Is it possible that Malaysia plane was stolen?

[CGI_Ram]

Malaysia: Plane's disappearance a 'deliberate action'

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/15/malaysia-airlines-flight-missing/6451477/

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak said Saturday that communications on a Malaysia Airlines flight missing since last Saturday were disabled due to "deliberate action by someone on the plane" and that the last known signal from the airliner came more than seven hours after takeoff.

The revelation came amid an intensifying search involving dozens of planes and ships in an ever-widening area where the plane may have gone down. Military and government experts on Saturday pored over satellite and radar data that may shed light on the fate of the plane but so far there is no trace of debris.

Speaking at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, Prime Minister Razak said investigators were making calculations to try to determine exactly how far the airliner traveled after its last point of contact.

According to new satellite data analyzed by the FAA, NTSB, AAIB and Malaysian authorities, the plane's communications from the Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System were cut off just before the aircraft reached the east coast of the peninsula of Malaysia, and the aircraft's transponder was turned off shortly thereafter, near the border of Malaysia and Vietnam, he said.

Flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 12:40 a.m. on March 8 with 239 people on board. A multi-national search effort involving 14 countries, 43 ships and 58 aircraft has turned up no trace of the Boeing 777, despite an expansive search that has widened with each passing day.

The last confirmed communication from the plane to a satellite was 8:11 a.m. Malaysia time, Razak said.

The prime minister said the search for flight has entered a "new phase," focusing on two possible corridors -- a northern corridor from the border of Kazakstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, and a southern corridor from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean.

The prime minister also confirmed reports that circulated earlier this week that the plane veered off its course toward Beijing, turning back westward and crossing over peninsular Malaysia into the northern stretches of the Strait of Malacca.

Razak announced that search operations were ending in the South China Sea and investigators are refocusing their attention on the pilots and passengers on board Flight MH370. He added that Malaysia was "working with the relevant countries to request all information relevant to the search, including radar data."

Razak would not confirm a hijacking.

"Despite media reports that the plane was hijacked, I wish to be very clear: We are still investigating all possibilities as to what caused MH370 to deviate from its original flight path," he said.

Razak also defended Malaysia's handling of the investigation, saying that they have followed up each and every lead.

According to a report by Reuters, authorities searched the home of the pilot shortly after the prime minister's statement.

"For the families and friends of those involved, we hope this new information brings us one step closer to finding the plane," Razak said.

Indian navy ships supported by long-range surveillance planes and helicopters scoured Andaman Sea islands for a third day on Saturday without any success in finding evidence of the missing jet, officials said.

Nearly a dozen ships, patrol vessels, surveillance aircraft and helicopters have been deployed, but "we have got nothing so far," said V.S.R. Murthy, an Indian coast guard official.

The Indian navy's coordinated search has so far covered more than 250,000 square kilometers (100,579 square miles) in the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal "without any sighting or detection," the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The search has been expanded to the central and eastern sides of the Bay of Bengal, the ministry said.

India intensified the search on Saturday by deploying two recently acquired P8i long-range maritime patrol and one C 130J Hercules aircraft to the region. Short-range maritime reconnaissance Dornier aircraft have also been deployed, the ministry said.

Bangladesh has joined the search effort in the Bay of Bengal with two patrol aircraft and two frigates, said Mahbubul Haque Shakil, an aide of Bangladesh's prime minister, Sheikh Hasina.

Seeing no headway, Malaysian authorities suggested a new search area of 9,000 square kilometers (3,474 square miles) to India along the Chennai coast in the Bay of Bengal, India's Defense Ministry said.

India used heat sensors on flights over hundreds of uninhabited Andaman Sea islands that stretch south of Myanmar, covering an area 720 kilometers (447 miles) long and 52 kilometers (32 miles) wide. Only 37 of 572 are inhabited, with the rest covered in dense forests.

The island chain has four airstrips, but only the main airport in Port Blair can handle a large commercial jet.

Much of the early search has focused east of Malaysia in the South China Sea, where the aircraft last communicated with air-traffic base stations about an hour after departing for Beijing.

Three days ago, six Indian navy and coast guard ships, plus reconnaissance planes, began searching eastern parts of the Andaman Sea. Friday, they headed west of the Andaman and Nicobar islands near the Bay of Bengal.

There are more than 500 islands in that chain, many of which are richly forested and uninhabited.

