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There are islands in the area, too, although not really close to where they're searching now. Just for the heck of it, I looked around on that website that I posted earlier, and zoomed in on Cocos (Keeliing Islands), and searched around a little, and on the west coast, northwest of the South Lagoon, I actually saw an airstrip and a plane. I looked up the islands and saw that there's an airstrip there used by the Australian Air Force. Here's the article. Cocos (Keeling) Islands (this article is from GlobalSecurity.org, btw)
No doubt, totally irrelevant, but since everyone is tossing out theories and whatnot, what if the plane took another turn after it's "final handshake?" Or, was that handshake supposedly when the engines died? And, of course, assuming the pings are just a diversion...
Location: where you sip the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mack Knife
Why would a hijacker have to avoid being detected by a military satellite or even air defenses. What could anyone possible do about it? The plane is in the air, it isn't like you can pull them over or force them to land. There isn't a way to force something like the 777 to land without creating conditions far more hazardous than allowing it to fly so long as it isn't enroute to fly into buildings or something like that.
Once that plane was airborne, nothing was going to stop what happened.
Maybe the plane was trying to evade detection because it DID have a target planned, 9-11 style.
Imagine this: hijackers take over the plane with the intention of making a terror attack on, say, Perth. The hijackers only have rudimentary knowledge of flying, if that. They hold a knife to the throat of the captain to force him to carry out their plan, maybe in addition threatening to kill his family if he doesn't cooperate.
He evades radar by flying low and flying around Indonesia, as they request ..... but then without telling them, he strays off course slightly away from the target. They probably wouldn't know. He flies on until low-fuel alarms go off which alerts the terrorists, then puts the plane into the steepest dive possible to intentionally crash the plane immediately ...... which has the unintended effect of keeping the plane intact enough so that little debris comes up.
The terrorist group doesn't take responsibility because they don't want the world to know that they failed in their mission.
Maybe the plane was trying to evade detection because it DID have a target planned, 9-11 style.
Imagine this: hijackers take over the plane with the intention of making a terror attack on, say, Perth. The hijackers only have rudimentary knowledge of flying, if that. They hold a knife to the throat of the captain to force him to carry out their evil plan, maybe in addition threatening to kill his family if he doesn't cooperate.
He evades radar by flying low and flying around Indonesia, as they request ..... but then without telling them, he strays off course slightly away from the target. They probably wouldn't know. He flies on until low-fuel alarms go off which alerts the terrorists, then puts the plane into the steepest dive possible to intentionally crash the plane immediately ...... which has the unintended effect of keeping the plane intact enough so that little debris comes up.
The terrorist group doesn't take responsibility because they don't want the world to know that they failed in their mission.
A lot of "what if's" out there. A 9/11 style attack on Australia is not unreasonable speculation, the plane would have hit during morning rush hour. It's crossed my mind that someone could have held a knife on the pilot and demanded that the plane go to Australia, but to seek asylum instead. Sounds crazy, but we have lots of crazies out there. I'm glad they are still looking at the passengers, they need to keep digging.
About the idea of terrorism/crashing plane into a target - it would have been in the middle of the night, or early morning on a weekend in Australia, wouldn't it? Not exactly a prime time to make a statement by crashing into an empty office building.
Does anyone know if they've said what direction the plane was flying when it was caught on radar at (sorry if I misspell it) Palau Perak? Early on they always showed the animation of it flying east-to-west, and now they're showing it make that turn northward to avoid Indonesia.
If that turns out to be true, the impact will be felt immediately for any airline using the 777. The reputation of the aircraft will be tarnished significantly.
Yes, some people will get scared...for a while. And if there is air crash investigation, some conclusions and recommendations will undoubtedly be addressed, if only for their calming effect. The plane was designed to be, and is, extremely reliable. But some event sequences are so rare, they can neither be predicted, ex ante, or really eliminated, ex post. When the "impossible" happens, it is sometimes impossible to correct. The same is true for stupid pilot errors. In the case of the Air France crash, every man in the cockpit knew that you don't recover from a stall in a nose-up attitude. But until the Captain arrived - too late - know one would have imagined that the person controlling the plane could have the been pulling back on the stick throughout the fatal sequence of events, probably even he was not aware of what he was doing.
Moreover, modern commercial aircraft systems impose a tremendous information burden on the crew to detect and understand how to counteract multiple, simultaneous failures. Air Qantas flight 32 was hit by a catastrophic engine failure and fire, 4 minutes after take off from Singapore. Many flight controls were disabled. It took the crew almost an hour to assess the status of the plane, before they took any action, so great were not only the number of failures to control systems, but also the amount of computer information that spewed forth from the computer. The plane and the passengers made it back safely. There was no pilot error involved.
Would a "fly-it-yourself" aircraft have survived? You never know. But the statistics do show that we are safer then ever before.
Someone just a page or so back said "they knew" or something like that regarding the location of the plane.
Bingo. That was brought up much earlier in the thread as well. I think there was no way anyone who knew was going to say because it might divulge the capabilities to track submarines and virtually any ship at sea. With the submarines especially, if the Russians though or knew we could watch their subs other than by tracking them with other submarines or sensor nets, that would really change the game.
Likewise if some other country had some technology that could do the same, it would shake our ideas of naval operations to the core.
The capability to track submerged submarines on a real time basis at every point on the globe does not exist! Run silent; run deep.
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