Strange Plane Disappearance...

[Lord Jim]

Missing Malaysia Airlines plane: Flight MH370 carrying almost 240 passengers 'disappears' en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing

An airliner carrying almost 240 passengers and crew has 'disappeared' during a flight from Malaysia to China.

Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off at 12.41am local time on Saturday from Kuala Lumpur and was due to land in Beijing at 6.05am the same day.

But air traffic controllers lost communication with the plane shortly after it left Malaysia.

Two of the passengers on board were travelling on stolen Italian and Austrian passports, it has emerged.

Luigi Maraldi and Christian Kozel were thought to have been on the the plane, but have since been reported safe and well.

For all the latest on the missing Malaysian Airlines flight follow our live blog.

Investigators are not ruling out any explanation for the missing flight.

A Vietnamese navy officer initially said the plane had crashed 153 miles off the coast of Vietnam's Tho Chu island.

These reports were later denied and a major search is now underway to try and locate the missing plane in the South China Sea.

A 12-mile oil slick has been spotted by Vietnamese Navy crews off the south coast of the country and is being investigated.

The Boeing 777-200 jet's passengers on the 2,746-mile journey totalled 239, including two infants and 12 crew members.

There were 14 different nationalities on board.

Malaysian Airways confirmed the plane had lost contact with Subang Air Traffic Control at 2.40am (SAT) local time - or 6.40pm (FRI) around 120 miles off Kota Bharu over the South China Sea.

The airline said in a statement: "Malaysia Airlines is currently working with the authorities who have activated their Search and Rescue team to locate the aircraft.

"The airline will provide regular updates on the situation."

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news ... z2vOlDiKKQ
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(It's night over there now, and they're going to continue the search in the morning, (the US is also sending in some vessels and technical capabilities to help)

It' too early in the investigation of course to know for a fact what the cause was, but the 777 is considered one of the world's most reliable passenger jets,and the fact that communication was lost at once without any "mayday" or call for help suggests that whatever happened took place suddenly.

And the fact that there were two passengers on the plane with stolen passports seems like an awfully big coincidence, since commercial passenger planes don't crash all that often; it certainly makes this suspicious...

If it wasn't a terrorist act, (possibly the same separatist group that conducted the suicide knife attack that killed more than 30 people recently) then it most likely had to be some other sort of explosion, to cause that kind sudden loss of communication....

[Lord Jim]

In thinking about this further...

If terrorism was involved here, it seems rather unlikely that it would be native Chinese terrorists:

Luigi Maraldi and Christian Kozel were thought to have been on the the plane

While I'm sure there are Asian citizens of both Italy and Austria, (though probably not many) you would think an Asian guy with a passport with the name "Luigi" or "Christian" would raise eyebrows, and bring some additional scrutiny....(unless the Malaysian airport security personnel are complete idiots, which is something I can't rule out since I'm really not familiar with the security set up in their airports.)

If you're going to travel on a stolen passport, it seems to me you would want to do so in a way that would not invite attention...If these folks were Asian, you would have expected them to steal the passports of Asian tourists...Even assuming they changed the passport pictures, (which to do a convincing job of would require some level of skill; again unless the Malaysian airport security people are complete idiots.) in this case the names would still be problematic...

Another thing that needs to be found out (which I'm assuming is already known, since the actual tourists have been contacted by authorities) is whether or not those tourists who had their passports stolen had visas for China...

Because if they didn't, then the people who stole them must not have had any intention of being able to gain entrance into the country when the plane landed, which really makes this suspicious....

Also another thing that's probably known to the authorities by now is whether or not they had also stolen the tickets from the tourists, or if the imposters bought them themselves with using the stolen passports...And if so, if the tickets they bought were "one way"...

Of course it's also still possible that the people traveling on the stolen passports were completely uninvolved in what happened to the plane, (maybe they were drug dealers or some other sort of criminals) but as I said in the OP, a plane going down like this that just happens to have two people on it traveling on stolen passports is one mighty big coincidence...

