"trader_4" wrote in message
news:42b6989a-b04c-49fb-a36b-

stuff snipped
Last night was just unbelievable on CNN. Apparently they got a military
"source" to tell them that the plane "made a sharp turn to the left at
the time it went missing and flew as low as 12,000 ft". They turned that
into a huge breaking news story, complete with their panel of 6 live
experts
and a 777 simulator. If you listened long enough, you finally figured out
that the "sharp turn" didn't necessarily mean a sudden, tight, 40 deg
turn. It could just mean that they meant that it was a distinct turn
away from their correct course toward Beijing, ie ~90 deg to the left
which we already knew. And then their reporter finally admits that all
the source said about the 12000 ft, was that it was flying that low
somewhere along it's route to the Straits of Malacca over the next hour.

Yet, there they are with the simulator, with that anchor idiot Don Lemon
asking them to show what a max hard turn to the left would be like. How
would the passengers feel, would they notice it, etc. Then he has them
do the same thing with a gradual, slow turn. Then he has them do a max
dive to 12000 ft. Then he has them do a gradual, slow decent to 12,000.
Good grief. How dumb are these idiots? They think they have to show
people what a gradual decent in a plane is like? And why speculate about
the sudden plunge to 12000, when their source, even according to them,
never said that? That crap went on for hours, I was watching other
channels, but flipped back once in a while to see it continue.

I will say that the 777 instructor in the simulator did do one
good thing. He said several times how even if he was doing a
12000 ft emergency decent, it would be easy to also be communicating
with ATC, to get off an emergency mesg, all you have to do is push a
button on the yoke, and he would have done so.

Well, they're unbelievable, dumb idiots about everything except the one
thing they said that appears to bolster your hijack theory. (-:

I've been in some serious car crashes. I can be easily convinced that a
pilot of a huge jetliner full of people can become so thoroughly engaged in
trying to save everyone's life that he does *exactly* what a growing number
of pilots keep saying he would: "aviate, navigate, communicate." He would
performs them in that very important order because it's the order most
likely to save lives. Number three, in this case, would have helped
officials recover remains. Not as useful to the presumed still-living
passengers and crew of MH370 as rules one and two when whatever happened,
happened.

It's just as easy for us to postulate a hijacker preventing comms as it is
for a disaster preventing comms or a suicidal pilot preventing comms based
on the paltry, confusing and ever-changing evidence we're being fed. Not
enough evidence to make any kind of a case yet. Instead, it's a slow and
steady stream of "factoids" because we really can't call them data points.
Anyone basing their presumptions on the order of events given us by the
authorities, who have recanted so many times they can't be trusted, is
likely to come to false conclusions.

I don't see them mentioning a climb to the operational ceiling anymore -
why? Discarded? Disproved? Never happened? Forgotten? Who knows?
Without concrete information it's all educated guesswork, and in the case of
the people guessing "it went orbital", it's not even very educated.

I did read an interesting post about how when a pilot pulls busses in the
panel to try to put out an electrical fire, he can end up resetting a number
of devices inadvertently. It's tempting to assume because a transponder
stopped sending, it was a nefarious event. That's because it's an event
that communicates with the outside world. We on the ground would have no
way, short of the FDR, of knowing if the pilot reset every electronic device
on the plane and even the FDR might not help tell us that.

At this point, there's no way anyone can be sure of what caused anything to
happen on that plane. We have lots of puzzle pieces and even some that
appear to fit nicely together. But there's still no "defining image"
recognizable. The worst part is that there may never be many more clues
than the ones we have now.

There's a good reason not to credit hijackers - why give them the publicity
and the added extra perception of "power?" The best public position to take
is "accident" and let DHS or the FBI work the potential terrorist angle
quietly. Otherwise it sounds like we're celebrating their cunning ability
to steal a plane without any interference. That's a mistake.

Hijackers are always looking for attention. We shouldn't gratify them -
it's the steroid-sized version of not feeding trolls. I also think it's a
very bad idea to broadcast, world-wide, that the tortuous security
procedures we put passengers through can be (easily?) breached. It gives
bad people ideas. It's pretty obvious one unfortunate outcome of this
investigation is a perfected "hijack checklist" - what things a hijacker
needs to do to make a plane invisible. That's not good for them to have.

What still bothers me is if this was a hijack, what was the goal? Some say
it was mostly likely aimed at the Petronas Towers. It makes sense because
they wanted a huge landmark target close enough to expend a large fuel load
on impact in a fireball. Maybe the group that did it is staying mum because
they intend to try again. But why at night? Maybe it's because all that
jet fuel for a trip to Beijing would have really lit up the night sky over
all Malaysia. All we have are theories. We had them with Earhart - even
that she was a spy eaten by cannibals. It doesn't get any less tranger the
longer the mystery goes unsolved.

Islamic terrorists made two significant passes at the WTC, many years apart.
It's their MO. What this incident proved is that the Malaysian AF would
have been powerless to stop such an attack on the towers, one of the tallest
in the world.

The best we can hope for here is that this spurs some serious change in the
air transport industry. How much more would you pay per ticket to keep your
loved ones off a roller coaster ride like this one? Multiply that by the
number of flights and there's your budget for more satellite time, GPS
transponders and other hijacker UNfriendly controls and interlocks.

--
Bobby G.