 

[Thordaddy]

I would be interested to see the occupations of all the folks on the flight manifest. We are looking for the remains over in the IO as reports show it flew west before it was lost and it appears all communications were shut off at differing times. So the curious side of me has to wonder could a Chinese national who has info the west could use or has been using been aboard that flight? I have to wonder as it would make a awesome extraction story of a CIA ran op to bring a defector in. Slip two operatives aboard under suspect passports somehow missed. They fly the plane to the military base in Diego Garcia unload the true cargo they want. Fly the plane to another spot unload the passengers and another week or so we find the wreckage and then through a tip find the missing passengers at some abandoned terrorist camp. Don't think that is the case, but would sure be a awesome way to pull off a defection. Odds are it crashed or was sabotaged so again the passenger manifest right now I am sure is being looked over with a fine tooth comb to see if what or any light it can shed. I would not rule out a hijacking, but so far no groups has stepped up to say yea we did that which most of the time is the case so they can use the public media for their advantage to strike fear.

I'd be inclined to think someone was trying to hijack the plane and failed and splashed it when they couldn't .
Here's my terrorist senario, the plane gets hijacked and landed in Pakistan,roled into a hanger where it's repainted to resemble an Air France 777 fitted with a 10 megaton bomb ,terrorist hijack a 777 Air France bound for Shivaji AP in Mumbai, they radio they are losing altitude 20 miles out where the impostor plane is shadowing them at 1,000 ft they drop below the radar and lose radio contact whereupon the impostor plane ascends without radio contact in the exact flight path 2 miles out they radio they are carrying a nuke and any attempt to shoot them down will be met with detonation demand the release of prisoners as they fly inland towards Bhopal where they intend to detonate at 1,000 feet ,but Jack Ryan Jr.was aboard unbeknownst to the terrorists and has been working on defusing the bomb since 15 minutes into the flight ,he's got a chute and a sawzall and an altimeter , the terrorists think the bomb is still armed ,Jack saws a hole in the fuselage and bails at 3,000 feet the boobs try to detonate and fail,a pair of SU-30MKI froce them down into a nearby mountain side where the bomb is recovered and the people of India elect Jack Jr. Prime Minister for life.

 

[Ram_of_Old]

I feel very bad for the families that are waiting for an answer. Even finding the wreckage would be somewhat of a relief at this point. Not knowing anything is got to be torture.

 

[Thordaddy]

I feel very bad for the families that are waiting for an answer. Even finding the wreckage would be somewhat of a relief at this point. Not knowing anything is got to be torture.

Yeah by now you know your family member in any scenario has met with bad circumstances.
I JUST heard a retired military man cay he thought the US had more info than they were releasing and that they were waiting on the Malaysian gov't to catch up,said he'd look in Pakistan or Iran .

 

[Ram_of_Old]

It stands somewhat amazing to me that we have satellites that can see a basketball bounce from space, and yet cannot tell when a 777 crashes into the ocean. Just Saying.....

 

[LesBaker]

I feel very bad for the families that are waiting for an answer. Even finding the wreckage would be somewhat of a relief at this point. Not knowing anything is got to be torture.

For sure, especially since the media is bloviating.

 

[Ram_of_Old]

For sure, especially since the media is bloviating.

Has anyone asked the NSA? They seem to know everything...

 

[RmsLegends]

It stands somewhat amazing to me that we have satellites that can see a basketball bounce from space, and yet cannot tell when a 777 crashes into the ocean. Just Saying.....

Satellites are tasked so they might not have had one free for a look when this went down or they could have been in perigee instead of apogee and if so then it's time on station would have been shorter. More than likely they just were not expecting this so they had no bird over the AOI that was untasked.

 

[jrry32]

Trying to use it as a weapon later makes no sense. First, where do you hide it? Second how do you refuel it? Third how do you maintain it? Finally how do you get it to your target without being shot down well in advance. A "lost" plane suddenly flying towards a major city is going to attract attention.

Makes zero sense.

Thank you. I was about to say the same thing. It's a 777. You're not going to hide it. You need a major runway to take off. And even if you get it into the sky, it's going to show up on radar. So if you have the transponder off, you'll either get intercepted by jets or you'll get shot down.

There's really no way to mask the plane and use it as a weapon. If they were going to use it as a weapon, they'd do it quickly. Take the target by surprise. Holding onto the plane just does not make sense.

IMO, even if it was hijacked, it's gone now.

 

[CGI_Ram]

I don't know what I think, honestly...

Now that they've started to switch their focus on the pilots, why do what they did if they just planned to crash the plane?

i.e. why turn off the tracking devices? Why the diversion from it's course? Why the tactical evasion maneuvers?

I mean... if you're gonna crash the plane in the ocean... crash it. Why take so long to do it?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/16/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

The first clue that perhaps one or both of the pilots were involved stem from when the plane made a sharp, deliberate turn from where it last communicated with Kuala Lumpur air traffic controllers, and before it would have to communicate with Vietnamese controllers, according to the U.S. official with knowledge of the latest intelligence thinking.

"This is the perfect place to start to disappear," the official said.

Adding to the intrigue, ABC News reported that the dramatic left turn was preprogrammed into the plane's navigation computer. It's a task that would have required extensive piloting experience to complete.

