I'll agree that this is a major head-scratcher. To say that there are more questions than answers is a major understatement, there are no answers yet.

Authorities Investigate 4 Passengers On Missing Malaysia Flight With ‘Suspicious’ IDs « CBS DC


The missing plane apparently fell from the sky at cruising altitude in fine weather, and the pilots were either unable or had no time to send a distress signal – unusual circumstances under which a modern jetliner operated by a professional airline would crash.

“We are trying to make sense of this,” the Malaysian air force chief told a media conference. “The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back and in some parts, this was corroborated by civilian radar.”

Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said pilots were supposed to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if the plane does a U-turn. “From what we have, there was no such distress signal or distress call per se, so we are equally puzzled,” he said.

Authorities were checking on the suspect identities of at least two passengers who appear to have boarded with stolen passports. On Saturday, the foreign ministries in Italy and Austria said the names of two citizens listed on the flight’s manifest matched the names on two passports reported stolen in Thailand.

Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said that authorities were looking at two more possible cases of suspicious identities. He said Malaysian intelligence agencies were in contact with their international counterparts, including the FBI. He gave no more details.

“All the four names are with me and have been given to our intelligence agencies,” he said. “We are looking at all possibilities.”

The stolen passports, and the sudden disappearance of the plane that experts say is consistent with a possible onboard explosion, strengthened existing concerns about terrorism as a possible cause for the disappearance. Al Qaeda militants have used similar tactics to try and disguise their identities.

According to Malaysia's civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, five passengers booked on the flight did not board, and their luggage was removed.

Not many plausible explanations, but Occam's Razor typically applies. The problem is figuring out which is the fit.

1. catastrophic decompression at altitude. If this happened, the crew could be out in a matter of seconds with no ability to call things in. Depending on the damage, it might fly for awhile (doubtful) or auger in (more likely). If it did that over sea, you would expect to see some floating debris but it could be a small pattern.

2. other catastrophic failure (airframe, control, comms). One could imagine losing comms combined with some other problem, trying to turn back (or getting lost) and eventually going down.

3. Passenger terrorists - commandeer the cockpit and crash it or plane goes down with a struggle, or blow up a device leading to catastrophic failure.

4. Pilot terrorist act - while others are out of the cockpit, pilot augers in.

I don't see much other explanation.

5. Hacked flight controls. The 777 is fly-by-wire AFAIK.

6. Tank explosion from static electricity.
PDF: http://lessonslearned.faa.gov/TWA800/TWA800findings.pdf
'the TWA flight 800 accident was an explosion of the center wing fuel tank (CWT), resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel/air mixture ...'

a to A∞-monads and completion - ResearchGate

I would like to see a retroactive audit of passports on past flights to see how often someone flew with a stolen passport. Are there gangs that smuggle people to China and beyond with stolen passports or is it something that is really unusual and points to terrorism?

If it is so common to find stolen passports then someone must have some statistics on the problem.

http://www.freep.com/usatoday/article/6230767 (Kind of disturbing)

The world is awash in stolen passports such as those that two passengers used to board the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared Saturday, but only a few countries closely monitor their use.

More than 40 million travel documents, mostly passports, have been reported stolen, according to a database begun in 2002 - following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States - by the France-based international law enforcement organization Interpol.

"Only a handful of countries worldwide are taking care to make sure that persons possessing stolen passports are not boarding international flights," Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said Sunday. His organization confirmed that at least two stolen passports were used to board missing flight MH370, which lost contact with air traffic control shortly after leaving Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.

Interpol said no country has made any checks on those passports since they were reported stolen in Thailand - an Austrian one in 2012 and an Italian one in 2013 - adding it's unable to say how many other times they might have been used.

"It is too soon to speculate about any connection between these stolen passports and the missing plan," Noble said. Yet he said their use is a "great concern" and should prompt countries and airlines to check Interpol's data before allowing passengers to board.

The United States uses Interpol's database, which started with a few thousand records, more than any other nation to screen the background of people entering the country. It does more than 250 million checks a year, followed by the United Kingdom with at least 120 million checks and the United Arab Emirates with at least 50 million.

Interpol makes its database available to all 190 member countries but cannot force them to integrate it into their own systems, according to Interpol's press office, which declined to name which countries - other than the U.S., the U.K. and the UAE - have done so.

Last year, Interpol reports, passengers boarded planes more than a billion times without having their passports screened against its Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database.

The data are currently accessible only to law enforcement, but Interpol is looking at an "I-checkit" pilot project that would extend availability to the travel, hotel and banking industries.

Fake passports, often obtained on the black market, have been used before by terrorists, including Ramzi Yousef, convicted of carrying out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York.

