Agreed, I would expect the base(s) in the region to be on some escalated level of alert as soon as the plane went missing in "9-11" style transponders off. Like a disturbed wasps nest some interceptors would be up and anchored navy ships put to sea. Based on past events if it showed up on defense radar they would have at least 2 interceptors.
Without doubt this appears to be a hijack given the prevailing data points. The alleged route appears to be have been very well planned.
I totally understand any intentional obfuscation by the Malaysian authorities. It is not in the best interest of authorities to immediately share all information with the public during an ongoing hijack/terrorist incident. It would potentially give too much feedback to perpetrators and enable them to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

#4191 map can be derived as follows.

You may infer from the strength of the last ping, how far away the plane was during the last ping. The "center" of the arc is eliminated, because this area is covered by some form of radar or other satellite, which did not see the aircraft. Based on the timing of the ping and the maximum speed of the aircraft, it would not be possible for the aircraft to make it to the left side of the circle.

Alright this post spells it out perfectly:

http://www.pprune.org/8379267-post4191.html

The arc is in fact from the last ping.

That being the case there must be other arcs from the other earlier pings we are not being shown. If the plane was just a bit farther north (or south really) when they lost contact these other arc might be such that one of the N/S duplicates would be impossible. They must have pings from when they actually knew where the plane was. It is an unfortunate coincidence that the plane was so close in the N/S direction to the satellite when they lost track of it...

Sorry, but it wont be easier to simply "hijack" the truck or trucks with that supposed Money or Gold when driving towards Kuala Int Airport?
Ok, supposing an abandoned cold war era field along Kirgyz/China border was used....it was night period...no fullmoon light at all, poor Navaids or even some ATC, lots of High Terrain in prox, after landed some sort of heavy handling material with some (lets say) dozens of persons for staff that operation was requested, and another miriad of other questions too???
What doing with the PAX after that?
At least some runway working illumination, me thinks...after that where to hide it? Even nowadays sitting normally on our rooms we still surf the earth with Google Maps and Earth,,,its not impossible, but would say, too much Hollywood for almost failing 99%.
And too many people involved without one of them simply breaking the silence pact!???

should westerly read southerly?

Interesting New snippets
 

Thought I would post a couple of interesting new pieces from the Telegraph.
Sorry if you've already read them:

This link talks about recent terror info regarding Malaysia and a shoe bomb, well worth a read...

Malaysia Airline MH370: 9/11-style terror allegations resurface in case of lost plane - Telegraph


.... at the end of this link:

MH370: profile of missing Malaysian Airline plane's pilots starts to emerge - Telegraph


It says:

American officials suggested on Saturday that three different pieces of signalling equipment had been disabled and that one of them was located outside the cockpit. The implication is that at least two people had collaborated to change the course of flight MH370 and make it and its crew and passengers disappear.
If the captain and co-pilot had been involved they will have given a new meaning to the term 'clean skins'.

Not necessarily. The distance from the satellite shown may be inferred from a single ping, based on the strength of the signal. This places it on the arc.

The center portion of the arc is removed by local radar or other source.

The left portion of the arc is ruled out because the plane at max speed couldn't possibly get from its last radar location to that far away.

Therefore, the red arc was its set of potential locations during the last ping. It should be noted that the path the aircraft took need not follow that arc the whole time. Only it means that the aircraft intersected the red portion at the time of that ping.

MTOW/MZFW and actual lift potential.
 

Since a new 777-200LR is about $300 million, it's a lot cheaper to steal one for purposes of a terror attack than to go and buy one.

Depending on how much fuel you have to load to reach your target, these things have an enormous lift capacity. On 9/11, it was not the impact of the aircraft, but rather the tens of thousands of gallons of fuel that did the most damage.

If you remove all the freight and reload with with explosives and just enough fuel to reach your destination, it occurs to me that you would have one heck of a flying bomb.

With careful maintenance, aircraft can be flown repeatedly at the maximum payload limits. But what if you didn't care about being able to fly the aircraft tomorrow?

If you could find a long enough strip with a headwind and no nearby obstructions, other factors being equal, how much could a plane like this lift off and eventually climb with?

I would never have asked this question immediately after the disappearance, but given what we know now, it doesn't seem so crazy.

Everyone is hungry for information but the amount of speculation about this is unbelievable!! It says something about human nature!!!! Listening to the likes of Sky News, BBC and every crappy paper under the sun beggars belief!! After over 200 pages, this forum sounds like the worst of them!

