Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost

[Communicator]

Mobile Phone Tracking

Nobody seems to have responded in any detail to the various points about pax phones.

It is common knowledge that many cell phones are left on during flights. Given the demographics, most MH370 passengers would be using smartphones. This raises one interesting avenue of enquiry, and one non-issue.

"QQ" IP Number Logs

If MH370 crossed Peninsular Malaysia at relatively low altitude, some of those phones could have established contact with cell phone towers along the flight path, if only for short periods. Such contacts are logged by the telephone operators even if no call is made. MH knows the numbers of most phones on board because they were used for passenger registration.

More interesting is the fact that smartphone apps contact certain websites automatically when a cell connection is established. Families of some Chinese passengers are reported to have observed that QQ (similar to Gmail chat) showed the missing passengers as logged in. (Login could be entirely automatic under control of a smartphone app.) If true, this means that QQ (as well as the Malaysian cell phone carrier, and the respective governments) have a log of the IP addresses associated with passenger smartphones during the fleeting connection with the Peninsular cell phone towers.

As regards jamming, it is, of course, possible to jam phones, but considerable power would be required to jam every single phone throughout the length of the fuselage, in the cockpit, crew quarters, etc.

Non-Issue - Phones "Ringing Out" Without Going to Voicemail

Another claim in relation to phones is probably true but irrelevant - families of passengers claim that when they attempted to call the passengers' phones, they encountered a continuous ring tone (ring out) rather than being diverted to voicemail or an error message after one or two rings.

Based on my own experience, Chinese cell phone carriers sometimes handle unavailable phones in very idiosyncratic ways, particularly when a Chinese phone is used outside China. There seems to be official concern that voicemail could be used for surreptitious political communications.