Hope n' Change isn't really interested in politics today. The mystery of what happened to Malaysia Flight 370 and its 239 passengers is all we can really think of.
It was bad enough to think that something catastrophic but accidental happened in mid-air. But as of this writing, it now sounds like someone in the cockpit shut off the transponders, turned the jet in a new direction, and then plunged it to an altitude at which it could fly to an unknown fate without being detected on radar.
If true, this is evil of a truly breathtaking nature.
Speculation on our part would be pointless until more and better information comes in. For now, we're keeping the passengers, crew, and their families in our thoughts. And additionally hoping that if this has been an act of terrorism, that there will be swift and dramatic consequences.
that a plane can disappear off the civilian radar is easy enough to explain.simply turn off the transponders and drop to 'prox 50 feet alt. a good pilot can do that, no prob! jettison fuel to create an oil slick ...... no prob! question is ...... why?!?!
ReplyDeletesuch a maneuver would draw attention from China ...... where the flight was headed. such a maneuver would be seen as a tactic to avoid radar and would lead to a shoot-down.
The fate of this aircraft has certainly become an intriguing mystery. Theories ranging from hijacking and pilot suicide to alien abduction and trans-dimensional teleportation abound. The fact that some relatives of passengers claim that their loved one's cell phones are still active and ringing only serves to further mystify the situation. It all seems to support the philosophical adage "If man were meant to fly, he'd have been born with frequent flier miles".
ReplyDelete@Geoff-- "If man were meant to fly, he'd have been born with no need of TSA".
ReplyDeleteFTFY
It *is* a conundrum, to be sure - if it hit the waster softly, there 'should' have been all kinds of alarms and squawks. If it hit NOT gently, there should have been a crap ton of debris - seats, luggage, styrofoam cups, what ever...
ReplyDeleteYes, holding all aboard and their families in prayer, either way (and apparently, some cell phones "ring" as the system is searching for them...)
Professional Pilots Rumour Network - Maylasian Airlines MH370 Contact Lost
ReplyDeleteInteresting theories here, expressed in technical terms by professional aviators.
Clearly a straffled turbo-encabulator. If the stabilo-mandilatrix loses signal from the frammis, the scarsicoid radumflator imposes a positive clamper bias on the credisrod, and straffulation is inevitable.
ReplyDeleteEither that or a zener diode flare in the doohickey, which of course creates an inverse fleagle along the torginal control cable and fries the central goddamit. And you DON'T want that at 37,000 feet.
I hope for the best outcome, but at this point is seems problematic.
ReplyDeleteThe pilot turned, or was forced to turn (as is now being reported), forced to descend to below the radar and dump fuel in preparation for landing at an old airfield (which, if all you’re looking for is a flat surface - there are still many old Japanese/British/American WWII fields all over the area. Only glitch to that theory - why no demands? They may have crashed on landing and the wreckage is on some island far away from where they are looking, or possibly they wanted a civilian aircraft to turn into a flying bomb. Let’s go all James Bond/Jack Ryan - terrorists have a perfectly good, modern civilian aircraft with a NK or Iranian nuclear device on board that they could replace a legitimate flight with. Get into landing pattern of a major city, be it Beijing, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Wasilla, and pop the detonator. Who knows? Would make a good movie plot anyway.
That we are so befuddled by this is truly a sign of the age we live in. But only a few generations ago, planes disappeared without a trace all of the time. A mere century ago, a disappearance by any form of transport was commonplace. But today, things like this simply are not supposed to happen.
ReplyDeleteSo in this case with so little hard evidence to go with, we are are mostly left to speculation. All we know with any degree of certainty is that at some point over the South China Sea contact was lost. Even the news that the jet may have taken a "hard left turn" is largely speculative, as well as the recording of an "unidentified object" flying westward over the Strait of Malacca some time after tracking of the jet was originally lost.
So basically, we still have nothing solid to go on.
So instead we speculate on the superfluous, like the two mystery passengers travelling on stolen passports. Terrorists? Possibly. But more likely ordinary criminals continent-jumping. (One of the more out-there theories was that these two Iranians had hijacked the plane and were heading to Israel for a 911-style attack, but since I don't think the plane had fuel for that length of journey, that's unlikely)
A bomb? Possibly, but a plane exploding at altitude would scatter debris over a very large area which would certainly have been discovered by now.
A mechanical failure resulting in a ditching? Also possible, but in that case an ELT (Emergency Location Transmitter) should have had an opportunity to transmit, which clearly didn't happen.
Terrorism: The whole point of terrorism is to create widespread panic amongst the general public. Usually when something of a terroristic nature takes place, somebody takes credit. (If a tree falls in a forest...) Otherwise, what's the point? And yet that hasn't happened. It's still just an "accident".
So it's my guess that until any debris or other hard evidence shows up, there will be a mini-industry left to speculate on this while the reality will never be definitively solved.
Someday in the near future this jet will mysteriously reappear right before it crashes into a skyscraper in a large metro area some where in the world. London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, the Eiffel Tower? I say it is hidden somewhere in an islamic country right now such as Yemen or Somalia. It had the range to make both of those destinations.
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ReplyDeleteIf it does turn out to be a terrorist act, I doubt very much that consequences (if any) from this administration will be swift OR dramatic.
ReplyDeleteWe can only wish that our Dear Leader and the 'boob squad'was on board headed out to another golfing vacation!
ReplyDeleteMan, it's terrible that I feel that way! But I do.