Two senior law enforcement officials also told ABC that new information revealed the plane performed "tactical evasion maneuvers" after it disappeared from radar. CNN was unable to confirm these reports.

 

[brokeu91]

Another odd thing about this, which I heard on NPR the other day (sorry if someone else already wrote about it) is that satellites that pick up explosions (really used to make sure no country is firing missiles) did not notice anything. For instance when TWA 800 when down these satellites picked up the explosion. There is nothing on this plane.

The entire thing does not make any sense at all. It's just for a lack of a better term, weird.

 

[Ramhusker]

I used to work crash recovery in the Air Force.and I can tell you this much. If this plane went down in the ocean, they would of found debris by now and not just a door and an oil slick. Many parts of a plane are buoyant and a plane that size would make a debris field the size of 1000 football fields by now in open ocean. This plane either went down in mountain terrain or something very bizarre and unlikely has occurred. The likelihood of an airliner being used as a weapon go down exponentially once you land it.

 

[CGI_Ram]

 

[RamFan503]

I used to work crash recovery in the Air Force.and I can tell you this much. If this plane went down in the ocean, they would of found debris by now and not just a door and an oil slick. Many parts of a plane are buoyant and a plane that size would make a debris field the size of 1000 football fields by now in open ocean. This plane either went down in mountain terrain or something very bizarre and unlikely has occurred. The likelihood of an airliner being used as a weapon go down exponentially once you land it.

All good points. Still.... WTF??? Nothing really adds up so far.

 

[RhodyRams]

View attachment 1387

was bound to happen sooner or later. I wish I was quick enough to think of this stuff !!

 

[Ramhusker]

Missing Plane's Tracking Device Disabled Before 'All Right' Radio Call

Indonesian national search and rescue agency personnel watch over high seas during a search operation for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the Andaman Sea on March 15.
Sunday, 16 Mar 2014 06:29 PM

By Newsmax Wires


The final words heard transmitted from the flight deck of the missing Malaysian Airlines jetliner — "All right, good night" — were uttered after the plane's signaling equipment was shut off, a senior Malaysian official said Sunday.

"Yes, it was disabled before," said Hishammuddin Hussein of the tracking system in response to a question about the crew's final, seemingly normal, radio transmission, The New York Times reports.

The revelation came as investigators continued to trawl through the backgrounds of the pilots, crew and ground staff who worked on a missing jetliner for clues as to why someone on board flew it perhaps thousands of miles off course, the country's police chief said.

Meanwhile, the British Sunday Telegraph reported that Saajid Muhammad Badat, a British-born al-Qaida informant, told authorities in court last week that he was aware of a long-standing plot by a group of Malaysians — one of whom reportedly was a pilot — to hijack an airliner.

Badat said he once supplied the cell with a shoe bomb and that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now being held in Guantánamo, was the plot's original organizer.


Security experts told the Telegraph that the evidence was “credible”. Badat, who is in hiding, said that he had met the Malaysian jihadists – one of whom was a pilot – in Afghanistan and given them a shoe bomb to use to take control of an aircraft.

“These spectaculars take a long time in the planning,” one British expert told the paper.

Testifying at the trial in New York of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, Badat said: “I gave one of my shoes to the Malaysians. I think it was to access the cockpit.”

Badat told the court that the Malaysian plot was being masterminded by Mohammed, the principal architect of 9/11. Mohammed kept a list of the world’s tallest buildings and crossed out New York’s Twin Towers after the September 11, 2001 attacks with hijacked airliners as “a joke to make us laugh," Badat said.

The Mail of Britain also reported Sunday that the pilot of missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 was a "strident" supporter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

Hours before the plane took off, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah reportedly attended a session of Ibrahim's long-running court proceedings. His colleagues said the captain was preoccupied with Ibrahim's trial. Reuters reported that postings on his Facebook page also seem to confirm this.

Ibrahim is a former deputy premier of Malaysia. He broke with the ruling Barisan Nasional Party and founded an anti-corruption reformist Islamic movement. He has been involved in lengthy proceedings following his imprisonment for alleged corruption and homosexual activity. Ibrahim is currently out on bail and the leader of the Malaysian parliamentary opposition. He is planning to run for re-election in his constituency on March 23.

Additionally, reports also emerged of the presence of an aviation engineer among the passengers, the Times reported.

But background checks of passengers have so far drawn a blank, though not every country whose nationals were on board has responded to requests for information, police chief Khalid Abu Bakar told a news conference on Sunday.
No trace of the Boeing 777-200ER has been found since it vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board, but investigators believe it was diverted by someone who knew how to switch off its communications and tracking systems.

Malaysia has appealed for international help in the search for the plane across two corridors stretching from the shores of Caspian Sea to the far south of the Indian Ocean.

