Posted on 03/17/2014 9:58:08 AM PDT by BuckeyeTexan
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Whether by accident or design, whoever reached across the dimly lit cockpit of a Malaysia Airlines jet and clicked off a transponder to make Flight MH370 vanish from controllers' radars flew into a navigational and technical black hole.
By choosing one place and time to vanish into radar darkness with 238 others on board, the person - presumed to be a pilot or a passenger with advanced knowledge - may have acted only after meticulous planning, according to aviation experts.
Understanding the sequence that led to the unprecedented plane hunt widening across two vast tracts of territory north and south of the Equator is key to grasping the motives of what Malaysian authorities suspect was hijacking or sabotage.
(Excerpt) Read more at mobile.reuters.com ...
The Inmarsat team arrived in Malaysia yesterday and will be helping the UK and US investigative teams.
Another thread here today says the family of one of the pilots moved out the day before the flight.
The Transponder goes off
"By signing off from Malaysian airspace at 1.19 a.m. on March 8 with a casual "all right, good night," rather than the crisp radio drill advocated in pilot training, a person now believed to be the co-pilot gave no hint of anything unusual."
" Two minutes later, at 1.21 a.m. local time, the transponder - a device identifying jets to ground controllers - was turned off in a move that experts say could reveal a careful sequence."
And this about the other communication system - ACARS:
"At some point between 1.07 a.m. and 1.37 a.m., investigators believe someone switched off another system called ACARS designed to transmit maintenance data back to the ground.
...
"Cutting the datalink would not have been easy. Instructions are not in the Flight Crew Operating Manual, one pilot said. Whoever did so may have had to climb through a trap door in full view of cabin crew, people familiar with the jet say. Circuit-breakers used to disable the system are in a bay reached through a hatch in the floor next to the lefthand front exit, close to a galley used to prepare meals. Most pilots said it would be impossible to turn off ACARS from inside the cockpit, though two people did not rule it out."
So it is not know which of these systems was shut off first or, in fact, whether they might have gone off simultaneously. And shutting off the ACARS systems would have been or could have been noticed by the flight crew or the passengers.
Alternative conspiracy theory: The ACARS system was rigged in advance with the gadgetry required to do a wireless command to shut it off without going through the hatch on the floor.
Questions, questions, questions.
Maybe HAL took over. Open the pod bay door...
does anyone know where Penn and Teller or David Copperfield were on the day it disappeared?
OK, I know this is petty ... but can anyone make a complete sentence out of the very first line of this story?
“journalism” is a lost practice.
Yes. “Whoever flew” is the base sentence, but your point is acknowledged.
I'm a RADAR tech with FAA and land-base Enroute RADAR can't track the entire flight so who ever did this knew there was a hole in the RADAR coverage that they could escape through.
The co-pilot had a simulator at his house. Maybe a search of the computer can tell what kind of simulations he was practicing, like maybe low-level flight under the RADAR.
The morons who hi-jacked the 9/11 planes practiced for up to 5 years before they acted.
Yes, and the lesson learned, at this point, is that primary radar in that part of the world is not closely monitored. So terrorists now know to make the pilot turn off the transponder and stick to commercial flight paths at cruising speed to go relatively unnoticed.
That is a most interesting theory and makes sense to me.
.
That’s one neat theory.
"The predictable effect was to delay the raising of the alarm by either party," David Learmount, operations and safety editor at Flight International, wrote in an industry blog.
Looks like a well planned operation...
That could work. A couple of times I flew formation flights through controlled airspace, and they had us turn off all but one transponder so as to present only one radar image.
And.....While this well planned episode of terror acted out....Obama was in Key Largo, Florida, NYC, raising money for political campaigns and buying clothes for American hater wife, MIchelle and the daughters!!! He could care less about terrorist action against America or other nations!!! And...if you think differently, ur are not the sharpest knife in the drawer!!! We are eleven days into this charade...and Obama and his Obamabot administration know zilch!!!
They know. They may even be complicit in it.
By signing off from Malaysian airspace at 1.19 a.m. on March 8 with a casual "all right, good night," rather than the crisp radio drill advocated in pilot training, a person now believed to be the co-pilot gave no hint of anything unusual.
Remember that the two pilots had not asked to fly together. If voice analysis shows that it was the co-pilot (the young devout TROPer with no wife and children who always attends Friday prayers) and the not the pilot (the older Richard Dawkins fan angry about Malaysia convicting people of homosexuality) then the co-pilot would have to be the main suspect.
The sign-off was spoken AFTER someone disabled the transponder.
That’s interesting but isn’t most radar used today advamced enough to detect two aircraft even when they’re flying close together, especially military radar?
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