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Transportation News

What Really Happened To Malaysia's Missing Airplane (theatlantic.com) 184

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370's disappearance in March 2014 instantly become a global news phenomenon, as multiple countries joined the search for the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew. But the mystery is still swirling five years on. The Atlantic's July cover story looks at all of the known evidence about how MH370 vanished into the Indian Ocean to deliver the clearest picture to date of what happened: that in all likelihood the plane was intentionally crashed by the pilot. From the report: In truth, a lot can now be known with certainty about the fate of MH 370. First, the disappearance was an intentional act. It is inconceivable that the known flight path, accompanied by radio and electronic silence, was caused by any combination of system failure and human error. The story also tracked down Blaine Gibson, an American who has taken it upon himself to recover pieces of MH370 wreckage. Gibson has collected more plane fragments than any other person or entity -- and on beaches hundreds of miles apart. What Gibson's discovery of so many pieces of debris has confirmed is that the signals analysis was correct. The airplane flew for six hours until the flight came suddenly to an end. There was no effort by someone at the controls to bring the plane down gently. It shattered. Amid the bizarre conspiracy theories that continue to surround the disappearance of MH370, Gibson has become a target of threats and abuse. Yet his work to recover pieces of MH370 continues.
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What Really Happened To Malaysia's Missing Airplane More

What Really Happened To Malaysia's Missing Airplane

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  • I'm not saying it's aliens... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...but its aliens.

  • Why is Blaine Gibson being threatened (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pgmrdlm ( 1642279 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @12:20PM (#58776016) Journal
    So, he is actively looking for the plane? Is that a reason to threaten him or abuse him? Time to see what I can find out about him to understand why he is being threatened.

    I just find it strange that he would be threatened when there are so many families that are looking for closure, which he might be able to provide in the future.
    • yea, ok. Tin foil hat's wrapped too tight. All parties included.

      https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/death-threats-force-mh370-hunter-blaine-gibson-into-hiding/news-story/777109012716aed1909d3fd728cf73dc

    • Re:Why is Blaine Gibson being threatened (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @12:30PM (#58776106)

      So, he is actively looking for the plane?... I just find it strange that he would be threatened when there are so many families that are looking for closure, which he might be able to provide in the future.

      Strange as it sounds, there are people who actively believe(along with plenty of trolls who purport to believe) the plane landed intact somewhere, or the passengers are still alive(probably including some family members who refuse to accept their relative is dead)/were murdered by some nefarious group, or that the whole thing was a plan to eventually use the plane in a false flag terror attack. They might derive validity form that belief, or feel that they know something others do not and so belong to a very small group of people, and anyone looking for information that might challenge or disprove what they "know" to be true is attacking their beliefs and therefore attacking them.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mea2214 ( 935585 )

        Strange as it sounds, there are people who actively believe(along with plenty of trolls who purport to believe) the plane landed intact somewhere, or the passengers are still alive

        There was a 6 year TV series on ABC that dealt with this very scenario and in the same location of the world.

        • Re:Why is Blaine Gibson being threatened (Score:5, Funny)

          by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @03:31PM (#58777386)

          Strange as it sounds, there are people who actively believe(along with plenty of trolls who purport to believe) the plane landed intact somewhere, or the passengers are still alive

          There was a 6 year TV series on ABC that dealt with this very scenario and in the same location of the world.

          Sorry, you lost me there.

          • That's ok, most people who tried to follow along felt lost too.

          • Is that the comedy called "Lost"? I never felt the slightest inclination to watch an episode, and now I feel even less reason to give a damn about it.

            But there's allegedly a new series of "Engrenages" in production. Woo!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        anyone looking for information that might challenge or disprove what they "know" to be true is attacking their beliefs and therefore attacking them.

        Their beliefs about it possibly being intact have already been disproven by the pieces discovered; at this point he could just uncover more information leading to the TRUTH about what actually did happen....

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jandrese ( 485 )
          I'm sure conspiracy theorists will say that those parts were seeded to throw off people. You can't use logic or evidence to dissuade someone who arrived at their conclusions by explicitly ignoring logic and evidence.

    • Re:Why is Blaine Gibson being threatened (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fredrated ( 639554 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @12:44PM (#58776202) Journal

      Why is he threatened? Because the truth threatens many people, and some will threaten back.

      • Why is he threatened? Because the truth threatens many people, and some will threaten back.