This is ugly, but like Pry I too wish it was AF1 that disappeared and not these innocent folks. I was watching The Five and did just hear on Fox News they think they've identified where the jet went down. If it's true, a Chinese satellite picked up the wreckage, or whole plane, in the ocean. What's puzzling is the "black box" is not beeping it's distress call and many of the cell phones are still functional per family members (per the news report). Maybe there are survivors and someone can shed more light on this mystery.
ReplyDeleteWell, this is most certainly "not on topic" but it only goes to show you my social ineptitude - but I just saw this posted elsewhere and thought that the H&C gang would show it some R-S-P-E-C-T just like they do everything else. And anyway, this Malaysian Airline thing is just too weird and sad. But then, so is Sheila Jackson Lee.
ReplyDeletehttp://freebeacon.com/sheila-jackson-lee-thinks-the-constitution-is-400-years-old/
I seriously doubt that any of the cell phones were, in fact, "functional", considering that cellular signals are light-of-sight at best.
ReplyDeleteIf the plane was far enough away to be off radar, it was certainly too far away for any cellular network to be accessible.
Not nescessarily true. Radar is also line of sight. A plane can be off radar by simply flying under it. Cell reception depends on where the nearest tower is. A plane sitting on a tarmac is off radar, but could have perfect cellphone signal.
DeleteLatest news I just saw is that it is now believed this plane could have flown for another four hours. I would think there are plenty of landing areas in that large a radius area from the last contact.
ReplyDeleteI wonder where the next airplane turned missile attack will be? I would bet it won't be long. And I wonder if the passengers will be held as "hostages" in the hope that wherever in the world the target is the respective military will not shoot it down?
I do not think this is going to end well. Perhaps the best thing now would be if it had in fact crashed.
Although it's true, @Geoff King, that radar stations are tuned to avoid picking up ground clutter, the assumption here is that the plane was far at sea and well beyond the range of ground-based radar. If it was beyond the range of ground-based radar, it was certainly beyond the range of two-way cellular coverage. The conspiratorial implication is that the jet has been flying about at low level to evade radar coverage. Certainly possible. But if it was flying low in any area that was close enough to civilization to receive cellular signals, the plane certainly would have spotted by numerous people on the ground somewhere. Also, a jet's range is severely limited at low altitude, so it couldn't have gotten all that far either. Therefore, I'm still discounting that theory.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there is a lot of misunderstanding in the media about what a "transponder" is or what it actually does. A transponder is a radio device that responds to a sweep by a radar beam by sending back information about the aircraft. Information includes the aircraft's identification, altitude, attitude, ground speed, heading, vertical rate, and a 4-digit code assigned to the aircraft by air traffic control. Turning off the transponder does not make the aircraft "disappear" from radar. (although if at extreme range the radar return may be less distinct or consistent) It just makes it so that radar operators can no longer uniquely identify a particular aircraft, especially in congested airspace.
New News: We finally have some actual hard data from the aircraft. Telemetry from the 777 engines transmitted to Rolls Royce indicate that the plane flew an additional 4 hours after it's last hard contact. The engines transmit data via satellite to Rolls Royce every 30 minutes, and includes various performance parameters of the engine, as well as the altitude and airspeed of the aircraft. (but not any navigational data) The data is intended to provide the manufacturer and mechanics with long-term information about the engine's health.
So now we know that the plane could be anywhere within a 2200 nautical mile radius, and hijacking is again front-and-center as the possible cause of the disappearance.
To the Hope-n-Change staff: I have posted one of your cartoons at: www.qcghost.blogspot.com
ReplyDeleteIf you would rather I not post your stuff from time to time, please advise. Thank you, QC Ghost
@alan markus- Wow, Mrs. Jarlsberg and I have pretty much been glued to the site you linked to (where actual pilots are speculating about what may have happened). Thanks!
ReplyDelete@John the Econ- The information (now denied by some authorities, but not entirely convincingly) that the jet's engines continued sending data for four hours is head-spinning. I can imagine a lot of scary scenarios in which this might only be "step one."
@QCMediaGhost- By all means feel free to post anything from Hope n' Change on your site (and thank you!). The only restrictions are that you need to keep the identifying information on the cartoon, and that you can't use the images commercially for any reason. Other than that, I'm grateful for your help in sharing the material!
Sounds like a play right out of Tom Clancy's Dead or Alive, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear you found the link to the pilot site useful. After I posted, some lunatic was there trying to advance a theory that the plane was snatched out of the sky by alien abductors. Was worried that you might follow the link before the moderators zapped those posts.
ReplyDeleteOff topic but today's UK The Telegraph has ( near the bottom of the page) in the "photographs" section a series of doctored photos by some artist of various wold leaders as drag queens. Obama's is particularly lovely and should really grace your page, perhaps opposite his Saudi friend who is equally enticing.
ReplyDeleteFirst and foremost, my thoughts and Prayers are with those passengers, crew members, and families/friends of those on flight MH370. This 'incident' has me dis-combobulated with theories, and I can't decide which scenario makes better sense; even with my foil hat on.
ReplyDeleteMayhaps we could ask Barry H. Oomniscient to utilize his pen and phone to help solve this mystery; he 'believes' he can solve every other problem with them.
Off topic, but two video's (from today) worth watching; God Bless Trey Gowdy!
ReplyDeletehttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/13/trey-gowdy-on-obamas-power-grabs-how-does-going-from-being-a-senator-to-a-president-re-write-the-constitution/
Disappear Obama ASAP.
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