Dont think so. They think the plane zoomed up to 45,000 feet. The purpose of this would be to depressurize and quickly kill anyone not in the cockpit on bottled oxygen. Then it came back down. Possibly flew low to avoid radar.

Im thinking Charles Martin is making more sense on this.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/03/16/malay-mystery/

I'm calling BS on pjmedia, for a couple of simple reasons.

First, he uses the phrase "rattling around in the cockpit", referring to bodies and their interaction with an autopilot. Sorry, an autopilot might not be the simple gadget you think it is. Next, depressurization to incapacitate an unknown number of people is mentioned. Omitted is the ability to do this. The flight crew has no ability to turn Oxygen to the passengers off.
As Patrick Smith and numerous others pointed out, it is not necessary to hijack an aircraft full of passengers in order to get one. There are countless airliners in perfect flying condition sitting in airports all over the world.

It is so much fun to indulge in conspiracy theories. We'll hear about Elvis and aliens making off with it.

The INMARSAT tracking data and the available radar shows that not only did the aircraft cross back over Malaysia and keep on flying, but that it was being actively navigated. We know this because it made turns at charted waypoints and flew published airways.

A Boeing 777 (or any commercial airliner, for that matter) does not "zoom" up to 45,000 feet. Rather, it climbs to that altitude like an old man climbing a flight of stairs. It's not a fighter jet. 45,000 feet is probably about 3000 feet above the certified service ceiling for a 777. If it attempted to cruise at that altitude for any period of time, it probably would have damaged the engines.

I'm seeing two possibilities at this point. Either it flow around in the southern Indian Ocean until it ran out of fuel and then it ditched, or it landed on an island somewhere at least somewhat intact. The lack of an ELT transmission is hard to account for -- it requires that either it landed, or underwent an extraordinarly violent crash that destroyed the ELT. It appears that the last ping from the INMARSAT terminal was at about the time that the plane would have run out of fuel.

The captain of the aircraft was known to be a supporter of the Malaysian opposition leader who was jailed (on a charge of homosexuality) just hours before MH 370 departed. The two possible motives I came up with are: (1) the captain intended to hold the plane and passengers hostage in an attempt to negotiate with the government to get the opposition leader released, or (2) the captain intended to use the plane for a 9/11-style attack, with the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur being the obvious target. Of course, both of these things assume that the plane was not hijacked. If it was, there are a bunch of other possibilites that come into play. In any event, whatever was intended apparently didn't work out. Possibly there was a Todd Beamer aboard who thwarted the plot but was unable to save the aircraft.

Here's the thing that gets me about this story; why is there an "Off" switch on the Transponder? It seems like the first thing that hijackers do is to turn off the transponder.

And actually, I did some research and there are technical reasons why you might need to turn off the main transponder during a landing at a crowded airport. But why isn't there another device on the plane that always sends out a locator beacon. You can get Lo-Jack for your car, and Apple can "Find My iPhone." Why don't we have these for planes?

After 9/11, I would think that the Powers that Be would have spent a lot of time coming up with ways to prevent or mitigate airline tragedies. It seems that the only 2 things they've come up with are "Lock the Cockpit door" (Pretty Good Idea) and "Molest Amy Alkon" (Not So Good.)

The lack of an ELT transmission is hard to account for -- it requires that either it landed, or underwent an extraordinarly violent crash that destroyed the ELT. -- Cousin Dave at March 18, 2014 6:58 AM

Anecdotal story:

The small plane goes down in the woods of Washington State. The way the plane breaks up on impact it totally rips the antenna off the ELT. They find the plane and bodies about 15 days later. The crash investigator has the ELT on his desk and is like "Why didn't it work?" He taps the antenna receptacle with a metal pen. He is basically blown across the office. Then he gets a call from the tower saying "We just had a single blip from an ELT." He's like don't worry about it.

Basically if the plane went down on land there may be no survivors or none that have a clue about what the ELT is. If it went down in the ocean the sonar pinger could have landed in the right ridge line that it will only be picked up by being in the right line to the ridge in a sub, and not in a surface craft.