        There's a modern proverb.

        • I'm not sure that Socrates would feel particularly happy about having his trial described as "modern".

          • That doesn't really make any sense when you think about it. Anything that Socrates could have experienced would by definition have occurred when Socrates was alive, and would therefore be considered "modern" by Socrates. :P

            • Point being, in what circumstances would Socrates be upset about his trial being called modern? If we raised him from the dead and gave him a crash-course in world history first?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The pieces he finds will be evidence of a certain chain of events. Someone with a fanatical committment to a different chain of events will see his work as a threat.

    • Re:Why is Blaine Gibson being threatened (Score:5, Insightful)

      by citylivin ( 1250770 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @01:58PM (#58776774)

      If you read the article, you will see thats its mostly internet trolls he was not prepared to deal with. Probably he had a lot of personal info online so that people could contact him, which invites abuse. He was also a rich guy, who probably never had to interact with the worst parts of public, like working retail, so had no skills to deal with that abuse.

      The malasian government also just wants the whole thing to go away, so there are some state actors that want him to give up as well.

      But its probably mostly internet trolls which lets face it, will do anything for any stupid reason you can think of (boredom for instance) or to be part of a larger story in some small way. I doubt its a grand conspiracy.

      MH-370 TLDR, the pilot likely suicided the plane in a weird way due to his family problems. They could have found the plane if the Malaysian government wasn't horribly corrupt and incompetent. He was an expert pilot, who practiced a no fuel scenario, in a flight simulator, headed for antarctica, sometime before the event happened.

      Was a good article that should bring closure to the mystery, but probably wont as there is no plane to find.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Apparently there is a plane to find...just in lots of pieces. In effect, the plane has been found. We just don't know precisely where it decided it wanted to be a submarine.

      • The malasian government also just wants the whole thing to go away, so there are some state actors that want him to give up as well.
        That is probably a retarded attitude. They are interested as much as everyone else to solve the riddle.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shanen ( 462549 )

        I'd have moderated it insightful over informative (if I ever got a mod point to give), but the murder-suicide scenario by the pilot has always been most likely. I considered it barely possible the copilot could have done it, but as you noted, the circumstantial evidence points pretty strongly at the pilot.

        At this late date, even if they find the plane intact on the bottom of the ocean, the degree of natural decay will be so advanced that they won't be able to figure out much. Perhaps confirm that the passen

      • Remember, kids, if you want to make a heroic Antarctic ice sheet landing, don't calculate your range in kilometers and flightplan in miles.

    • Time to see what I can find out about him to understand why he is being threatened.

      From the article:

      He printed up cards identifying himself: adventurer. explorer. truth seeker. He wore a fedora

      Have you read enough?

    • So, he is actively looking for the plane? Is that a reason to threaten him or abuse him?

      I take it you've never seen a large mob of people who are in grief. There are many people who fail to get past the first and second stage. Denial and Anger are powerful emotions, and if you group several hundred family members from several hundred deceased you're likely to combine failure to cope with grief in addition to an already unhinged personality.

      People are the worst. The larger of a group you survey the worse the elements you will find.

  • Hijacked? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by RAHH ( 5900166 )
    Possibly hijacked with threat of a bomb and hence changed flight path but then something happened and bomb went off causing it to be blown into a million pieces?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "blown into a million pieces"

      No.

      It's hard to get a bomb that big onto a plane. Most bombs blow a ten-foot hole in the fuselage, leaving a LOT of wreckage.

    • Re:Hijacked? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @12:34PM (#58776142)

      Possibly hijacked with threat of a bomb and hence changed flight path but then something happened and bomb went off causing it to be blown into a million pieces?

      From what I understand, all of the wreckage found so far indicates the aircraft broke up upon hitting the water and not in air. Now, an explosion significant enough to cause the crash could still have been small enough not to break up the plane until it hit the water, but the only way to prove that would be to find parts with scorch marks or other signs of explosion.

    • Bomb would only tear a hole in the plane, maybe causing it to lose control but a tumbling plane would not impact with force enough to shatter a plane... Also you'd find explosive reside, which I don't believe has been found on anything to date.

      The shattering aspects suggests it was flown into the ocean at speed...

    • While after 9/11 the policies for hijacked flights have changed. Probably including not flying into populated urban areas even at the risk of the own aircraft and its population. However I would expect policies would still have the aircraft be tracked and notified to ground there is a change in course.