The 9/11 Commission report, issued in 2004, detailed how the 9/11 hijackers obtained and modified the passports that got them into the United States. It lists five ways terrorists can use passports, including changing stolen ones with new photos or doctoring them to create a fake travel history by adding or removing visa entry stamps.

Since that report, passport security hasn't improved much, mostly because it has not been exploited in a recent U.S. attack, said Michael Greenberg, a former Clinton administration official and founder and director of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security.

"Passports are a very weak link in the security system," he said, noting there's still no effective way to ensure that the person presenting a passport is the person to whom it was issued. He says they're easy to steal, replicate and alter, and international fliers not leaving from or arriving at a U.S. airport face a different system from the one used by the United States.

Despite the 9/11 report's discussion of biometric passports â?? virtually impossible to replicate and intrinsically linked to whomever it was issued â?? "the federal government keeps the system we have in place and hopes nothing bad happens," Greenberg said.

Still, he said the U.S. system, which involves checking reported stolen or false passports against its own watch list, is better than the one used internationally. Had the Malaysia Airlines flight been headed to the United States, he said, the passenger manifest would have been checked before takeoff, primarily against the U.S. watch list rather than Interpol's database.

Many nations, he said, neither maintain their own watch lists nor check any list as carefully as the U.S. "So if you're flying between two foreign airports, you're at the mercy of whatever the host and receiving countries are doing," Greenberg said.

Though this doesn't answer your point directly, it gives a sobering look at stolen passports as a major commodity.

The following only addresses U.S. issued passports (from the State Department website):

"During the period October 1, 2010 and September 30, 2011, the State Department reported 253,037 passports as lost and 60,984 as stolen."

Add to these numbers the passports lost/stolen from other countries and the potential for black market/terrorism use is obvious.

Parallel:The NHTSA won't keep statistics on SUV crashes/theft/damage/injuries.

Differences Between Insuring a Car vs. an SUV or Truck
-'All things equal, SUVs and trucks generally cost more to insure when compared to cars. Oftentimes, the premiums can run 10% to 20% more.'
-'Many SUVs and trucks are stolen more often than cars."

I'm of personal surmise that keeping statistics will show a much greater insurance-industry profit loss than a mere 10-20%...

I know at least one American that was robber for his passport in London.

In the 2010 Air India crash at Mangalore, out of 160 passengers 10 had false/stolen passports. So maybe it is more common in that part of the World than people realise.

In the night of Mar 9th 2014 Vietnam's Search and Rescue Control Center released a photo of a part floating in the Gulf of Thailand, that despite darkness was discovered by a Twin Otter Aircraft of Vietnam's Coast Guard at position N8.792 E103.374 about 31nm southsouthwest of Tho Chu (editorial note: 114nm north of the last radar contact position) and is believed to be a part of the aircraft. The Control Center stated, the part is definitely made of composite material. Forces will be dispatched to the part after daybreak Mar 10th 2014.

Crash: Malaysia B772 over Gulf of Thailand on Mar 8th 2014, aircraft missing

Although, it is not obvious to me what the floating thing is (see photo at link) or that it is from an aircraft - thoughts?

One of the nightly news programs said it might be a door.*

* I only heard it in passing.

It definitely looks consistent with an airliner door.

Cockpit doesn't have a door.
Cockpit is sealed.
???

If you wanted to get back to PRC and had "escaped" previously, perhaps you would need a stolen passport? So, this could be a red herring.

The complete lack of comm from the aircraft points to a TWA 800 scenario, and it seems there isn't a definitive answer to that one yet, so we're going to have to chew our nails a bit on this one too, I suspect.

Airplane entrance/exit door or cargo door?


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Something I find curious and may be significant. I noticed that the timeline for the flight is often abbreviated, but when looking at a complete account of the flight, there is a considerable, unexplained gap.

12.40 am - Flight MH370, a Boeing 777-200 carrying 227 passengers from 14 nationalities along with 12 crew members, took off from the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.

1.22 am - The plane was meant to transfer to Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh air traffic control but never appeared.

2.41 am - Malaysian air traffic control in Subang lost contact with the plane, some two hours after it left Kuala Lumpur.

It's the 1:22 am entry that's often left out. With it there, it appears the flight crew never checked in or transferred control, around 40 mins. Into the flight.

Then, at 2:41 am, an hour and nineteen minutes later, the plane is lost on radar.. Unless I'm missing something, there appears to be a considerable amount of time, nearly an hour and a half, when the flight is uncommunative yet in the air. It is during this gap when the plane seems to turn back, lose altitude, and disappear. That doesn't appear to be a sudden catastrophe. Am I way off on this?

I wonder if this aircraft has ever had any previous accidents? I'm thinking of the 1985 747 crash in Japan. An incorrectly repaired bulkhead ruptured, causing an explosive decompression and loss of the part of the tail.