Here's the thing that gets me about this story; why is there an "Off" switch on the Transponder?

Two reasons:
First to simply be able to replace the part without having to electrocute yourself mid-flight.
Second so you can fly dark in cases where you are given no choice but to fly over hostile airspace.

A few reasons for having a transponder power switch:

1. Fire safety. If the transponder catches fire, you have to shut it off. Say the transponder doesn't have a power swtich. No problem, the pilot says -- I'm pulling the circuit breaker. And you can't just wire the circuit without a breaker; the safety authorities will never go for that.

2. If the transponder is malfunctioning, the tower may well request that it be shut off. A malfunctioning transponder may mis-identify the aircraft or cause it to appear somewhere other than where it actually is.

3. There is a problem called "synchronous garble" in which two aircraft can interfere with each other and prevent the radar from receiving a return from either one. ATC may ask one aircraft to turn off its transponder momentarily so that it can read the return from the other one.

As for a tracking device, the reason no one has made one is that up until now there has been no demand for one. Now perhaps there is, and I'll bet people at Honeywell and Rockwell-Collins are already looking at it. But it's not as simple as putting a Lojack system in your car. Anything that is built into an aircraft has to be designed according to certain safety principles and go through an expensive certification process. Say you're going to make it a self-contained device with its own battery. One thing you will have to do is show that, even if it dead-shorts internally and catches fire and the battery melts down, it won't do any harm to the rest of the aircraft. (And after the 787 battery incidents, everyone has suddenly gotten religion on batteries.)

Here's another problem with a tracking system: The plane, like all Boeing 777s, rolled out of the factory equipped with a system called ACARS. It's a data-downlink system that helps speed up maintenance -- an aircraft can notify the airline of a problem while it's in the air, so that by the time it lands, the airline already has a tech with the needed tools and parts ready to go. It incidentally provides a tracking ability and would have done what people are asking for. But... Malaysian Airlines doesn't subscribe to the ACARS service. The hardware was in the plane but it didn't do anything because there was no place to send the data. A tracking service would have the same problem -- it only works if the airlines support it and pay for it.

"As Patrick Smith and numerous others pointed out, it is not necessary to hijack an aircraft full of passengers in order to get one. There are countless airliners in perfect flying condition sitting in airports all over the world."

And your point would be?

First off, if you steal a plane, and take off, someone usually notices right away, and either tracks you, or shoots you down.

This was a bit more sophisticated, and also looks like it might have been a crime of opportunity.

They had a seven hour get away window over a low technology part of the world, and they "stole" the airplane from an airline that was too cheap to pay for the subscription to the tracking system Boeing provides.

I believe it is still a possibility that the plane crashed rather than landed, but we won't know much until they find it.

The supposition in the article linked to, that it was a simple electrical fire, is looking less likely every day, Occam's Razor, notwithstanding.

Isab, please tell me you don't believe an empty airplane missing is more conspicuous than a loaded one.

Then, go read Patrick Smith on the subject. He commits far fewer errors than the fluffy place cited.

Isab, you nailed some good points. It had not occurred to me before, but yeah, you don't need to steal a plane if you want one to use as a cruise missile. All you need to do is go to Victorville and you can buy an old 727 or DC-9 for about $500,000. They don't have the cargo capacity of a 777, but it's enough for a tactical-size nuke or dirty bomb, and they fly as fast as a 777 does. Delta just got finished retiring a bunch of DC-9's and there are many parked at Victorville still in airworthy condition.

And I concur with you about the electrical fire being unlikely. First of all, the aircraft has multiple redundant electrical systems, and it would be extremely unlikely that a fire would have disabled enough of them to take out all of the comm systems at one time. Second, if there was a fire, most likely the pilots would have made an attempt to communicate with ATC, in order to get other traffic cleared out of their path. If their voice radio and transponder weren't working, they could have called their company on their sat phone (we know the INMARSAT transceiver was still working) or activated the ELT manually.

