I have read this thread from day 1.
Loads of wacky theories out there. Like really out there.
But amongst all the chatter here on pprune there is occasionally some real cutting edge analysis that breaks new ground - often well ahead of news media and especially those god awful 'news' conferences from KL.
I had been firmly of the view after reading all that I have here, that the aircraft most likely ended up in the Indian Ocean at the far end of the southern arc.
I just couldn't conceive that anyone, even after initially engaging in such purposeful and tactical flying, as now seems almost certain, could fly north and avoid detection.
But what has troubled me from day one - why plan this thing thing so carefully, fly so tactically, so dangerously, initially so far north, only then to fly for 6/7/8 hours simply to drop it in the drink.
Many things about this don't make sense. But that to me is the most illogical.
And then I read this post ...
"leanderandhero
Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: sestos
Age: 61
Posts: 4
It is on the ground in western Xinjiang.
I have observed all comments here with interest since Saturday 8 March.
The quality of the technical knowledge on PPRuNe is, for the most part, the best in the world.
The site.....and the 'Mods' deserve great praise.
Tanto nomini nullum par elgoium
I have not posted here for 12 years.
I was a professional pilot. (7000 hours) Before that, a British Army officer. With experience of terrorism.
For the moment I propose this, for discussion:
The aircraft landed safely in western Xinjiang, the homeland of the Uygurs, at about sunrise on Saturday 8 March. On an unpaved desert strip. The passengers are alive. They are hostages. The plane is now in bits and hidden. It is no longer required.
'Echelon' knows this.
The Chinese are looking there.....furiously. For 3 or 4 days.
I will say more tomorrow."
.....
Another crackpot I thought.
Them I googled 'Echelon'
Ok I thought. Interesting. But most likely another red herring.
Then on wading through all today's posts one thing started to jump off the page.
Not one, but virtually all of the countries tied up in this human tragedy have been caught out and actually admitted that their radar capabilities and monitoring is not just hopeless but on weekends and other times simply non existent. They don't even bother turn on what they have on.
These failures and gaping holes in radar coverage have been reported/admitted by Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, India and now Australia.
And these admissions have been obtained only now after 9 days of extreme pressure.
If the aircraft managed to get to northern china and if hostages or ransom negotiations are underway (and with most of the passengers being Chinese that could certainly firm up a motive) I can guarantee the Chinese would deny all and everything. Including radar tracks.
They have already issued instructions to local media not to investigate or comment on the disappearance.
And remember that very first red herring about the large plane parts they spotted floating new the last known position.
That was fishy from day one.
I'll post below some of the most intriguing comments/stories that have made me start to question what I had concluded most likely happened.
"17th Mar 2014, 22:50 #5452 (permalink)
ILS27LEFT
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Europe
Posts: 165
Chinese Terrorism
"Meanwhile, claims that a 35-year-old Uighur man from China’s troubled autonomous Muslim province was on Flight MH370 may be looked at in a new light. The group claimed responsibility earlier this week but were dismissed as opportunistic and not credible, but Malaysian reports now say the passenger had taken flight-simulator training in 2005."
Uighur separatists? claim over missing flight MH370 may be re-examined | News.com.au"
" #5523 (permalink)
xcitation
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: California
Age: 44
Posts: 141
@simon001
Quote:
Also, there are parts of Malaysia and Indonesia between point 2 and the top of the southern red arc. Was there no military coverage in these areas?
I am expecting there is a good reason for this but it would be nice to see some detail behind the maps. I'd be wondering if I was a family member.
According to the military chief for India on the Andaman islands they only operate when required to. I have heard that this is during normal working hours and they turn off in the evening."
" 18th Mar 2014, 06:20 #5568 (permalink)
Blake777
Join Date: Mar 2014
Location: WA
Posts: 8
From the New Straits Times:
NST also reports that Malaysian investigators are currently favouring the theory that MH370 headed north."
--------------------
"Malaysia Plane May Have Flown Into Radar Black Hole — Indian Military
Mon, March 17, 2014 6:04pm EDT by Andrew Gruttadaro
Was the hijacker of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 able to escape detection by flying into a part of the Indian Ocean that isn’t covered by radar? That’s the question being investigated after a senior official in the Indian military revealed that they only sparingly check the radar systems in that area.
Initially it seemed impossible that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 people, could have disappeared without anyone noticing, but it turns out this modern age of surveillance isn’t as constant as we thought. On March 17, an Indian official admitted that they rarely monitor the radar systems that Flight 370 likely passed through."
Flight 370: Did Radar Systems Miss It?
One of two proposed flight paths the disappeared plane could have taken extends from Indonesia to the Indian Ocean. If Flight 370 did fly through this area, then there’s a good chance that Indian radar systems didn’t even pick it up, a senior military official told CNN.
The official revealed that the radar systems covering the Andaman and Nicobar Islands aren’t as closely watched by the Indian military as others. That leaves open the possibility that the systems did not notice the plane as it crossed through the area. If Flight 370 flew along that proposed southern corridor, then there’s a good chance that it did so through this “black hole” in the Indian Ocean.
---------------
By Peter Apps and Frank Jack Daniel
LONDON/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Whatever truly happened to missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, its apparently unchallenged wanderings through Asian skies point to major gaps in regional - and perhaps wider - air defenses.
More than a decade after al Qaeda hijackers turned airliners into weapons on September 11, 2001, a large commercial aircraft completely devoid of stealth features appeared to vanish with relative ease.
