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."
Re:Thank goodness that we know ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Except of course you are conflating "fear of or the risk of terrorism are overstated" with "there is no such thing as terrorism." I could get shot by some nut in public tomorrow, but I'm not going to structure my life or society around the fear of that possibility.
Re:Was there any ACARS data? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only problem with the thought of losing portions of the planes controls in stages, the first two or three would have had to have quickly knocked out the transponders, the pilots radio (separate from the transponders) and the backup radio (separate from the transponders and the primary radio) before affecting anything else on the plane that would have caused the pilots to message someone on the ground that bad things were happening. Transponders disappearing usually gets a call from someone on the ground, which the pilots would respond to if they could. Needing to switch to a backup radio will have the pilots letting someone on the ground know in short order. If you assume they lost electrical system power due to total engine failure (which would merit a fairly rapid SOS call as a result), that still wouldn't prevent the ram air turbine from generating the power needed to send a distress call.
It isn't unreasonable to start from an assumption of catastrophic failure of the airframe and start your search on that basis while investigating other possibilities in parallel. It could also be due to a pilot or co-pilot deciding they wanted to take the plane down, however, since the transponder can be disabled from the cockpit (Think Egypt Air MS990, though that was never declared officially to be a pilot suicide), but then the plane would have quickly shown up as a transponder-less blip on multiple radar systems, since that air space is quite well covered along the flight path and to both the south and west. To the north east, it should have been picked up at Con Son, unless it really was under control to head back south east towards Riau Islands. Chances are good, whatever direction it went, including straight down, either the Malaysian or Vietnamese govts. will eventually announce the radar tracks they watched it on, given that the last transponder point had the flight only ~250 km from the closest Malaysian airport (not to mention Malaysian Navy ships out on normal patrols) and about 1/2 of that from a Vietnamese naval base which it would have flown directly over if it had continued on path.
Hmm, just checked Google News for an update. Reported in the last 30 minutes, the Malaysian military is saying the plane appeared to turn back south according to radar.
Re:No American aboard ... move along, folks ! (Score:3, Insightful)
No, alien abductions only seem to happen to the most stupid people you ever meet. There were way too many smart people on the plane to have the alien encounter (cause aliens are scared of smart people).
Re:Was there any ACARS data? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Was there any ACARS data? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cargo (Score:5, Insightful)
And we learned that you can board a plane with passport that was stolen and REPORTED stolen on an airplane, as long as you leave your shampoo at home an remove your shoes before boarding.
Re:Cargo (Score:5, Insightful)
In Malaysia.
Re:Summary needs a slight rewrite (Score:5, Insightful)
The stolen passports likely have nothing to do with Freescale, but in regards to those passports, they've already determined that the two tickets purchased for those two identities where purchased at the same time - they have consecutive ticket numbers. Further, and oddly, the two had different final destinations.
A conceivable theory is that they were terrorists with explosives in their checked in baggage. The plan was for the explosives to detonate later than they did (but something caused one to detonate prematurely), thus taking down two flights and not just one. Further, they may have intended to disembark or not board those final flights while intending their luggage to continue on (perhaps they did a test run and found that luggage was not properly removed from the plane if a passenger did not board a connecting flight at the destination Chinese airport). There was a Chinese terrorist attack in the last couple weeks (the mass killings with knives) and this plane was carrying almost all Chinese citizens, and it was headed for China. If that speculation is correct, two planes would have been destroyed, doubling the amount of Chinese that were killed, and the destruction would have happened over China, thus potentially causing collateral damage.