The same happened with the reports of the radar capturing it drastically off-course. First it looked like a sure thing, and then it was eventually completely denied. Perhaps that's just a symptom of such an intensely-analyzed ongoing news story, though.
I do feel a bit sorry for the Malaysian government. They don't get to control what the media prints, but are expected to immediately confirm/deny everything (difficult with the volume of reports they are likely dealing with!), and to some extent get chastised when the media prints stuff that later gets busted.
The New York Times, quoting American officials and others familiar with the investigation, said radar signals recorded by the Malaysian military appear to show the airliner climbing to 45,000 feet (about 13,700 meters), higher than a Boeing 777’s approved limit, soon after it disappeared from civilian radar, and making a sharp turn to the west.[1]
If the MH370 suddenly climbed to 45,000 feet that would indicate that either (1) there was a mechanical failure so the pilots had to struggle to take the control again or (2) there was a fight in the cockpit that resulted on the abrupt climb.
I had never read before that it was known the plane did a 180, but the Malaysian government denied for a week (why would they deny it..) And then the plane was on a zigzag course and traveling fast.
So we don't know what happened, but based on that alone it seems like something fishy.
IIRC it was controversial as it implies that the 777 was in controlled flight for several hours after it lost contact, making it a deliberate act rather than accident. Radar data released by the Malaysian military showed clearly that the plane turned west then south.
Is this what passes for journalism today? (see section below bracketed in +++)
quote from the CNN story:
"Report: Plane flew low to avoid radar
Whoever was flying the airplane may have flown below 5,000 feet and used mountainous terrain as cover to avoid being detected by radar, the New Straits Times newspaper in Malaysia reported Monday, citing unnamed sources. +++CNN could not immediately confirm the newspaper's account, which is just one of several as-yet unproven theories about what happened to the jetliner after its last contact with flight controllers.+++"
Immediately after the equipment stopped operating, MH-370 made a series of course changes.
It did a ~160 degree turn (at a very high angle of bank) and flew along the border between Malaysia/Thailand border (probably assuming that military RADAR operators in both countries would assume the flight belonged to the other country). Once passed Malaysia, it then turned north to avoid Indonesia and flew along the Strait of Malacca. [1]
It doesn't show up on RADAR again, but we know it later turned almost directly south after passing the northern tip of Indonesia.
This route comes across as so calculated with the explicit intent of going missing, that it's really hard to justify any scenario that doesn't start with the equipment being turned off intentionally and maliciously.
Not really, no. Immediately after that statement it says "When contacted, Malaysia Airlines declined to confirm or deny the reports", and nor has it been confirmed in the six hours of updates to that story since.
The whole investigation is a complete disaster because no one has a clue what happened.
That means that everytime someone said what they thought happened and it turned out to be wrong it looks like a conspiracy. People denied things because they said something different earlier, and they didn't want to appear wrong.
It's fairly likely that foul play on the aircraft itself was involved, but it's pretty unlikely that there was a multiple-government coverup involving Malaysia, China and Australia.
Back when this happened, me and a friend spent some time coming up with the most ridiculous conspiracy theories about how the plane disappeared , just for fun. The best one that I could invent with was that MH370 flew right next to another plane in order to appear as a single, really big plane on the radar.
A few weeks later my stupid conspiracy theory was all over the media thanks to a blogger who proposed the same thing (but not as a joke, apparently) [1][2][3]
FWIW the kibitzers on pprune.org don't think much of this article. There's a 10,000+ comment thread there [1] on MH370. There are also other sites discussing the disappearance, but I can't even keep up with pprune.
Bottom line is that very little about the plane's disappearance has been made public. Do the authorities know more, and are they withholding this information? Perhaps.
I really wish people would wait for the report before drawing conclusions like this. These investigations take a long time, and it's often not the issue that gets circulated on Twitter.
AirAsia 8501 was widely suspected to be caused by a thunderstorm. Wired [1] and WaPo [2] still have articles up blaming the weather. When the investigation came out a year later, it turned out to have nothing to do with weather. The fly-by-wire system malfunctioned and the pilots got confused.
>In 2016, a leaked American document stated that a route on the pilot's home flight simulator, which closely matched the projected flight over the Indian Ocean, was found during the FBI analysis of the flight simulator's computer hard drive.[256] This was later confirmed by the [Australian Transportation Safety Bureau], although the agency stressed that this did not prove the pilot's involvement.[257] The find was similarly confirmed by the Malaysian government.[258]
This seems like a hijack and the Malaysian incident seems like a hijack. How are there not satellite photos of the plane changing course and landing on a freighter or something? That's got to pop on a satellite image somewhere.
The thing I can never get past with the Malaysia 370 incident was the super weird flight path the plane took - like it was trying to evade tracking systems.
AP is already walking back the headline, now reads "Malaysian official says missing plane hijacked"
"It is not conclusive. I'm heading the investigation and nobody is saying that. It's not true. We are looking at the possibility, we're looking at all possibilities. We're doing every profile of the passengers and crew but there is no firm evidence or leads so far," he told the Telegraph.
That being said, this seems like fodder for conspiracy theories and click throughs. Under normal circumstances, yeah, I bet it's hard to disable. However, if we assume the plane crashed, we know there was a massive malfunction -- seems more likely to me that it was a part of that.
Yeah the exact circumstances are not known but it was clear after a couple of days that MH370 did not fly its designated flight plan and instead flew a different path and actively avoided detection.
The same happened with the reports of the radar capturing it drastically off-course. First it looked like a sure thing, and then it was eventually completely denied. Perhaps that's just a symptom of such an intensely-analyzed ongoing news story, though.
I do feel a bit sorry for the Malaysian government. They don't get to control what the media prints, but are expected to immediately confirm/deny everything (difficult with the volume of reports they are likely dealing with!), and to some extent get chastised when the media prints stuff that later gets busted.
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