The New Neo

Well, this certainly narrows it down, doesn’t it? What an “interesting” neighborhood:

[Malaysian Prime Minister] Razak said countries located in the flight corridors that are now the focus of the search have been contacted so they can share radar data and “all relevant information” with the investigative teams, which include the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board.

That northern corridor runs through Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Burma.

There is a southern corridor too, but it goes mainly to the west of Australia over the Indian Ocean.

The Prime Minister added that “the flight was still communicating with satellites until 8:11 a.m. ”” seven and a half hours after takeoff, and more than 90 minutes after it was due in Beijing,” at which point it would have been close to running out of fuel.

Here is all that’s known (or at least, reported to be known) of the earlier path of the plane:

This is a strong statement:

[An unnamed Malaysian] official said a deliberate takeover of the plane was no longer a theory. “It is conclusive,” he said, indicating that investigators were ruling out mechanical failure or pilot error in the disappearance…

The Malaysian official said only a skilled aviator could navigate the plane the way it was flown after its last confirmed location over the South China Sea.

The possibilities are almost endless, and some of this will be pieced together through military radar from a host of countries. I would imagine most people (and here I’d include myself) would have assumed that a rogue plane would have been detected by radar whether it had its transponder on or not, and would be considered at least potentially hostile in this post-9/11 world. And yet this one was hardly noticed, and if it was it seems to have elicited a yawn—even though a Malaysian plane was already reported to be missing! The implications are staggering.

The sad and mind-boggling truth is that we don’t know what human agent was responsible for this, where the plane was taken, if it crashed or landed safely, and if the passengers and crew are alive or dead. That’s a lot of unknowns, although I believe we are not being told everything the authorities know.

[NOTE: I’ve also noticed many people in the comments sections of various articles keep asking why none of the passengers managed to call on their cellphones. But at very high altitudes and far from any cellphone towers, no calls could be made successfully. Some of the 9/11 passengers managed to do it because those planes were flying relatively low at times, and what is especially important is that they were always over land that tended to be generously equipped with cellphone towers (here’s a very lengthy discussion; even at fairly high altitude cellphones can sometimes work if over towers). In addition, many of the 9/11 calls were on special airphones, installed in planes and designed to be used while flying.]

At least, not yet.

I hope that someday we’ll learn enough to make sense of it. But I’m beginning to wonder if that day will ever happen. Or if we’ll ever get a straight story on it from the authorities.

In the meantime, we weave speculative tales about it in an effort, probably vain, to make as much sense of it as we possibly can with the limited amount of information we have so far.

I’ve been writing about this story on a daily basis because it’s unusually gripping, with all the elements of a Tom Clancy novel except the author’s explication, or the pleasure of knowing it’s just a story. This is a story, but not just a story; it’s reality, unfortunately for the passengers, their families, and the rest of us. Just as 9/11 was a revelation about what was possible with a bunch of determined and planful terrorists, so Flight 370 is a revelation about how a flight can go missing in real time without a whole lot known about it, if certain human agents (which it appears were responsible) want it to disappear.

Here’s my best theory of the moment. It goes almost without saying that this is pure speculation, but it’s speculation based on the “facts” as best we know them:

I don’t think the cockpit was breached by a stranger, although that is certainly possible. It would help to know whether the 777 had a locked cockpit door; I haven’t seen that information offered anywhere. I think that one of the pilots (most likely the younger one, who was only 27) caught the other completely off-guard and disabled or killed him. But whether it was one of the actual pilots or an outsider, it would have to have been someone who was very familiar with this type of plane and how to turn off its feedback systems.

Once alone, the pilot was able to act as he wished without being observed. He proceeded to turn off the transponder and other systems and fly the plane according to a preconceived plan, which probably did not involve crashing it. The passengers would have been, quite literally, in the dark. Especially with a locked door, they would have noticed nothing. It was night, after all, and most were probably sleeping. They were flying over a relatively unsettled area with few lights, so why would anyone have noticed a diversion, even if it went on for many hours? When they looked out the windows, they would have seen darkness either way.

Whether the perpetrator succeeded in his plan I do not know, nor do I know what the ultimate goal was, although you can be fairly sure it was a bad one, and probably involved other people on the ground. Was his destination a country, or a remote landing strip? Did it involve further weaponizing the plane, holding the passengers hostage, or something else?

If he succeeded, we will probably learn in time, although what we learn will be even more disturbing than what we already know. Possibly even catastrophic. Alternatively, he crashed (most likely by accident) and we may or may not ever recover the plane’s wreckage, the finding of which could give us many more clues as to what happened.

A week ago I would have considered the above a wild fantasy, and I probably would not have entertained it. Things have changed, and truth may have become even stranger than fiction.

[ADDENDUM: Newer information here. The gist of it is that the plane’s new flight path was ” a commonly used navigational route.” That indicates a non-rogue pilot to me. Of course, the actual pilot might have been placed under duress by a highjacker.]