20 Freescale Semiconductor Employees On Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 190
NeverVotedBush writes with news reported by CNN that a passenger manifest for the flight that went missing on its way from Malaysia to China indicates that "Twenty of the passengers aboard the flight work with Freescale Semiconductor, a company based in Austin, Texas. The company said that 12 of the employees are from Malaysia and eight are from China," and writes "Apparently, at least two passengers used stolen passports to board."
Was there any ACARS data? (Score:5, Informative)
I watched a documentary about Flight 447 (the Airbus flight that was lost off Brazil) and they mentioned that modern planes send tons of position and other data per flight. Seems the current system is called ACARS [wikipedia.org].
Anyway, from a probability perspective it seems highly unlikely that a plane would disappear from radar precisely at the time that a data transponder stopped sending position fixes, unless, you know, the plane crashed right there.
I mean, the media makes it sound like the search radius is "flight speed * remaining potential flight time at current fuel burn rate".
Summary needs a slight rewrite (Score:3, Informative)
Freescale Semiconductor did not write that blurb about the stolen passports and the way it is displayed here makes it seem that there is a connection between the passports and the company's employees.
Re:No American aboard ... move along, folks ! (Score:2, Informative)
As there is no American aboard that plane, move along, there is nothing to see here ...
Not so. There were three Americans in the group of 239 that died on that flight.
The premise of your comment is ignorant.
You gotta understand ... (Score:3, Informative)
... from a probability perspective it seems highly unlikely that a plane would disappear from radar precisely at the time that a data transponder stopped sending position fixes, unless, you know, the plane crashed right there ...
You are talking from a perspective of a Western folk who has no idea what is going on in other parts of the world.
The airplane belongs to the Malaysian Airline System (MAS). The plane took off from the KLIA airport, again, of Malaysia. That radar which did the tracking (actually there were 4 radars doing the tracking) were all operated by ... Malaysians.
Furthermore, the pilot and first officer of that plane were from Malaysia.
Everything points to the same thing - Malaysia - a country whereby RACE means everything.
That pilot is a Malay. The first officer is also a Malay. Both of them graduated from MARA college, a college which has produced the kind of graduates that the private sectors of Malaysia do not want to hire.
The reason is simple:
Graduates from the MARA college (now promoted to become a "university") are all from the Malay race (you need to be a Malay before you can enroll into that college, btw) - which essentially means ... MARA takes in people who are NOT qualified to go to college any where else, and award them college degrees even if they can't do anything right.
In such context - your "probability perspective" will never work as the whole thing is so skewed out of whack.
Re:Was there any ACARS data? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Was there any ACARS data? (Score:5, Informative)
ADS/CPDLC [nec.com] runs over ACARS and definitely sends position data. Believe me, I used to code this stuff for a living.
Have you check all other International Airlines ? (Score:1, Informative)
That maybe true but they operated internationally
Tell you what ...
You go try checking with other International Airlines ... and here is a short list of International Airlines that you can call up or write to ...
Singapore Airline, or Cathay Pacific, or Dragon Air, or United Airways, or British Airways, or American Airline, or Quantas
Go check with them exactly how many of their Pilots and/or First Officers were graduates of the MARA college.
Go check now, and then come back and tell us how "international" the MARA graduates are.
The truth is, out of the hundreds of airlines all over the world, only TWO airlines employ graduates from MARA as pilots / first officers.
One is MAS, and its subsidiaries.
The other is AirAsia, and its subsidiaries.
Only these two airlines are reckless enough to employ graduates from MARA as pilots / first officers.
As for the others ... why are they not hiring MARA graduates ? Why ???
Re:Yay slashdot! (Score:5, Informative)
I see we have never been to Malaysia.
I remember the first time I was in Kuala Lumpur, I was shocked to see newspaper ads for apartments that openly declared "Chinese only" or "Malay Muslim woman only, 18-25" or some such. The racism is all out in the open and codified in law. Every citizen's mandatory ID card has a field for race and religion. Race is there because different people's votes count differently come election time, and religion is there so that when you're eating during the day on Ramadan, when the religious police come into the restaurants you show them and you don't get arrested.
Did we learn something today? Much better than just ignorantly shouting "RACISM!" at a culture with which we are unfamiliar.