To me, most likely either the crew commandeered the aircraft or it was hijacked. Apparently whatever was planned for the aircraft, the plan didn't work out and then they just flew around the Indian Ocean, looking for someplace to hide, until it ran out of fuel. I too think it's unlikely (although possible) that it landed intact. The search area is enormous and finding it now is going to be difficult.

I don't fly, read very little on this, and this may likely be a very dumb question.

Could someone on the plane have used a cell phone after the transponder was shut off?

Isab, please tell me you don't believe an empty airplane missing is more conspicuous than a loaded one.

Then, go read Patrick Smith on the subject. He commits far fewer errors than the fluffy place cited.

Posted by: Radwaste at March 18, 2014 1:30 PM

I believe, the easiest plane to steal, is the one you are already flying.
It takes one guy with the opportunity to lock everyone else out of the cockpit. Then you go on oxygen, depressureize, and kill everyone else on board.

This is a case, where being an expert on planes tells you what is unlikely, but it does not make Mr. Smith an expert on either terrorism, or people, and their motives.

I don't fly, read very little on this, and this may likely be a very dumb question.

Could someone on the plane have used a cell phone after the transponder was shut off?

Posted by: Goo at March 18, 2014 1:51 PM

You have to be flying very low and slow to pick up a cell phone tower.

I turned on my cell phone as an experiment once going transatlantic at 35,000 ft. There was nothing, just a search for service.

A sat phone might work, but I think by the time anyone figured out there was a problem, they were either dead or dying.

Yeah, cell phones usually won't work at altitude... when the same phone appears in a dozen cells at once, the system gets confused and it stops service to that phone to resolve the dilemma.

Regarding the sat phones... I doubt one would work from inside the cabin. It would need an external antenna. The aircraft itself had a sat transceiver and antenna for the INMARSAT service that supplied the crew sat phone and the (unused) ACARS link.

Isab, read this out loud:

YOU CANNOT TURN PASSENGER OXYGEN OFF FROM THE COCKPIT.

Patrick Smith does not have to be an expert on terrorism. He just has to know something about airplanes – which he does.

And you and your EDITORIAL reference do not.

You have not even noticed that it is easier to steal an unattended, unoccupied plane with no notice then one packed with passengers, whose families will be waiting for the arrival of a scheduled flight.

I get it. For some reason, you need James Bond to have stolen this plane.

Isab, read this out loud:

YOU CANNOT TURN PASSENGER OXYGEN OFF FROM THE COCKPIT.

Patrick Smith does not have to be an expert on terrorism. He just has to know something about airplanes – which he does.

Again, Radwaste, You think you have a point, when you don't.

The issue here is not knowing about airplanes. It is knowing about the effects of elevation, and altitude sickness.

Please see the Payne Stewart crash.

http://www.airsafe.com/stewart.htm

The aviation experts I have read, said you don't need to turn passenger oxygen off from the cockpit.

All you have to do, is stay up above breathable limits in an unpressurized plane for more 20 minutes since passenger oxygen lasts for approximately 15 minutes.

People will die quickly above 40k.

The bottles in the cockpit last quite a bit longer, I am,told, since those are separate, and for the pilots.

Last I checked for most people, the killing unpressurized elevation is somewhere above 30,000 feet. Trained mountaineers can make it up to the top of Everest, and back down, but most people fall asleep and die up there after a few hours without supplemental oxygen.

By the way, I am not saying absolutely that was how it went down, just that is is an extremely plausible explanation for the fact, that we haven't heard anything from the plane or crew, and it has been a week now.
Dead people, don't make cell phone calls, even when the plane lands, as opposed to crashes.

The fact that there is some evidence that those cell phones remained active, and on the network for almost a day after the flight went missing is a negative indicator for a sudden fire, and quick crash.

"I get it. For some reason, you need James Bond to have stolen this plane.

Posted by: Radwaste at March 18, 2014 8:09 PM"

No, just one of the pilots or possibly the flight engineer. They are the ones with the expertise to do it.

I saw Patrick Smith on Megan Kelly, He was the only one of the panel still claiming this was most likely a simple accident. Probably could not have gotten on the show otherwise, since he has the contrary view to all the other experts.

