"It doesn't sound very good," retired American Airlines Capt. Jim Tilmon told CNN's "AC360." He noted that the route is mostly overland, which means that there would be plenty of antennae, radar and radios to contact the plane.
"I've been trying to come up with every scenario that I could just to explain this away, but I haven't been very successful."
He said the plane is "about as sophisticated as any commercial airplane could possibly be," with an excellent safety record.
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That's a pretty bad sign.
Losing contact after a sudden incident also seems less than rare if my two hour dive into lastwords.com is anything to go by.
Sucks either way.
The 777 is one of the safest (if not the safest) widebody aircraft, with only the Asiana flight last year causing any deaths, and that was due to pilot error.
Yep they use the same designation for the new flight which seems kinda eerie to me but only for irrational reasons.
True but could be drug smuggling, intel agents, etc. etc. If they are terrorists planning to do a hijack and crash, why book the flight from Beijing to Europe?
The BBC was speculating illegal immigration.
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Unless they did something wrong or haven't completed their plan.
Considering it was a regular scheduled flight from KLM to Beijing, I'm gonna guess no, this isn't what happened, because a whole bunch of reasons, but number one is that the Chinese are in fact human beings, and not monsters.
True. They are often acting like a bag of dicks right now, but they are not monsters (well Tienanmen square, Tibetan religious repression, jailing of political dissidents and uighur repression aside). Killing a whole bunch of civilians for absolutely no good reason? In a manner that will make them international pariahs and is guaranteed to result in problems from here till Christmas?
No fucking way. Unless it was some dumbass junior officer who is about to be scheduled for the quickest trial and execution ever.
I could be totally wrong here. I'm not well versed.
There is a lot of weirdness about this entire thing and it's not just the passports.
I've been hearing reports that the plane had turned around before it vanished. Which is kind of freaky.
Eh its a big area.
The lack of radar contact strikes me as weird. Usually planes are very very carefully tracked. If ones goes down, breaks up usually they know where to start searching.
But I also lack knowledge.
Vietnam thinks they found something.
But what strategic target would they be heading to in that area?
See the passport thing actually raises my suspicions.
One passport, maybe a coincidence.
Two on the same flight with the passports from separate nations (granted I believe they share a border) raises some red flags in my mind.
Of course as previously posted I heard this plane had lost part of its right wing while taxiing when it clipped the tail of another aircraft. That seems to best the likeliest reason for the catastrophe so far barring more evidence.
Also according to the economist during an emergency crews are taught to aviate, navigate, then communicate. So if they never got past the first two steps it's not as unusual they never got to communicate what had happened before they crashed.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2014/03/flight-mh370
The passports were stolen from tourists in Thailand. The country of origin is completely irrelevent, they were probably sold to the guys from some dude on a truck who looked through until he found pictures that looked good or something.
Nah, that whole area is rife with trafficking of all sorts. It's likely something to do with plain ole criminal activities, as @mcdermott (e: stated).
It might have been. But human error happens hell there was a plane that crashed because a whole bunch of people failed to notice that the maintenance crew forgot to remove adhesive tape that covered the sensors for critical instruments like the altimeter and autopilot. There was a plane that crashed because the pilot failed to taxi to the right runway and used one too short for his craft.
Of course at this point it could be a collision with a meteor.
I know it's not really relevant but it's going to bug me until I correct it. It's possible for radio signals to penetrate a few dozen feet under water depending on signal frequency, power, and proximity and significantly further within the VLF range.
But yeah most plane airbands normally occupy the VHF range which normally isn't going to go more than a few feet.
It's still utterly baffling and concerning that something could go wrong if that was the case, though. This whole thing is so weird.