It'd had a wing tip broken off and repaired a couple of years ago. But if it was something like this, there would have been bits floating floating around over a big area.

The really weird thing is two days later no one has a clue and all good theories (pun not intended) get shot down in flames.

Well, this is admittedly a bizarre and far fetched idea, but what if it didn't crash? What if its been hijacked, and taken to a remote location as part of some sort of ransom plot or to be used as a political bargaining tool?

Complete hogwash, I know, but the lack of answers makes the mind wander.....

Umm, well it wouldn't be for free labour to work in the "salt mines" of North Korea, because I think they have a fair amount of free labour there already. It will be really interesting over the next few days I'm guessing, by that I mean who are the stolen passport guys etc.

How far apart are those land masses? Could someone on land see something exploding in the sky?


Also, what time, local time was the flight? I thought it was daylight.

Why no ransom request then? Very perplexing for sure.

I've wondered about something like this as well.

Very few things realistically happen in an airplane that don't give the crew time to communicate. Catastrophic airframe or mechanical failure (rare), massive explosion (aircraft or terrorist), shot down, or hijacking. If something happened dramatic enough that caused the aircraft to break up in flight and at altitude, I'm shocked that they haven't found pieces.

Not many remote areas have 2000 meter concrete runways.

4 8 15 16 23 42

In all seriousness - this is very troubling.
I have heard discussion elsewhere about the idea that perhaps this was a "test run" in which case the responsible parties may not want to tip their hand yet. Very bothersome about level of "security" worldwide, but with stolen passports getting through unscathed - in tix (1-way)purchased immediately prior to flight.
Makes me glad to take my shoes, jacket, belt off and nearly empty my carry on multiple times per week.
There. Rant over.

Nutmeg I have always been perplexed by the griping over airport security and what an inconvenience it is. Surely if you find yourself on a plane with some mentally deficient islamic missionary trying to blow you up you might wish security were even tighter.

Radar contact lost at 2:41 am. It was dark.

No debris? What if the ocean slick tests show negative for JP-4 or no match for hydraulic oils used on the 777? Whats left? Alien Encounter?

After noticing what appears to be over an hour of time the plane was flying without contact, I thought of a hijacking also but with a resultant crash. However, I wonder about that possibility due to the security of the cockpit door. A hijack could explain the lack of communication, the altering of course, and the eventual (maybe) plunge into the ocean.

I absolutely know nothing about the look of a jet fuel slick, but from what I've seen, the slick being shown on the net looks an awful lot like bunker oil. I'm very skeptical of that slick being from the plane, but I'll wait until analysis is reported.

Beretta-
To clarify: not so much of a gripe as pointing out the level of searching and implied security vs the lack of use of the data that is available.
If I minded travel that much, I would find a career that would plant my butt in a cube somewhere.
I think I flew about 6-8 legs within china in January, and they "appear" to apply a high level of security at the airport. The apparent level of ineffectivness is the disconcerting piece here.
Sorry I was not clear earlier.

The oil slick was determined to not have originated from the aircraft, so at this time still no sign as I understand it.
The previous wing repair is a non issue, if you are getting on a commercial airliner there is a pretty slim chance it h as no damage history unless it is brand new, and in addition it appears that the aircraft merely had the winglet damaged and replaced, the aircraft can fly with very little effect with one winglet torn away. In fact, I know of a 777 that had winglet damage and had to relocate in order to be repaired and Boeing's recommended action was to cut off what was left of the winglet, speed tape the hole and fly the aircraft with one winglet to the repair location.
This event is remarkable in many ways, it is pretty hard to lose an aircraft these days. As far as location, the area in question is not an area that has systems that allow controllers to hard "paint"an aircraft, in areas such as this the "radar" system is really not a radar, it is the aircraft reporting her position to ATC, not ATC discerning her position by actual radar. So a significant transponder or nav system issue could have the aircraft reporting a gross postion error and everyone looking in the wrong area.

No oil slick? Impossible..................vanished without a trace...

The new "Bermuda Triangle of the South China Sea".

I can't get behind the "disintegrated" at 35K feet theory. Seems like there were be lots of debris spread over a large area had that plane come apart at Mach .8 while at altitude.

As far as the alien abduction... I heard two women discussing this at a garage sale on Saturday. One said, "They do have their own Bermuda Triangle over there." :rolleyes:

disintegration at high altitude could leave very little trace spread over a massive area. No oil slick is not that surprising if the aircraft truly did disintegrate the fuel would have dissipated over a huge area maybe not leaving enough in any one area for a slick.

That's a big plane. Even a massive explosion would leave a sizable debris trail with some pretty big pieces. I'm sure some would sink, but not everything.

Oh, there is a debris field somewhere. They just haven't found it. The ocean is a large place.