The indicated track indicated by the Malaysian authorities puzzle me. If this information is well correct of course.
At 1721UTC/07 - 0121/08 Malaysian time - MAS370 is at, or by IGARI, and on a 25° heading. A right turn is then initiated towards BITOD, about 37NM away. Mag heading from IGARI to BITOD is 59°. Last recorded heading is 40°. Because the FR24 history playback is accelerated at a x12 speed, I believe that MAS370 was established on course to BITOD, because the recorded position is not precise enough. From there the military PSR is the only source of information, seemingly. We learn that, afterwards, the aircraft performed a right or left turn towards VAMPI. IGARI-VAMPI direct route is a 263° heading for about a 45 minutes flight time (361 NM-470 kts). At VAMPI, MAS370 initates a 125° right turn to the heading 28°and less than 7 minutes after, a 80°left turn to IGREX 268 NM away. I do believe this. But...
Professionnals pilots in command IMHO, not possible. Something else happened. My opinion is that someone tried to enter a routeing inside the FMS and could not because not familiar with the how to and/or having the wrong WPT entered. It would explain such erratics and incredible heading changes. Or the crew was under threat and tried to gain time...
I had thought that someone was trying to enter GIVAG instead of GIVAL to go back to KUL but for what reason, and why VAMPI then.
This flight was only less than 45 minutes on its way when the squawk was switched off. I do not know what sort of services MAS provides to its passengers on this route, but I believe that it was the dinner time or the aperitif just before. Learning what already happened with the F/O on a previous flight, may be that some nice looking person(s)ask to have a little visit to the flight deck and it was accepted... Or someone irrupted in the cockpit while one of the crew member was going in/out.

Roger that? Acknowledging a frequency change this way seems strange to me.

Correct, and it is the most important ping.
At that time they were close to fuel exhaustion so whatever remained of this aircraft must be close to the location of this ping.

You might want to look up trilateration. Indeed in 3-space, with 3 origins, if the origins of the spheres lie in a straight line with one another then you are not able to narrow your search down to two possible positions, which in the case with space-based geolocation is really only one since the other will be in space.

Trilateration is not what they were doing with these SATCOM pings. Knowing the difference between tx/rx time and the height of the satellite above ground at that exact point in time, it is possible to calculate a rough angle down to the surface of the earth. This creates a circle. By rejecting points on this circle that lie outside of the a/c's possible range, in combination with PSR data collected, allow you to narrow down the position to a point on an arc.

This will be *approximate* since millisecond differences can result in hundreds of kilometres of error when the receiver is in geostationary orbit.

Insulting the other poster by suggesting he take an elementary school math class is rude and asinine. None of this is grade school mathematics. This is advanced stuff (although perhaps not advanced in theory). I should know, I studied Mathematics.

To add; why would the red lines on the arc at 40 degrees EXCLUDE the area between Vietnam-Indonesia, where the last verified contact with MH370 was made? Primary radar plots from that point on were of an "unidentified object".
The red lines an the north/south extremities of the 40 degree arc are based on maximum range and fuel loadings, but is it possible that the plane ditched in the sea at approx LKP, intact enough for SATCOM to keep pinging?
Not suggesting this is likely, however interested to know why that part of the 40 degree arc has been excluded.

I am sure that the thing that puzzles many of us is the idea that one could arrange a suicide and not do it fairly quickly after the point of no return.

Would you really stand on a parapet and think "I will jump off in 7 hours time and in the meanwhile I will sit on this ledge so no-one can see me."?

This type of behaviour must be well outside of that expected by a person committed to suicide.

Accurate Google Earth KMZ file of Inmarsat arc
 

Since that diagram showing Inmarsat's ping arc is a bit low-res, I made an accurate version for Google Earth:

http://www.ogleearth.com/mh370.kmz

Article with context and method:

Flight MH370 ? search data in Google Earth | Ogle Earth

Geometric problem resulting from Inmarsat pings has North-South symmetry. Any pattern of pings consistent with northern route, has equivalent, North-South, mirror image. North-South symmetry of the pattern would only be perturbed by asymmetry in jet streams. For the moment both hypotheses need to be considered

Could it be that the Malaysian authorities know exactly where the aircraft is, which is why they're unwilling to give full information, as it's actually a hostage situation? There is theories all over so thought I may stick my ore in.

People committing suicide are not exactly in their most lucid frame of mind, why would you then exclude certain behaviours? I am sure if you dug into hundreds of jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge you would find amazing examples of inconsistencies. I see nothing hard to grasp when a suicidal pilot wants to do a final mischief and decides to bury himself in real deep waters. specially if it was within his reach.

I refer you to my post #4095 and Jonathan3141's post #4108. Suicide is a complex issue, and a long delay is not unusual.