[Gob]

Foreign ministry officials in Rome and Vienna confirmed that names of two nationals listed on the manifest of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight match passports reported stolen in Thailand.

Neither European was on the missing plane, which disappeared from air traffic control screens over waters between Malaysia and Vietnam early on Saturday morning.

Malaysia Airlines meanwhile also contacted Austria's foreign ministry, saying that the name of an Austrian was also on the passenger list of the plane, a spokesman for the ministry said in Vienna.

"We contacted the person to whom the passport belonged. This person is in Austria and safe and sound. His passport was stolen in 2012 on a trip to Thailand," the spokesman said.

[Lord Jim]

Okay, the plot thickens...

That means that the people who used these passports didn't steal them themselves; either they obtained them from some criminal source that trades in stolen passports, or they belong to some organization that keeps stolen passports on hand...(and they must have gotten the tickets using the stolen passports)

This certainly makes it look more like a professional job, at least as far as the imposters on the plane are concerned...

[Gob]

Poor sods...

A Queensland couple who wanted to spend more time travelling in their older age were two of the six Australian passengers on board the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.

Neighbours said Catherine and Robert Lawton, aged 53 and 57, had already been on a trip to Asia and were "looking to see a bit of the world" now their three daughters had moved out.

Springfield Lakes resident Robbie Daintith, who lives across the road from the couple and would often put their bins out when they travelled, said they were "lovely people" who adored their young grandchildren.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/missing-mal ... z2vPifWNVv

[Lord Jim]

There was an infant and other children on board too...

[Guinevere]

The latest is now that the plane may have turned back, so perhaps it was a mechanical issue. Still not a sign of any debris. Those poor souls.

[Guinevere]

Still not any trace of the plane.

[Lord Jim]

It's frustrating...the more we learn the less we know...Imagine how wrenching this must be for the families..

So far there have been nothing but dead ends, as far as the search for the plane is concerned. I've seen speculation from experts ranging all the way from some who are skeptical about the plane turning back, (because it was at the outer range of the radar where false readings are common, and the plane may just have been making a standard course adjustment) all the way to the other end of the spectrum where some are now thinking that the plane may not have gone down in the water at all and may have crashed in the jungle...

Here's some updated info, such as it is (including some disturbing information about the two imposters and incidents at the Kuala Lumpur airport):

Officials investigating the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 plane with 239 people on board say oil slicks spotted by rescue crews in the South China Sea do not belong to the aircraft.

Malaysian maritime officials spotted the slicks and sent a sample to a lab to see if it came from the plane, but the results were negative, said Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s civil aviation chief, at a press conference late Monday.

More than 48 hours after the plane disappeared from radar screens, a multinational search team consisting of dozens of ships and aircraft had failed to find any sign of the aircraft's fate.

The American guided-missile destroyer USS Kidd joined the USS Pinckney in search efforts Monday, the Navy said. Malaysian officials said the search area will be expanded Monday.

“The amount of water – the distance between Vietnam and Malaysia is probably the size of the state of Pennsylvania, so there really is quite a bit of water that needs to be investigated,” Robert Mark, a commercial pilot and former air traffic controller, said Monday on “Fox & Friends.”

Rahman said that investigators were pursuing "every angle," including the possibility of an attempted hijacking, in an effort to understand what happened that caused the plane to vanish early Saturday morning, local time.

“We don’t know exactly what happened to the aircraft,” he said late Monday, insisting that a search and rescue operation was still ongoing – not a disaster recovery mission.

Searchers were dealt a double blow Monday when a floating yellow object that was believed to be a life raft from the plane when it was spotted Sunday turned out to be the moss-covered cap of a cable reel, according to Vietnam's civil aviation authority. Earlier in the day, Vietnamese officials said that they had not been able to locate a rectangular object that appeared to be one of the plane's doors.

Doan Huu Gia, the chief of Vietnam's search and rescue coordination center, said Monday that four planes and seven ships from Vietnam were searching for the rectangular object but nothing had been found.

