Malaysian plane missing.

If only they'd extended Southern Surveyor's commission until the Investigator was ready, then we would have a vessel capable of mapping the sea floor in the area. The ROV operators are going to have fun.

There is no further news at all about the missing plane. Nothing.

That hasn't stopped CNN and their obsessive 24 hour coverage. I turned on CNN to see if anything was happening in the world about three hours ago, and saw to my my amazement they were still talking about the missing plane – although there's absolutely no new information.

Three hours later, after some errands, dog walking, etc., I turned on the TV only to find CNN still continuing their "coverage" of the missing plane.

It's been over three weeks now, with this constant coverage. Will this be a perpetual story? Has CNN devolved from a 24 hour news organization into a 24 hour "Gosh, what do you suppose happened to that plane?" organization?

They are rapidly becoming a parody of themselves?

Are they still peddling the black hole theory?

Today they're obsessing over the loop-de-loop theory. I was pleased to see Anderson Cooper point out that the loop-de-loop was not based on any real facts, but his colleagues mostly took it at face value.

There actually is something new, kinda. The Malaysian official who said the sign off was "All right, good night" was wrong. Apparently. Instead, the last words were "Good night Malaysian three seven zero".

Does it seem strange to anyone else that the officials are now changing what they said the last words were?

http://news.yahoo.com/malaysia-corrects-last-words-flight-mh370-210628672.html

Ambrosia said:

There actually is something new, kinda. The Malaysian official who said the sign off was "All right, good night" was wrong. Apparently. Instead, the last words were "Good night Malaysian three seven zero".

Does it seem strange to anyone else that the officials are now changing what they said the last words were?

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Not particularly. Some (not all) "officials" placed in charge of making statements to the public media are prone to say almost any damn thing that will get them off the hook. And language translation is involved, as well.

caw

rugcat said:

It's been over three weeks now, with this constant coverage. Will this be a perpetual story??

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How long has Nancy Grace been harping on the Natalee Holloway disappearance?

caw

Anyone seen this? Malaysia Airlines MH370: Orange objects confirmed as fishing equipment.

ABC News said:

Four orange items considered "the most promising leads" yet in the search for MH370 are in fact fishing equipment, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) has confirmed.

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Visibility orange is more a fishing equipment color. Sad to say I think this is going to be a long search.

I'm beginning to believe my hubby's theory that the plane turned, went back over the land and got shot down by someone who freaked over an unknown radar contact.

About as good as anything else right now.

I still think it is in the ocean. But it's a big ocean and they only have an inexact method of predicting where it was when it went down.

It's a big ocean with a bunch of trash in it. They're never going to find that plane.

It is, unfortunately in a trash vortex area. There is a lot of stuff there. Also the ocean there is a mile deep. Tough search.

Malaysia Police Chief has classified the disappearance of the plane as a criminal investigation.

This sounds promising. Fingers crossed.

A Chinese search ship has detected an electronic pulse in an area of the southern Indian Ocean where it is believed the missing Malaysian Airlines plane crashed, state media has announced.

"Chinese patrol ship Haixun 01 searching for flight MH370 discovered a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5kHz per second in south Indian Ocean waters Saturday," the official news agency, Xinhua, said.

The single-sentence story is the first potentially positive sign in the race against time to find the Malaysian aircraft's black box. But there is as yet no indication of whether the pulse is in fact connected to the plane, and no wreckage has been found in the area despite a massive international hunt.

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Hapax Legomenon said:

Malaysia Police Chief has classified the disappearance of the plane as a criminal investigation.

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At this point, anything said by any Malaysian official about this incident has the substance of morning fog in a dawn sunrise.

caw

blacbird said:

At this point, anything said by any Malaysian official about this incident has the substance of morning fog in a dawn sunrise.

caw

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My thoughts exactly. Except for the nice metaphor. Well done, that.

GQ did a not-bad piece for the one-year anniversary of the disappearance this month. The writer interviews several family members as well as some folks involved with the search.

The money quote for me:

A short hop away, in Canberra, Martin Dolan hinted at pretty much the same thing. He is the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the ATSB, which is in charge of the search. But he's limited in what he can say. What about, for instance, Indonesian radar? It should have picked up MH370. "It detected nothing...," Dolan started. "Wait, I'm sorry. There was no detection. I have to choose my words carefully. I can't say more about Indonesia, but they are not concealing anything from us." As for Australian radar, he chooses his words even more carefully. "It, ah...wasn't aimed there at that time. And that's all I can say."


Dolan understands that those are the kind of words that breed conspiracies. He also understands bureaucracies. "Speaking as a career public servant," he said, "if you have a choice between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, go with the stuff-up. It's a good rule of thumb."

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The poor families.

It's highly likely the radar station at Banda Aceh in Indonesia was offline at the time. Suspicions that the capabilities of the Indonesian radar system have been greatly over stated in the past is rampant here in the region. An overflight of Indonesia that went undetected is not out of the question.

I kind of like this very specific theory in which the author (a former aviation talking head on CNN) argues against the Southern Route argument and goes so far as to pinpoint the airfield where it might have landed in Kazakhstan. He even points to a "suspicious" building project and a hole just the right size for burying an airliner.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370-theory.html

What saves the piece is that it is well written, that he admits he has become an MH370, junkie, and that he is self-aware enough to question his own sanity.

Expat-hack said:

He even points to a "suspicious" building project and a hole just the right size for burying an airliner.

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I notice he offers no theories for why the Russians would bury a 777 (apparently intact to judge by the size of the hole) rather than simply repaint it and call it their own. Just more silliness regarding MH370, though it is at least nicely written silliness.

I see. Hijacked by fiendishly clever people who fly close to highly disputed territory and then bury the plane in one piece, not even bothering to remove the wings.

The Northern Route is really not possible without believing in conspiracies.

I live in Malaysia. I lost a friend and his wife on MH370. I've followed all the reliable news source reporting since the first hours, filtered through the nonsense and the theories and taken my own engineering approach at understanding the data.

The most probably cause continues to be fire, possibly accompanied by an exploding O2 bottle, decompression or toxic gas from burning lithium batteries overwhelming the crew and passengers, followed by the plane simply flying on it's last fly-by-wire settings until it ran out of fuel.

There are no conspiracies required. The 777 has a history of electrical fires - more than 50 of them since the plane went into service - and the only leap of faith is to accept that the plane is not perfect.

The Northern Route assumes that the plane flew through multiple countries without triggering any radar intercepts, was then hidden at it's destination along with all of the passengers, and no one has leaked any details of the necessary secrets to pull this off in over a year.

None of the conspiracies could have gone this long without surfacing something.

If ISIS wanted it to deliver a suitcase nuke, they would have done so already.

Frankly if ISIS wanted a plane, there are many easier ways to steal a long-haul cargo plane than there are to steal a 777 mid flight.

It's a tragedy that will hopefully be understood when they eventually find the wreckage - 3-5 miles down on the floor of the Southern Indian Ocean.