    • Pilots have secret ways of signaling to air traffic control that they've been hijacked. None of these were used. The plane's transponder and other location-signaling devices were also deliberately turned off from inside the plane. That's why the leading theory is that the pilot(s) did this intentionally, or some sort of massive electrical failure. For the same reason, if they actually did find the wreckage, I suspect it would turn out the black boxes had nothing useful on them because they'd also been di
    • Blown into a million pieces due to a bomb is the Hollywood version. What we know of real airplane bombings like Pan AM 103 [wikipedia.org] is that large sections of the airplane stay intact even when falling to the ground.
  • First plane taken down by a meteorite.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by RAHH ( 5900166 )
      This wouldn't explain why it went off of it's flight path in the first place unless of course the pilot knew where the meteor was going to strike and flew it intentionally into its path. Obviously...

  • Isn't this the prevailing conclusion? Persons unknown absconded with MH370 and crashed/ditched the plane in the Indian Ocean. The flight crew did it, or they were a party to it, or the plane was commandeered by others.

    ...laura

  • Yes, we know... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ambient Sheep ( 458624 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @12:38PM (#58776160)

    Few people who followed the PPRuNe 296-page megathread [pprune.org] were left in any doubt that it was indeed the result of deliberate pilot action, probably as a political protest against Malaysia's then-prime-minister jailing his opponent on trumped-up charges, along with the pilot having his divorce finalised on the same day (albeit it was apparently amicable).

    And indeed mainstream news articles have been printed saying much the same thing.

    So I'm not entirely sure why this is news, although I'm glad it's not being forgotten about and somebody somewhere is still, literally, picking up the pieces.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Gah. That is a monster of a thread indeed. Interesting to see domain experts going over it. I still don't like the certainty that some people preset the explanation with (esp with embellishments), but yeah, it does seem like the most likely.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Few people who followed the PPRuNe 296-page megathread [pprune.org] were left in any doubt that it was indeed the result of deliberate pilot action, probably as a political protest against Malaysia's then-prime-minister jailing his opponent on trumped-up charges, along with the pilot having his divorce finalised on the same day (albeit it was apparently amicable).

      And indeed mainstream news articles have been printed saying much the same thing.

      So I'm not entirely sure why this is news, although I'm glad it's not being forgotten about and somebody somewhere is still, literally, picking up the pieces.

      The problem with that theory is that anyone sending a political message, erm... usually sends a message, as loudly as they can so that whatever they do gets noticed. That's why Hezbollah hang signs up and wait for the news cameras to arrive before blowing up a bus. If you're trying to make a statement, you don't do it ambiguously.

      BTW, this is the first I've heard of this theory, so mainstream news articles haven't been "saying the same thing".

      The new article makes quite a few assumptions with little

  • What's funny to me is that we live in a decade where everything is connected, tracked... and we lost a 100 million dollar airplane that was tracked by everything, especially when it veered of course and flew in a "wrong direction" for "6 hours". Like the military and civilian radar operators were like:
    ... oh look.. an airplane with 200 people on board is flying into unknown direction 6 hours for god knows what reason. Meh. Shift over... I'm off to play videogames. Priorities 101.

    • Re:Lost like keys (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ambient Sheep ( 458624 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @01:06PM (#58776358)

      Cutting a long story short, as soon as he signed off from one ATC area, he promptly turned off all his tracking devices (so from then on only military primary radar could track him, not the secondary radar used by most ATCs), then changed altitude and sneakily doubled back on himself, very cunningly flying a flight path that sneaked him under and past all the nearby primary radars, seriously minimising his chances of being spotted.

      (Another reason the electrical failure hypothesis is absolute rubbish, his turnback flight path was far too well-planned.)

      By the time the next ATC area (Thailand IIRC) realised that he hadn't checked in with them, he was long gone and heading towards the South Pole for six hours, way out of range of any radar on the planet (except possibly Australian military right near the end).

      Had they realised about the double-back earlier they might have got him, but as it was, when he didn't check in they assumed an accident, and started searching where he would be given his last known trajectory, i.e. in the South China Sea.

      By the time they reviewed military radar tapes two days later and saw this passing object on the fringes of their scopes, everyone was long dead.