So how was the passenger compartment depressurized safely from inside the sealed cockpit?

"YOU CANNOT TURN PASSENGER OXYGEN OFF FROM THE COCKPIT."

However, the pax oxygen system is only good for 20 minutes or so, just long enough to make an emergency descent. Having said that, it's not clear to me that that was the intent... if you wanted to kill all of the passengers, depressing the plane at 35,000 feet would work. Coaxing it up to 45,000 was not necessary for that purpose, and the aircraft would not have stayed at that altitude for more than a few minutes. Either the engines would have flamed out, or the plane would have flown into the "coffin corner" and gone out of control. So I think there was something else going on.

"So how was the passenger compartment depressurized safely from inside the sealed cockpit?"

Turning off the air bleed valves from both engines would have done it. The pressurization and air conditioning on most airliners (the Boeing 787 being a major exception) relies on bleed air from the engines.

And Isab, there's a better example of the sort of thing your're talking about: Point your search engine at "Helios Airways Flight 522" and read the heartbreaking story.

One other thing regarding the cell phones. When a cell phone is "roaming" (connected to a network other than the one it is subscribed to), and someone calls that phone, it can take some time for the home network to communicate with the remote network and have it search for the roaming phone. A lot of cell phone networks, when confronted with a lengthy search for a roaming phone, will send a ring tone back to the caller to avoid leaving a long period of silence that might cause the caller to abandon the call. Basically, it's the network's way of telling the caller "Hang on, I'm working on it". If the phone that registered roaming has since gone off line, eventually the remote network reports that it can't find the phone, and then the local network forwards to voice mail. This can give the caller the impresison that the called phone is on line when it really isn't.

Gee. How many "experts" have as many hours at the controls as Patrick Smith?

How are these "experts" paid?

James Bond HAS to have stolen this plane. Why you and others think this is an exercise for psychiatry, not aeronautics.

When this turns out to be an in-flight fire, I expect such sensationalists to quietly hide.

"When this turns out to be an in-flight fire, I expect such sensationalists to quietly hide."

Doesn't add up:

(1) No distress call, and no sign of distress when the crew made their "good night" call to Malaysian ATC.

(2) The plane kept flying for hours afterward.

CousinDave, you bring up many very good points, and your expertise adds a lot.

We may never find out exactly what the motive was for this act.

It could have been pilot suicide designed to look like a terrorist act, and hide the black box deep in the Indian ocean. The South China sea is notoriously shallow. (This has insurance implications)

It could also have been done to embarrass the Malaysian government.

There could have been a struggle for the plane which caused the changes in elevation.

What we do know, is a lot of deliberate things were done, to disguise the heading of the plane, which would not happen in a simple electrical fire.

I suspect whoever did this, did not know that the ACARS system would attempt to handshake at regular intervals and tell investigators that the plane continued to fly.

Thanks, Isab. Yes, it may be a very long time before we know much more than we know now. As an aside, I think one point that's been reinforced to a lot of travelers is that just because a Third World nation manages to support an airline, that does not elevate it out of Third World status. The political machinations of various governments involved have hugely hindered the investigation and maybe killed the chances of ever being able to determine conclusively what happened. Yes, the planes may look the same; the airports have the same jetways, and they may serve the same food and drinks and show the same movies on board. But when the chips are down, it's not Delta or British Airways or Qantas. It's the Third World. And travelers are going to think about that.

@CousinDave.

You bring up some more valid points.

My husband is chief engineer in charge of construction at a large US Air-force base with two fighter wings, and an airfield.

All of the contractors, and also most of his construction inspectors are Japanese nationals.

The Japanese inclination is to cut corners, and jury rig stuff in order to save money.
On a daily basis, my husband has to fight this, and make them add money to projects to insure that they are done to code.

I suspect the jury rigging and money saving is even more pervasive in poorer Asian countries.

The motive could have easily been to commit suicide in such a way as to ruin the airline, and shame the country of Malaysia.

If it was, they have probably succeeded. Trust is hard to get back.