You don't need a visa to enter PRC if you are a transit passenger with an on-going ticket to another country. You are allowed 72hours stay in the country with no visa.

You should really educate yourself on the immigration laws of the country concerned before criticizing other peoples posts.

Position of Crash
 

Sorry if this has already been posted.
From flightradar24 - showing altitude zero (ie in the sea).

The position of the 777 is:

LAT: 6.68
LONG: 103.46

Why the search parties didn't just check on this website hours ago God only knows.

@LHR


That's a LONG way round. Amber 1??

So we have two stolen passports on the same flight? That does not sound good.

Stop focusing on this passport issue ! People fly everyday all around the world with stolen passports. The aircraft has gone down for whatever reason, i highly doubt it has anything to do with stolen passports.

philipat
 

@philipat - amber/yellow is Great Circle Route. In red is the planned routing for this daily/regular route.

I would not jump to any conclusions or rather exclusions.
In the case of Adam Air 574 it didn't require any Control Law disparity (whatever that means) to achieve the same outcome.
The 777 might not be prone to the certain kind of upset experienced on AF447 but that doesn't mean it can't be put into an upset in a different way (possibly even one which might not happen in a 'Bus- the world is not always as simple and black/white as some obviously would like it to be).
Let's wait until we know a little bit more about what happened.
Heck we don't even know how large the wreckage path is, nor where it is.

Reports that both passports were stolen from Thailand, so it is likely the two passengers had other things in common.

Criminality, illegal migration or terrorism?

Statistical coincidence?
Were these unknowns trying to enter China for some other purpose there? And the aircraft loss was an unrelated coincidence?

I venture to suggest that the unfortunate promulgation of the manifest does indicate a scenario that has a higher probability than any other that comes to mind. Unless 2 completely unconnected false personae simultaneously tried to enter China on the same flight. Do your own calculations of probabilities.

IMHO, comparisons to AF are irrelevant. AF was flying through the ITCZ during bad weather. What relevance does that have to a 772 flying over the South China Sea in calm conditions? Can we remain focused here??

Or......keep taking your medication and wait for the accident reports. Then you will know what happened.

@LHR


It's been a long time, forgot the routes!! But aren't there shorter routes from KUL to PEK?? Over Vietnam and Cambodia??

As of now, it isn't obvious what accident reports you are referring to? We have a missing aircraft with no reports and a cut ACARS trail??


My Meds, off duty, amount to a 1982 Margaux, which seems to work fine, thanks.

Assuming the aircraft is located in a few days at most,

Any guesses on when we can expect the FDR and CVR to be retrieved? is the necessary equipment available in the area or will specialist vessels have to travel far?

I remember the ET409 accident off Beirut in waters of approximately the same depth, where it took slighly less than 2 weeks to find and retrieve the recorders.

I guess I could write off one stolen passport being used to board MH307 as a mere coincidence, but two stolen passports, both of which were stolen in Thailand, being used to board the same flight suggests to me something much more sinister may have taken place.


Both passports are from countries which have access to the visa waiver programme in PEK, providing they had tickets valid for travel from PEK within 72hrs they could board the flight without a visa.


There were flaws in many early European biometric passports which allowed access to the encrypted information stored on the chips very easily.


I know that the Italians upgraded their first series of biometric passports only 4 years after being introduced, which is amazingly fast for a country where simple systemic flaws often take decades to be rectified.


Providing the data on the chip correlates to the physical passport being presented to border officials, they will be far less likely to detect physical abnormalities caused by altering the passport itself.

Passenger manifest now published and linked on the MAS website, so we may consider it official. For all its worth, the Italian and Austrian names are listed...

IF these reports of stolen passports are true (and for the time being no reason to doubt), it will be interesting to see where the information became lost. Malaysian immigration scans passports inbound/outbound, so we may safely assume that these were stolen was not entered into the system...

As for getting back on track, for the time being this seems to be the only scrap of information worth chewing on, though I agree it could be totally irrelevant.

OK, so you are insinuating that Pitos and the ITCZ are the issue here??

flightradar24 often briefly reports the altitude as zero when the radar contact is lost. This means nothing.

Reports from a Chinese news website that US military at Utapao in Thailand picked up an emergency message from MH370 mentioning a disintegration of the fuselage. I would be very surprised if only a US military camp in Thailand was able to receive that message???

2 fake passports on same flight......i cannot imagine someone trying to migrate to china or even transit via china on a MAS flight via PEK

Vanished into the ether.
 

Assuming wreckage is found, there are quite a few oil field construction type ships with deep water Robotic Vehicles in the S China Sea are which are capable of tying shoe laces at 1000m which could be called up. But as yet after an extensive day's searching both by air and sea search and rescue parties; mysteriously no debris has been sighted, not even a cushion or life jacket so no one knows for sure whether it has been hijacked to some where or vanished. I also note that Sky news stories about emergency beacon tranmissions have also fizzled out and oil slick sightings are perhaps another Red Herring.

No.
But apart from that (which is indeed unlikely) we don't know anything at all yet.
I did not make any reference to AF447 (I don't know to whom your post Re AF447 referred), just to Adam Air 574. And that didn't require ITCZ and iced pitots either.
The point I was trying to make is that LoC can happen in different ways and we cannot even exclude that at this point.
That was my reply to a post which insinuated that since it was a Triple Seven, any kind of LoC could be completely ruled out.
It can not.
Which doesn't mean at all it was the case. It simply means: we don't know yet.
Can we put this to rest now, please?

On the other hand, in previous acts of aviation terrorism were false or stolen identity documents used?

