Flight 370 mystery just keeps getting weirder and weirder...

[Logan Darklighter]

Via Hot Air

Over the last couple of days, Malaysia and outside investigators have begun releasing information that strongly suggests that the fate of Flight 370 was no accident. First, the flight path taken after deliberately turning off the transponders showed awareness of military radar systems in the region, and then came word that subsystems continued signaling for hours after the flight diverted from its path. Now a leading paper in Malaysia reports that the Malaysian Air flight dropped to below 5,000 feet for part of its mysterious journey, the better to avoid commercial radar too:

As the search for the missing flight MH370 enters its 10th day with few clues as to its whereabouts, the New Straits Times said today the Boeing 777-200ER dropped 5,000 feet (1,500m) to evade commercial radar detection.
In an exclusive story, the government-backed paper said investigators analysing MH370’s flight data revealed that the 200-tonne, fully laden twinjet descended 1,500m or even lower to evade commercial (secondary) radar coverage after it turned back from its flight path en route to Beijing. …
Investigators poring over MH370’s flight data had said the plane had flown low and used “terrain masking” as it flew over the Bay of Bengal and headed north towards land, the NST reported. …
“Terrain masking” refers to an ability to position an aircraft so there is natural earth hiding it from the radio waves sent from the radar system. It is a technique mostly used in aerial combat where military pilots would fly at extremely low elevations upon normally hilly or mountainous terrain to “mask” their approach.

The flight may also  have paralleled normal commercial routes to confuse ground-control trackers:

Officials, who formed the technical team, were looking into the possibility that whoever was piloting the jet at that time had taken advantage of the busy airways over the Bay of Bengal and stuck to a commercial route to avoid raising the suspicion of those manning primary (military) radars, the paper said.

All of this means that the disappearance didn’t come from a technical malfunction or catastrophic failure. Nor does it mean a hijacking in the two contexts we already know, either for ransom (monetary or political), or for annihilation — at least not at the moment. Whoever took Flight 370 had plenty of highly-populated targets in the region if they wanted to turn the plane into a guided missile, a la 9/11, but instead tried very hard to disappear off the grid. Why?
Investigators still don’t know the answer to why, but they may have a clue about who:

The Boeing 777's Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, last transmitted at 1:07 a.m., about 40 minutes after takeoff. ACARS sends information about the jet’s engines and other data to the airline. The transponder, which identifies the plane to commercial radar systems, was shut down about 15 minutes later.
The final, reassuring words from the cockpit — “All right, good night” — were believed to have been spoken by co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, according to Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya.

The focus had been on the captain of the flight, who had his house searched yesterday after Malaysian officials belatedly acknowledged that something very fishy was going on over the South China Sea. There is no word on whether Malaysia has begun searching the residence of Hamid, although it seems highly likely that a lot of security services around the world have begun to take a big interest in the entire flight crew.
Officials in Kuala Lumpur have taken a lot of heat for their handling of the crisis. China added to the pressure today, demanding that Malaysia “immediately” expand the search area for the flight:

“Search and rescue efforts have become even harder now, and the area is much bigger,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told Reuters on Monday. “We hope that Malaysia can provide more thorough, accurate information to countries participating.”
China’s media have been scathing of Malaysia’s hunt for the missing jet and have criticized conflicting information about the search.
In an op-ed in China’s state-run Global Times newspaper Yao Shujie, the head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham, said that Malaysia “has lost authority and credibility” due to its chaotic response.
“The contradictory and piecemeal information Malaysia Airlines and its government have provided has made search efforts difficult and the entire incident even more mysterious,” the China Daily newspaper wrote in an editorial.

Australia has decided to take the lead in searching the southern areas of the Indian Ocean, which is where the limit of the plane’s fuel would have taken the flight — if it was headed out to sea at all. It seems a lot more likely that all of this deliberation was meant for something other than a quiet ocean ditch, though, and more likely that the plane turned toward land. For what reason … no one knows. Yet.

[robkelk]

Or maybe it's not weird at all.

Via AirTrafficManagement.net - a site for air professionals:

“The data released thus far most likely points to a problem with hazardous materials. This scenario begins with the eruption of hazardous materials within the cargo hold – either improperly packaged or illegally shipped – or both,” says Vincent.

In his view, a fire which started in the cargo hold progressively and serially destroyed the aircraft’s communications systems; toxic fumes quickly overwhelmed the passenger cabin and the cockpit where at least one of the flight crew managed to don an oxygen mask allowing them to turn the aircraft back to Kuala Lumpur before also succumbing.