<The sad thing is we would of knew 99.9% of this information 2/3 days ago if the Malaysians were being transparent and honest.>

Authorities DID know, they just didn't release info to the public. As far as the press conferences, Malaysia in over their heads especially when it came it international media scrutiny. Doesn't make them bad, just inexperienced in high profile matters.

<Could a plane really land without being noticed? >

Absolutely, especially if it was expected by certain parties.

"Agreed, I would expect the base(s) in the region to be on some escalated level of alert as soon as the plane went missing in "9-11" style transponders off. Like a disturbed wasps nest some interceptors would be up and anchored navy ships put to sea. Based on past events if it showed up on defense radar they would have at least 2 interceptors."

Agree and all relevant data would be sent to threat assessment. First piece TSPX ceases to respond between goodnight KL and hello HCM -TA personnel do not believe in coincidence, threat level goes up, available spook sats are tasked to locate a commair traveling sans ident. If they learn the bird turned left to 263, threat level is up another notch and if they pick up on the second turn (and especially if they pick up even a suspicion of an attempt to shadow another plane) the code red alarm bell goes off -need we draw pictures as to where they would go from here...

I would hope and presume that by now the authorities have a clear picture of which passengers were sitting where - and who up front near the cockpit in particular - and their backgrounds are being checked too ?

My sincere apologies for posting as I am neither a pilot nor a communications expert...Hence, the feelings of guilt!
I have been reading this forum since the day of the incident and have found it more useful than the news :)
I have but one point (that was mentioned a few 1000 posts back!) and I hope smarter people than me may have some insights:
How and could the fires on the Melbourne to Abu Dhabi flight in Feb relate to MH370??
Could fires such as what happened be used to create a diversion, allowing a hijack take-over??.
I guess the one thing against that would be that I would have thought that someone would have notified ATC about any fire.....
It just seems suspicious to me that multiple fires occur on a 777 and a month later a 777 goes missing....Both were night flights...

I agree with Passenger 389

Most likely scenario so far is that a disgruntled pilot with a psychological imbalance has tragically decided to exit with an enormous splash.

The fact that the final ping is recorded extremely close to the temporal fuel endurance of the aircraft might strongly suggest the aircraft was flown until the fuel ran out. It is also easy to speculate methods in which the only person on board who was alive for the 6-7 hours was the 'hijacker'! That being the case it is not a huge leap to speculate that the intention has always been to make the wreckage of this aircraft as difficult to find as it is possible to imagine. That also explains the erratic flight path. I am so sorry to say this, but perhaps this aircraft will never be found.

Truly terrifying 'terrorism' indeed! Cruel. Evil.

So if you wanted to 'hide' the end, would you take MH370 over land, or over thousands of miles of remote, deep ocean? (7400m in places!) Where surface debris has already had a week to drift unnoticed.

Of course, the intention could have just been to show up the talking head idiots, for precisely what they are! And my goodness haven't we had plenty on this one!!!

Finally. If this is just a one off, it's bad enough. It also makes a total mockery of security checks for pilots, since they are the only ones on board who don't NEED a 'weapon' (read nail file!!) to take over the controls! Better to give pilots more psychological checks. Perhaps akin to the screening received in Israel before every flight.

However if this isn't a 'standalone', another hijack, using a related method could have a similarly devastating effect on aviation as Sep 11th!

Worrying times for all.

Sincere condolences to all concerned.

Also China has denied the aircraft ever entered its airspace. Given the tensions with Russia/Japan/North Korea/Tibet (and even grumblings from the US and Australia about politics) etc, I'm betting China's radar/operations WOULD have picked up any anomalies and been straight onto them.

BARKINGMAD

Yes - and a LOT has changed since then. I can personally recall hearing two air intercept events whilst flying in European airspace, and shared a rather somber beer with the captain of one of those aircraft, who had missed the fact that he had flown out of French CTA and into somebody else's with his VHF 1 inadvertently flipped to a previous frequency!
Bearing in mind they were following their flight planned routes and transponding appropriately, what do you think would have happened if they suddenly went OFF flight plan, disabling TX and ID kit, and dropped low level?
This is the very raison d'être of aviation security bodies and airforce fighter/interceptor "assets".

Not unusual to tanker fuel up to the mainland Chinese ports. Ideally, sufficient fuel to get there and back but limited by landing weight etc.
ES

Malaysia is an major oil producer. The national carrier can almost certainly negotiate a discount on its fuel prices at home. If it then needs to buy less fuel in Beijing, then it makes more money on the round trip.

Australian JORN OTH Radar
 

Here is the Fact Sheet for Jindalee.