There are also questions over how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft – which was scheduled to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing -- using stolen passports.

A senior Malaysian police official told Reuters Monday that there have been past incidents of people being caught trying to fly out of Kuala Lumpur with explosives and fake passports.

"We have stopped men with false or stolen passports and carrying explosives, who have tried to get past KLIA [airport] security and get on to a plane," the police official said. "There have been two or three incidents, but I will not divulge the details."

Interpol said it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the Boeing jetliner departed Saturday.[ Especially given the history at this airport, this is inexcusable. The process involved to do this is fully automated, doesn't require any special training for security personnel, and only takes a matter of seconds.]
Warning "only a handful of countries" routinely make such checks, Interpol secretary general Ronald Noble chided authorities for "waiting for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates."

The thefts of the two passports -- one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy -- were entered into Interpol's database after they were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and last year, the police body said.

Electronic booking records show that one-way flight tickets with those names were issued Thursday from a travel agency in the beach resort of Pattaya in eastern Thailand. A person who answered the phone at the agency said she could not comment.

The ticket purchases reportedly took place almost simultaneously, and the tickets were numbered consecutively, according to the BBC.

A telephone operator on a China-based KLM hotline confirmed Sunday that passengers named Maraldi and Kozel had also bought one-way tickets on a KLM flight that departed from Beijing for Amsterdam on Saturday. Maraldi was to fly on to Copenhagen, Denmark, and Kozel to Frankfurt, Germany.

She said the pair booked the tickets through China Southern Airlines, but she had no information on where they bought them.

As holders of EU passports with onward flights to Europe, the passengers would not have needed visas for China.
[That would be a really good way to get on a plane that you knew would have a lot of Chinese passengers without going through the visa process]

Interpol said it and national investigators were working to determine the true identities of those who used the stolen passports to board the flight. White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken said the U.S. was looking into the stolen passports, but that investigators had reached no conclusions.

Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference Sunday that authorities were investigating footage of the two people who boarded the plane using the fake passports.

Interpol has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has underpinned a new market for identity theft: Bogus passports are mostly used by illegal immigrants, but also pretty much anyone looking to travel unnoticed such as drug runners or terrorists. More than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol's database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, the police agency said.

“The majority of passengers were Chinese – it was a flight going from Malaysia to China. And what’s the group that’s really going after China right now? It’s called the east Turkistan Islamic movement, Ryan Mauro, a national security analyst, told “Fox & Friends” on Monday. “You would think that they would immediately come out and claim responsibility but in the past they’ve waited a month to claim responsibility.”

Rahman also said the baggage of five passengers who had checked in to the flight but did not board the plane were removed before it departed, he said. Airport security was strict according to international standards, surveillance has been done and the airport has been audited, he said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of distraught relatives were gathered in a hotel in Beijing, waiting to be flown to Malaysia. Of the 227 passengers, two-thirds were Chinese. There were also 38 passengers and 12 crew members from Malaysia, and others from elsewhere in Asia, Europe and North America, including three Americans.

"We accept God's will. Whether he is found alive or dead, we surrender to Allah," said Selamat Omar, a Malaysian whose 29-year-old son Mohamad Khairul Amri Selamat was heading to Beijing for a business trip. He said he was expecting a call from his son after the flight's scheduled arrival time at 6:30 a.m. Saturday. Instead he got a call from the airline to say the plane was missing.

Possible causes of the flight’s disappearance included some sort of explosion, a catastrophic failure of the plane's engines, extreme turbulence, or pilot error or even suicide. Establishing what happened with any certainty will need data from flight recorders and a detailed examination of any debris, something that will take months if not years.

Malaysia's air force chief, Rodzali Daud, said radar indicated that before it disappeared, the plane may have turned back, but there were no further details on which direction it went or how far it veered off course.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03/10 ... -airlines/

[Lord Jim]

It appears at this point, that the authorities are closer to identifying the passport imposters than they are to finding the plane...