Flight MH370 is reported to have climbed to 45,000ft which Vincent believes could have been due simply to the inability of the flight crew to clearly see and set the controls for a return to Kuala Lumpur.

Vincent guesses that control could have been regained and the aircraft sent back to a lower altitude of around 23,000 ft – which is accepted by the manufacturers of large transport aircraft as the optimum altitude to prevent a fire taking further hold but which allows better survivability for those on board and also vents the avionics bays.

The final report of a UPS B747 crash in Dubai in 2010, details how that crew of the freighter aircraft also attempted to depressurise the aircraft to slow down the fire 30 seconds after the loss of aircraft systems and flight controls. In that accident, the time interval between fire detection and the onset of aircraft system failures was around two and a half minutes.

Vincent guesses that the crew did manage to stabilise the aircraft and set it on a new course before once again succumbing to either a loss of oxygen or the remaining toxic fumes.

“The airplane then continues flying until no fuel remains and crashes – most likely into the ocean as there has been no report of any Emergency Locater Transmitter (ELT) signal which can be received by satellite if the crash were on land,” says Vincent.

--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Logan Darklighter]

A Startlingly Simple Theory About the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet

There has been a lot of speculation about Malaysia Airlines Flight
370. Terrorism, hijacking, meteors. I cannot believe the analysis on
CNN; it’s almost disturbing. I tend to look for a simpler explanation,
and I find it with the 13,000-foot runway at Pulau Langkawi.

We know the story of MH370: A loaded Boeing 777 departs at midnight
from Kuala Lampur, headed to Beijing. A hot night. A heavy aircraft.
About an hour out, across the gulf toward Vietnam, the plane goes dark,
meaning the transponder and secondary radar tracking go off. Two days
later we hear reports that Malaysian military radar (which is a primary
radar, meaning the plane is tracked by reflection rather than by
transponder interrogation response) has tracked the plane on a
southwesterly course back across the Malay Peninsula into the Strait of
Malacca.
The left turn is the key here. Zaharie Ahmad Shah1 was a
very experienced senior captain with 18,000 hours of flight time. We old
pilots were drilled to know what is the closest airport of safe harbor
while in cruise. Airports behind us, airports abeam us, and airports
ahead of us. They’re always in our head. Always. If something happens,
you don’t want to be thinking about what are you going to do–you already
know what you are going to do. When I saw that left turn with a direct
heading, I instinctively knew he was heading for an airport. He was
taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi, a 13,000-foot airstrip with an
approach over water and no obstacles. The captain did not turn back to
Kuala Lampur because he knew he had 8,000-foot ridges to cross. He knew
the terrain was friendlier toward Langkawi, which also was closer.

Take a look at this airport on Google Earth.
The pilot did all the right things. He was confronted by some major
event onboard that made him make an immediate turn to the closest,
safest airport.

What I think happened is the flight crew was overcome by smoke and the
plane continued on the heading, probably on George (autopilot), until it
ran out of fuel or the fire destroyed the control surfaces and it
crashed. You will find it along that route–looking elsewhere is
pointless.

Read the rest. It's quite compelling. Occam's Razor suggests to me that this is the most likely answer that fits all the known facts. It doesn't require a conspiracy or hijacking. Just something going horribly wrong at the worst time.

[Jinx999]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-26640114
According to the BBC "simple, compelling and wrong"

[Logan Darklighter]

Hmm. Okay then. Damn. Don't know what to think. 

[robkelk]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-26640114

According to the BBC "simple, compelling and wrong"

BBC doesn't know how checkpoints and modern autopilots interact.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Bob Schroeck]

Latest word on CBS Radio this morning is that a satellites have picked up images of a couple pieces of possible debris in the Indian Ocean, one big enough (80 feet) to be an entire wing. Australia is sending planes out to check now, but they're being hampered by poor visibility.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Logan Darklighter]

If that does pan out, that would support the "simple" theory above. 
Either way. Heart goes out to the loved ones. Damn. 

[Black Aeronaut]

If ti does pan out, then I just hope they're able to find the Black Box. Gonna be awful hard to find under that much water.

[Logan Darklighter]

If it had fallen/crashed into the sea directly between Maylasia and China, it would be relatively simple** to retrieve, since the depth there is only about 200 feet max. 
But yeah - if it went far out deep into the south Indian Ocean? Oof. Yeah. Good luck finding it there. They may -never- find it. 

(** Relatively being the operative word, there nothing easy or routine about diving trying to recover wreckage under even the most ideal circumstances.)