If the pair were Chinese nationals whose real identities were on a watch list in China, then it would have been clever to choose to impersonate Europeans, even if risky, as their mission did not hinge on getting past immigration in China.

Mickjoebill

Surely there are better passports to steal if you want to enter china, than an Austrian and Italian one....?

found this special site on jacdec
http://www.jacdec.de/fotos/news/2014..._SEARCHMAP.jpg

Ocean depth seems less than in the AF 447 accident

After all the Assumptions why no ELT-Signal............

Hope you don't mind a question from an SLF ...

With aircraft navigating by signals from satellites and sending out ACARS messages [sorry if that's the wrong terminology], almost in real time although at a cost if I read correctly, does the technology not exist such that it should be mandatory (as with carrying an ELT) that an a/c broadcasts at least its lat/long, alt, speed and heading every 10 seconds (or other short period)? That would seem to me to give the powers that be immediate notice that something had gone badly wrong and greatly narrow down the area of search for survivors or wreckage.

If someone could manage a sentence or two explaining why things aren't as simple as I imagine, I'd be grateful. Ta.

Nothing mysterious, neither surprising. Communications was lost in the small hours, with ETA at 6am with an extra 2 hours endurance. In the first hours after loss of comms, an increasingly frantic exchange of messages with neifhboring FIRs. It probably took a good 3-4 hours until the grim reality started to sink in, and somebody plucked the courage to wake the CEO. It probably took another couple of hours to establish with a reasonable degree of confidence where to start looking (there was quite a bit of confusion at the beginning on exactly how far into the flight was communications lost).

All the involved countries are fairly rigid hierarchical societies, which means information must be passed up the chain of command, then down again on the other end. This is complicated by the disputed territorial claims on various parts of he South China sea, which means that the SAR process must have had to been coordinated an an unusually high level. I doubt that the actual search would have been launched before late morning, midday, with 5-6 hours of daylight left. Probably there were no more than a couple of sorties flown over a vague target area before it became dark. Daylight tomorrow will hopeful bring results, as the search can get better organized tonight, with well defined areas and responsibilities for participating aircraft and vessels. Remember that the first AF447 wreckage was only spotted 2 days later. Then we had the ACARS messages to chew on, while now if they do exist (probably they do, as all Malaysian gov't and airline officials seem to accept the total loss as fact) they are not in the public domain.

The Gamma Normids meteor shower is now at it's peak. Some fragments can penetrate the atmosphere and theoretically hit an aircraft, very unlikely though, but one can imagine the result of a direct hit.

Theories being looked at are terrorism, contaminated fuel and structural damage.

MAS are having their tech & maintenance engineers look and respond to these items for all future flights across all fleets prior to departure, with fuel samples being kept until completion of the sector.

Errr,,,it means the radar contact was lost in that position. I looked at the track and this is the exact position where radar contact was lost. Would be a good place to look, me thinks.

So MickyMan you say we should not speculate?
Somewhat hypocritical when your post of 19 jan 2013 seems to be doing that.
This is after all a 'rumor network', so all theories should be welcome.
If you don't like to read them, then don't!

The sea state in the area this afternoon was quite benign, it begs the question why even some evidence of wreckage has not yet materialised.
It may transpire that the SAR effort was a little slow off the mark and possibly not even in the correct place in the few hours of daylight on this first day.
Tomorrow should at least confirm where.

Just out of curiosity, while we all wait for the facts, has there ever been a proven case of an aircraft being hit by a meteorite??? I mention this as, in the last 6 months flying in N. Canada, I have seen meteorites enter the atmosphere on 3 separate occasions.

mickjoebill

Yes, they were.

I mentioned the WTC-1993 bomber who did some trial/test runs using an Italian fake passport, who also had several other fake IDs laying around when police investigated. Air India bomber used a fake and/or incomplete name. Lockerbie bomber - I don't know what name was used for that, but it wasn't the man convicted.

Air France hijack in Algeria, the hijackers faked police IDs to gain access to the plane.

The new EU passports are hard to fake - much easier to steal and use, hoping for a sloppy bureaucracy to fail to nullify the passport ID number. Photos and person data is engraved into a special laminated paper, so IF you manage to get hold of such a passport AND it slips through the bureacracy I venture a guess that noone will suspect that the long-nose in front of them isn't the long-nose on the passport pic (which, btw, can be years old and very very very unflattering anyway).

Somewhat contradictary statement there SOPS. If it broke up into pieces midair I'd say there's even more likelyhood of debris floating on the ocean's surface.

If nothing has yet been found, maybe they're just not looking in the right place yet.

It is all about cost. Bean counters do a cost/benefit analysis, and come to the conclusion that crashes are so rare, the cost doesn't justify putting the equipment in the aircraft and paying for the satellite communications that would be needed. Sad, but very true.

Could somebody explain how contaminated fuel could result in the loss of an aircraft from cruise altitude with no comms?

Some people here have suggested loss of control due to a stall. But surely, even at night time, with possibly no air speed info on the primary display, a stall (or even a spin) is recoverable from 35,000 feet.

A second point... given that this was on an IFR route, surely the wreckage can be found by flying the same route at 2000 ft, at 100kts?

If this was a squawk 7500 situation, surely secondary radar would have picked up the deviated flight path, even if all onboard comms were disabled?

LAM470 similarities?
 

Except that LAM470 was tracked on radar after it started abruptly descending from 38,000 feet.

Not here apparently. So I can't see any similarity at the moment.

dont worry you've got a completely unqualified 21 year old a few posts back telling us how much fuel they had on..