"The search area has been significantly expanded," said Hussein, who also is the acting transportation minister. "From focusing mainly on shallow seas, we are now looking at large tracts of land, crossing 11 countries, as well as deep and remote oceans."

The disappearance of the aircraft has baffled investigators, aviation experts and internet sleuths since it vanished from civilian air traffic control screens off Malaysia's east coast less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing.

Malaysian authorities believe that as the plane crossed the country's northeast coast and flew across the Gulf of Thailand, someone on board shut off its communications systems and turned sharply to the west.

Electronic signals it continued to exchange periodically with satellites suggest it could have continued flying for nearly seven hours after flying out of range of Malaysian military radar off the country's northwest coast, heading towards India.

The plane had enough fuel to fly for about seven-and-a-half to eight hours, Malaysian Airlines' Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said.

On Saturday, police special branch officers searched the homes of the captain and first officer, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid, in middle-class suburbs of Kuala Lumpur close to the international airport.

An experienced pilot, Zaharie has been described by other current and former co-workers as a flying enthusiast who spent his off days operating a life-sized flight simulator he had set up at home.

Police chief Khalid said investigators had taken the flight simulator for examination by experts.

Earlier, a senior police official said the flight simulator programs were looked at closely, adding they appeared to be normal ones that allowed players to practice flying and landing in different conditions.

Police sources said they were looking at the personal, political and religious backgrounds of both pilots and the other crew members. Khalid said ground support staff who might have worked on the plane were also being investigated.

A day before the plane vanished, opposition leader Ibrahim was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to five years in prison, in a ruling his supporters and international human rights groups say was politically influenced.

Asked if Zaharie's background as an opposition supporter was being examined, the first senior police officer would say only: "We need to cover all our bases."

Malaysia Airlines has said it did not believe Zaharie would have sabotaged the plane, and many of his colleagues were incredulous.

"Please, let them find the aircraft first. Zaharie is not suicidal, not a political fanatic as some foreign media are saying," a Malaysia Airlines pilot who is close to Zaharie told Reuters. "Is it wrong for anyone to have an opinion about politics?"

Co-pilot Fariq was religious and serious about his career, family and friends said.

The two pilots had not made any request to fly together.

With no clear motive established as to why someone diverted the plane, Khalid said all possibilities — hijack, sabotage, or personal or psychological problems of someone on board — were being investigated.

Transport Minister Hishammuddin said authorities had not received any ransom or other demand. "That makes if very difficult for us to verify whether its a hijacking or terrorist," he said.

Southeast Asia's homegrown Islamist militant groups, such as Jemaah Islamiah (JI), which carried out the Bali bombings in 2002, have been quiet in recent years after security forces either arrested or shot dead numerous members.

Experts said they doubted the remaining militants had the skills or capabilities to carry out a complex hijacking.

"JI has not been involved with violence in the region since 2007," said Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict.

"The other groups that are active in Indonesia, in trying to make terrorist plots, are all not very competent. I would be extremely surprised if any group from Indonesia, the Philippines or Malaysia itself would be directly involved."

Analysis of satellite data showed the last signal from the missing plane was at 8:11 a.m., almost seven hours after it turned back over the Gulf of Thailand and re-crossed the Malay peninsula.

It's location was not pinpointed - experts could only determine that the plane could have been anywhere in either of two arcs: one stretching from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, or a southern arc heading from Indonesia to the vast southern Indian Ocean.

Hishammuddin said Malaysia had requested further satellite data from several countries, including the United States, China and France, to help with the search.

A source familiar with official U.S. assessments said it was thought most likely the plane had headed south into the Indian Ocean, where it would presumably have run out of fuel and crashed. Air space to the north is much busier, and the plane would likely have been detected.

Countries contacted by Malaysia to assist in the search range from the former Soviet central Asian republics in the north to Australia in the south, along with France, which administers a scattering of islands deep in the southern Indian Ocean uninhabited except for a handful of researchers.

The Indian Ocean is one of the most remote places in the world and also one of the deepest, posing enormous challenges for efforts to find any wreckage or the flight voice and data recorders that would be key to solving the puzzle.



The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Pieces to this puzzle are starting to merge together!

 

[Ram_of_Old]

One of the pilots took the plane down. I think the evidence is becoming more and more conclusive.

 

[CGI_Ram]

One of the pilots took the plane down. I think the evidence is becoming more and more conclusive.

Probably. But why fly around for hours off course if the plan was to crash all along?

 

[Ram_of_Old]

Probably. But why fly around for hours off course if the plan was to crash all along?

True that....

 

[Ramhusker]

Probably. But why fly around for hours off course if the plan was to crash all along?

Second thoughts about dying? Who knows but you know what they say about the "best laid plans".