If it turns out that they have some known connections to a terrorist group, then we'll pretty much have the explanation for what happened, even if we don't know the exact way it happened. If no such links can be found then we're right back to "the more we learn, the less we know."...

Terrorism still wouldn't be able to be ruled out, but we'd be completely back to square one, with numerous possibilities on the table...

There's even a very slender chance that the plane didn't crash at all; it could have been hijacked and the crew ordered to maintain radio silence, turn off the radar transponder, and fly to some secret landing strip that had been set-up...

Of course if that were the scenario, one would expect that some sort of ransom demands would be communicated... (however that could conceivably take a few days if they want to keep the location secret, and prevent a rescue mission...)

I'm sure that's the sort of possibility that the families are now clinging too, though it's probably a pretty remote possibility...

[Guinevere]

I've also been hoping they were hijacked, but I agree, its a slim hope. It seems the SAR has been completely screwed up - hopefully not purposefully. Such a contrast with this disappearance and the flight from Brazil that also disappeared over the open ocean.

[Big RR]

The strange thing is, even if it were a terrorist attack that blew up the plane, you would expect some sort of wreckage would have been seen. Granted, there is a lot of ocean there to be searched, but it's still strange nothing was seen (except for the report of a door that could not later be located). And, so far as I have heard, no terrorist group has taken responsibility for the incident.

If it were hijacked, it would be pretty tough to fly under the radar and find a place to land--a 777 is pretty big and would require a paved runway of a mile and a half or so to safely land--not that many of them in the middle of nowhere.

It's just strange.

[Gob]

Turns out the oil slick spotted was not from the plane either.

Conspiracy whack jobs must be having a field day, I wonder if Steve's tied this to the MOTU yet?

[Jarlaxle]

This is truly bizarre. Lots of things in a 777 float...from seats, to life vests, to blankets, to, well...dead bodies. And NOTHING has turned up? Not to mention that had it just taken off, the tanks would be completely full, with thousands of gallons of fuel...had it hit land, it would have fireballed spectacularly.

[Guinevere]

Conspiracy theorists heads set to explode:

The mystery surrounding the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has deepened with the Chinese media reporting that several of the passengers' mobile phones were connecting when called by relatives, but the calls were not picked up.

The sister of one of the Chinese passengers on board the vanished flight rang his phone live on TV, the Mirror reports.

"This morning, around 11:40 [am], I called my older brother's number twice, and I got the ringing tone," said Bian Liangwei. At 2pm, she called again on air and heard it ringing once more.

"If I could get through, the police could locate the position, and there's a chance he could still be alive" she said. The number has now been passed on to Malaysia Airlines and the Chinese police.

A man from Beijing also called his missing brother on the plane, and reported to the airlines that the phone connected three times and rang before appearing to hang up, according to Shanghai Daily. Media reports claim that the brother had called the number in the presence of reporters before informing the airline.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/missing-malays ... ed-1439560

[dgs49]

I heard on NPR today that the expression, "...vanished from the radar..." is pretty much metaphorical. The plane was not actually visible on any radar screens at the time it stopped transmitting.

Lack of a debris field is inexplicable, unless the search is way off base, location-wise.

I haven't heard anyone suggesting that either or both of the two Iranians with stolen passports were responsible. If it were a terrorist attack, you would think that someone would claim "credit."

Twilight zone. Maybe it flew someplace else after being hijacked, and the people are still alive.

[RayThom]

1) Alien Abduction (2%), or 2) Suicide By Jet. (98%)

Some of the avionics that NEVER shut down on a commercial flight were, in fact, turned off -- and "apparently" manually.

Some of the blogs I've gleaned seem to indicate the copilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, was showing some signs of mental instability due to relationship and financial problems. This may very well prove to be the airborne equivalent to the terrestrial slaughters like Columbine, Virginia Tech, or Newtown.

I wonder whose god was being invoked in those final moments?

[Rick]

Yers

[Big RR]

whose god

there's more than one?

[Crackpot]

I'm betting on Zeus or Thor. I guess it could be Cyric tho