      • "Had they realised about the double-back earlier they might have got him" nope. Everybody was dead the moment he started it and presumably incapacited the copilot. There is nothing the passenger or the military could have done at that point. Worst case scenario he is found out then he just need to put the plane in a death spiral, or in stall or out of aerodynamic envelop or climb extremely high until coffin corner etc.... The moment he disabled the copilot however he did it, it was game over, even if discov

        • "Had they realised about the double-back earlier they might have got him" nope. Everybody was dead the moment he started it and presumably incapacited the copilot. There is nothing the passenger or the military could have done at that point. [...] By that point the only thing that could be changed is bringing disclosure on the where about of the remain.

          Yes, exactly. I quite agree. Sorry, my wording wasn't brilliant as I was typing in a rush. By "got him" I meant "got his location". As I wrote to somebody else who picked up on the same point [slashdot.org]...

          at least they'd have known where to pick up the wreckage, which might have given us some confirmation of what happened and would certainly [well, hopefully] have given all those families some closure and bodies to bury

    • The plane was not tracked "by everything". Actually, it was not tracked at all after it was no longer trackable by radar.

      • Re:Lost like keys (Score:4, Informative)

        by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Monday June 17, 2019 @01:19PM (#58776478)
        FTFA:

        Five seconds after MH370 crossed into Vietnamese airspace, the symbol representing its transponder dropped from the screens of Malaysian air traffic control, and 37 seconds later the entire airplane disappeared from secondary radar...The controller in Kuala Lumpur was dealing with other traffic elsewhere on his screen and simply didn’t notice. When he finally did, he assumed that the airplane was in the hands of Ho Chi Minh, somewhere out beyond his range...

        ...primary-radar records salvaged from air-traffic-control computers, and partially corroborated by secret Malaysian air-force data, revealed that as soon as MH370 disappeared from secondary radar, it turned sharply to the southwest, flew back across the Malay Peninsula, and banked around the island of Penang. From there it flew northwest up the Strait of Malacca and out across the Andaman Sea, where it faded beyond radar range into obscurity. That part of the flight took more than an hour to accomplish...

        It didn't just drop out of site. The pilot waited until we has almost to the hand-off point between two air traffic controllers, then actively maneuvered the plane when and where he knew it would be difficult to detect.

        • Thank you for telling them that. Vietnam not Thailand then. :-)

          I'm normally an assiduous article-reader but this time it was too big and the urge to post first overcame me given some of the stuff being written here. Thanks for filling the gap.

        • Replying to this to cancel out my moderation. Damn mis-click.

    • It was only tracked for part of its flight. Many of the countries in that part of the world hate each others' guts and aren't fond of releasing information if they don't have to. Might tell their enemies something they can use. This also showed up in the escalation procedures. "This isn't right. What's up?" "Yawn. We'll call you back in the morning." wasn't proper procedure.

      Once MH370 was out of radar range nobody had any idea where it was. This isn't normally an issue, flight crews fly their assigned rou

      • Many of the countries in that part of the world hate each others' guts
        Actually, no. That is an american myth. They are all part of the ASEAN treaty and slowly transform into "the EU of Asia", heavily to the dismay of the USA.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      The lesson here is that you need to review why you think everything is connected. Because it obviously isn't.

    • What's funny to me is that we live in a decade where everything is connected, tracked...

      Not in the middle of the Indian Ocean it isn't. It's worth reminding everyone just how big that body of water is -

      https://www.google.ca/maps/@-4... [google.ca]

      This isn't New York TRACON we're talking about here.

    • I was also intrigued by the comment in the Atlantic article that said Indonesian military radar didn't 'see' the plane because it was turned off for the night. Military attacks do not come at night? I'm shocked.

  • read TFA before commenting (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I know, it's a long story, but it may be worth your time. Many interesting bits; like the idea that the passengers were killed off very conveniently and painlessly early in the diversion. You'll be amazed at the continuing incompetence and dishonesty of the local government at all levels. You'll be intrigued at the evidence that the very clever diversion was planned in great detail. You'll be disgusted overall in a way that will energize you for the rest of the day.

    Your comments after reading may actually b

  • Having read the article I have to say it is not even worth debunking point by point. There is nothing there but crazy. The only real mystery was why The Atlantic was willing to publish this garbage. It's illogical and half-delusional and the guy Gibson that he was writing about was even crazier. It is unfortunate that psychotics and just general crazies latch onto real mysteries like this, but who at The Atlantic is responsible for publishing the rantings of some crazy dude? The fact is we will never know w

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