
2 deactivates the transponder, and then disables a data transmitter system a few minutes later, after the plane has begun to turn
3 incapacitates most of the passengers and pilots swiftly, but without incapacitating everyone aboard
4 somehow prevents the person(s) in control of the plane from using a mobile phone when they are over land
Both theories suffer from the issue that a passenger or crew could have attempted to send a text message before they were incapacitated, which would have been transmitted when the plane passed over land, but apparently nobody did this. Passengers only have a few minutes of emergency oxygen, but crew have more, I think.
> Yes, that's true, but it is not so useful, because it would not add much information to what we already know.
It might add plenty of information. It tells us the plane did not pass near a cell phone tower at all which at minimum rules out all the "plane landed safely at x/y/z" theories. Even if it passes over land, many of those are weaker signals and not going to pick up at all so we can rule out any argument based on whether people tried to send text messages or not.
> The simplest possible hijacking theory relies on one event:
Wait so in one case you count 4 things as "one event" and in the other case you count 4 things as a "complex series of effects"?
I honestly don't see the difference: sure one pilot could have done everything. There are also single things that can happen to a plane that could generate all those effects. I don't claim that is more likely than a hijacking or suicidal pilot but it seems about as reasonable as either.
I do think the hijacking and pilot suicide angles have serious issues with the facts that people tend to hand wave away.
Based on the knowledge demonstrated by the hijackers, I'd say #3 seems fairly likely, with #1 being the failure mode, but it doesn't seem like a standard hijacking. #2 doesn't seem to account for the maintenance info, and if the pilot wanted to kill themselves, why would they turn off the transponders before they did?
One thing that sort of caught my attention, if you presume that they wanted to capture a plane rather than hold it hostage, is that it's a long-range variant, with a range of 7,725 nautical miles, enough to cross the Pacific and have a couple thousand miles of range left over.
Major crippling event and attempted recovery seems to also be more plausible than #2.
EDIT: Never mind, insurance explanation for #2 makes sense.
Interesting information about the long range aspect. I wonder if this jet could be used as a weapon in the near future. God speed to the technicians investigating.
Yeah, that was one of the few good reasons I could think of for capturing a plane like that and not asking for ransom. I'm sure there are others, planes are valuable, but possibly only with fairly high end infrastructure, and I can't imagine trying to fence a plane.
Question #1: Who would want to hijack a plane full of Chinese passengers?
Question #2: Given the answer to #1, where could people like that land a plane?
Question #3: Isn't Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region about the same distance from the point of disappearance as Beijing, the flight's original destination?
Question #4: If the pilot wanted to avoid detection, what better flight path than north through the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh, the Tibetan plateau and the Himalayas at night?
Question #5: With the rampant speculation about this incident, and every kind of wild idea, why haven't we heard this wild idea anywhere?
"We have many radar systems operating in this area, but nothing was
picked up," Rear Admiral Sudhir Pillai, chief of staff of India's
Andamans and Nicobar Command, told Reuters. "It's possible that the
military radars were switched off as we operate on an 'as required' basis."
Separately, a defense source said that India did not keep its radar
facilities operational at all times because of cost. Asked what
the reason was, the source said: "Too expensive."
3. is really unlikely. Where would you land a Boeing 777 without anybody noticing? The aircraft is too big to land on an improvised or remote runway. And runways which could be used are usually at active airports, near towns, or on military installations.
And why didn't the hijackers contact the authorities by now?
Do you have any sort of special knowledge here? I've read numerous stories which quoted people with aviation knowledge who suggested that a 777 could be put down on a wide variety of surfaces including but not limited to hard dirt and stretches of highway. The latter, of course, might attract some attention unless the highway was abandoned, but I imagine there are any number of hard, flat surfaces of greater than 3000 feet in length in the world, for example in the Kazakh steppes, that may be remote enough to make a covert landing mostly under the cover of night.
We've been told in ideal conditions, low weight (fuel mostly gone from burning or dumping it) and about sea level altitude a generic 777 can land on an 800 meter/2,600 foot strip. Add weight and/or altitude and the length goes up, but not impossibly.
We also don't have to assume a successful landing, just an intent of one, e.g. the plane could have crashed before then or the landing could have been ugly.
I think if it was a successful hijacking we would know by now. The hijackers would of made demands by now if they kept hostages, or taken credit for it and named whatever offended them causing them to do it.
Hijackers usually have a motive, and historically the motives typically involved some form of monetary exchange or demands for political asylum. You don't generally hijack a plane unless you either want to go somewhere or you want something in return.
That doesn't mean it's impossible for a hijacking to be done quietly, with no demands, but it's further complicated by the fact that the aircraft has to land somewhere. It's also somewhat difficult to hide a plane as large as a 777, much less find an airport to land it where it'll go unnoticed. This increases the likelihood that if it were a hijacking, it was probably similar to PSA flight 1771 [1] and more inline with a murder/suicide than a ransom.
Although, imagine the possibilities terrorists could use a 777 for. Load it with explosives, biological weapons, radioactive materials... It's enough to make a politician want to ban flying altogether. Let's hope they don't find my comment.
Regardless, I'm not especially comfortable wagering a bet on the cause of MA370's disappearance. My initial instinct was to presume foulplay or an in-flight fire. Now I'm not so sure.
If the aircraft isn't found, I suspect this might become the mystery of the century.
That category includes hijacked or stolen planes that were thought to have been deliberately crashed, not only suicide attempts by the official pilot of a scheduled flight. There are also seemingly cases there of suicide by passengers not involving a full-fledged hijacking but involving a crash.
EDIT: I tried to go through all of the Wikipedia articles in this category and subcategorize them according to perpetrator and circumstance.
* Passenger suicide resulting in crash (1)
* Passenger attack against pilots resulting in crash (6, including all Sept. 11 attacks)
* Suicide attempt by pilot resulting in deaths of others aboard (1)
* Suicide by pilot resulting in deaths of others aboard (2)
* Disputed suicide by pilot resulting in deaths of others aboard (2)
* Suicide by pilot not during scheduled flight, with no passengers aboard (2)
The latter cases both involved disgruntled pilots who wanted to get back at their employers. Unfortunately, in one of the two cases the pilot also succeeded in murdering, not passengers, but coworkers on the ground. (One of the fatal passenger-attacks-pilot cases also involved a disgruntled airline employee who was not a pilot.)
I imagine there might be other cases of general aviation pilots deliberately crashing their planes to commit suicide without intending to injure anyone else. Many of those cases may never have been identified as suicides by crash investigators.
... yeah, apparently there were 16 identified general aviation suicides (typically killing only the pilot) in the U.S. between 1993 and 2002 and 8 between 2003 and 2012.
Thank you for researching and summarizing this. I wouldn't know how to find and interpret this information, so I think this is very interesting and useful.
1. Hijacking gone wrong and the plane is in the ocean.
2. Pilot suicide and the plane is in the ocean.
3. Hijacking gone right and the plane is parked somewhere and all the passengers are dead and/or being held captive (least likely option).
That's it. Nothing else could have happened.