The Laverton site could have picked up MH370 if it went south. JORN may not have been switched on however.

Obviously, I have not read every post. But could someone tell what evidence has come to light that has so many pointing the finger at one of the pilots? I've seen nothing that leads me to believe one of the pilots (to descend into the vernacular) 'went rogue'. In fact, the erratic altitude readouts not long after the diversion would appear to give some credence to either a struggle for control or someone at the controls having difficulty flying the aircraft.

Anyone who has flown as a line pilot or cabin crew for any length of time would not find it difficult to believe that, despite locked doors and security procedures in place since 2001, (and particularly given the position of the toilets on the 777), intruders could gain access to the cockpit with relative ease.

Neither should anyone be surprised that there might be someone out here with the engineering (and perhaps flying) expertise apparently displayed here whose skills could not either be bought - or just as likely, made available willingly by a committed believer of a cause.

I also find quite strange that after having lost a plane, ATC didn't actively attempt to contact it.

Re the "mysterious" extra fuel: what was the designated (filed) alternate for Beijing? Depending upon how far away that alternate was would dictate how much extra fuel was carried.

They did. A post from a pilot on frequency at the time (see 32656 posts ago) said that Ho Chi Minh ATC Quote "was going nuts on 121.5" trying to contact it.

The key point is that the hostages have an intrinsic value as hostages. If one of my loved ones were on this flight today's news would have given me optimism. I don't think that the sale of organs makes much sense. Easier to kidnap low-value 'invisible' folk from the bottom tier of society, not somewhere near the top.

It could be that having landed intact (albeit perhaps not in an airworthy condition) the hostages may be on their way to some safe secluded place where their life needs are met with no means of escape or communication. Meanwhile, the hijackers make their way to some other place and make whatever demands they wish. They will promise to give the location of the hostages when their demands are met.

Provided the demands are of a political nature, they could get away with it.

BBC News have just interviewed another "expert" (worked on the 777, now runs a Flight Safety company). Some of what he said lines up more with where I've got to on this if you give the crew the benefit of some doubt:

- as they coast out ACARS fails for whatever reason but unknown to crew
- catastrophic event at IGARI, takes out most other comms / electronics including transponders
- perhaps an explosive decompression
- maybe flying controls degraded too so are using differential power perhaps explaining altitude changes and jinks in heading, either way they now have their hands full
- aircraft barely flyable so they try their best to get back to base, explains left turn if primary radar signal really is MH370
- then in trying to fly / navigate and with no comms it just all gets too much (with / without oxygen) and they're left heading out to sea on whatever heading and altitude they'd managed to get it to but their efforts are all in vain and it goes down, somewhere deep, west of Malaysia.

Something like this still seems plausible to me, more than suicide / heists / bullion / terrorism.

Given that the Malay PM has now put it on record that transponder and ACARS on MH 370 were disabled deliberately the disappearance of this aircraft and passengers now becomes a crime.
When police investigate crimes they may put some info out to the public and appeal for help but they never put all the cards on the table. ('keep the powder dry')
Of course there will be info about MH370 that authorities know which we don't (yet).
It is like trying to complete a jigsaw without all the pieces.
Thanks to posters here who are trying to make sense of the pieces we have.

Edit:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-disabled.html

Previous hourly pings
 

It would be interesting, for example, to see if the arcs of the prior pings were evenly spaced apart, indicating some steady speed and heading.

There was a suggestion in some of the material being leaked from Washington that there was perhaps data indicating a re-fuelling stop before the final ping.

Is it turned off at night? Wouldn't make any sense, even if there is no-one physically there watching blank screens, it should be running on "auto" and recording 24x7 for subsequent evaluation.

The one thing that strikes me odd about all the talk of hijack (either to destroy the plane in flight or take it intact) is that no-one has claimed responsibility. If you were a terrorist mastermind and wanted to gain from having pulled off this undertaking, would you not be phoning the local media and making it known by now?

With the way the internet is used on a daily basis to broadcast everyones opinion, not one reference has appears in any news broadcast regarding "we did it"!

They must continue searching the South China Sea they don't have enough evidence to not stop. They need to get the CVR and the FDR. I'm afraid if the stop searching near the point of Transponder SSR loss we will never find it and maybe something will wash up on a shoreline in Kuching or Vung Tau or like wise years from now. But it will be too late for any valuable data.
They need to run a test flight with B777 on their suspected turn back scenario with all ground stations radar etc checking their data, to eliminate or confirm their assumptions. Because at the moment they are assumptions only.
I hope the Chinese and Vietnamese keep searching the South China Sea we should support them as much as possible.