On Saturday, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak said authorities now believed the Boeing 777 flew for nearly seven hours after disappearing early on March 8. Either its crew or someone else on the plane disabled the on-board transponder civilian air traffic radar used to track it, investigators believe.
It appears to have first flown back across the South China Sea - an area of considerable geopolitical tension and military activity - before overflying northern Malaysia and then heading out towards India without any alarm being raised.
The reality, analysts and officials say, is that much of the airspace over water - and in many cases over land - lacks sophisticated or properly monitored radar coverage.
Analysts say the gaps in Southeast Asia's air defenses are likely to be mirrored in other parts of the developing world, and may be much greater in areas with considerably lower geopolitical tensions.
"Several nations will be embarrassed by how easy it is to trespass their airspace," said Air Vice Marshal Michael Harwood, a retired British Royal Air Force pilot and ex-defense attache to Washington DC. "Too many movies and Predator (unmanned military drone) feeds from Afghanistan have suckered people into thinking we know everything and see everything. You get what you pay for. And the world, by and large, does not pay."
"TOO EXPENSIVE"
Air traffic systems rely almost entirely on on-board transponders to detect and monitor aircraft. In this case, those systems appear to have been deactivated around the time the aircraft crossed from Malaysian to Vietnamese responsibility.
At the very least, the incident looks set to spark calls to make it impossible for those on board an aircraft to turn off its transponders and disappear.
Military systems, meanwhile, are often limited in their own coverage or just ignore aircraft they believe are on regular commercial flights. In some cases, they are simply switched off except during training and when a threat is expected.
That, one senior Indian official said, might explain why the Boeing 777 was not detected by installations on India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago which its planes were searching on Friday and Saturday, or elsewhere.
"We have many radar systems operating in this area, but nothing was picked up," Rear Admiral Sudhir Pillai, chief of staff of India's Andamans and Nicobar Command, told Reuters. "It's possible that the military radars were switched off as we operate on an 'as required' basis."
Separately, a defense source said that India did not keep its radar facilities operational at all times because of cost. Asked what the reason was, the source said: "Too expensive."
"SOMEONE ELSE'S PROBLEM"
Worries over revealing defense capabilities, some believe, may have slowed cooperation in the search for flight MH370, particularly between Malaysia and China. Beijing has poured military resources into the search, announcing it was deploying 10 surveillance satellites and multiple ships and aircraft. It has been critical of Malaysia's response.
While Malaysian military radar does appear to have detected the aircraft, there appear to have been no attempts to challenge it - or, indeed, any realization anything was amiss.
That apparent oversight, current and former officials and analysts say, is surprising. But the incident, they say, points to the relatively large gaps in global air surveillance and the limits of some military radar systems.
"It's hard to tell exactly why they did not notice it," says Elizabeth Quintana, senior research fellow for air power at the Royal United Services Institute in London. "It may have been that the aircraft was flying at low level or that the military operators were looking for other threats such as fast jets and felt that airliners were someone else's problem."
Current and former officials say that - hopefully, at least - such an incident would be detected much faster in North American or European airspace. There, military and civilian controllers monitor radar continuously on alert for possible hijacks or intruders.
The sudden failure of a transponder, they say, would itself prove a likely and dramatic cause for concern.
"I can't think of many situations in which one would actually need to switch them off," said one former Western official on condition of anonymity.
U.S. and NATO jets periodically scramble to intercept unidentified aircraft approaching their airspace, including a growing number of Russian long-range bombers.
In some other areas, it is simply not seen as worth maintaining a high level of alert - or radar coverage itself may not even exist.
"NOTHING MUCH HAPPENS AT NIGHT"
Investigators now say they believe MH370 may have turned either towards India and Central Asia or - perhaps more likely, given the lack of detection - taken a southern course towards the Antarctic. That would have been an effectively suicidal flight, the aircraft eventually running out of fuel and crashing.
The waters of the southern Indian Ocean and northern Southern Ocean are among the most remote on the planet, used by few ships and overflown by few aircraft.
Australian civilian radar extends only some 200 km (125 miles) from its coast, an Australian official said on condition of anonymity, although its air defense radar extends much further. Australia's military could not be reached for comment on Saturday and if it did detect a transponder-less aircraft heading south, there is no suggestion any alarm was raised.
U.S. military satellites monitor much of the globe, including some of the remotest oceans, looking primarily for early warning of any ballistic missile launch from a submarine or other vessel.
After the aircraft's initial disappearance a week ago, U.S. officials said their satellites had detected no signs of a mid-air explosion. It is unclear if such systems would have detected a crash landing in the southern Indian Ocean.
On India's Andaman Islands, a defense official told reporters he saw nothing unusual or out of place in the lack of permanent radar coverage. The threat in the area, he said, was much lower than on India's border with Pakistan where sophisticated radars are manned and online continuously.
At night in particular, he said, "nothing much happens".
"We have our radars, we use them, we train with them, but it's not a place where we have (much) to watch out for," he said. "My take is that this is a pretty peaceful place."
-----------------
MH370 Australian search looks at target 3000 km from Perth | Plane Talking
He wouldn’t be drawn on the possibility that MH370 has come down along the mirror image northern hemisphere arc from which the last known electronic trace from the jet could have come, other than to give the media a lucid explanation as to why both arcs were, signal wise, of equal validity.