Comments on: The Disappearance of Flight 370: One of the most important events ever. https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/ Fri, 09 Sep 2016 06:15:42 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.6 By: Craig Thomas https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479317 Fri, 09 Sep 2016 06:15:42 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479317 “A lot of shippers now use battery powered GPS trackers on cargo shipped by air, and passengers can buy inexpensive GPS trackers for their luggage.”
Utter rubbish. GPS (mostly) doesn’t work inside buildings so GSM networks are used to track luggage, not GPS. There are no GSM networks at 15,000 feet, and none in the Indian Ocean.

“the engines had GPS too”
er…no they didn’t.

” the position was known, at all times.”
by whom? Just one person, who kept stumm, or by dozens of people who all agreed to keep it a secret?

Your beliefs are frankly idiotic.

]]> By: Craig Thomas https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479316 Fri, 09 Sep 2016 06:08:48 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479316 ” wonder if Japan has any particular aircraft defenses around that huge tank farm at Fukushima”
If I recall correctly – that scenario has been taken into account by risk assessment exercises in the USA around nuclear power plants.
I think the conclusion was that it would not be very easy to use a plane to present much of a threat.

]]> By: UDog https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479315 Fri, 28 Mar 2014 05:50:38 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479315 A lot of shippers now use battery powered GPS trackers on cargo shipped by air, and passengers can buy inexpensive GPS trackers for their luggage. I wonder how many such GPS trackers were on board the airplane? Not only that, the engines had GPS too. So the position was known, at all times. Perhaps that’s why no fighters were scrambled when it went missing. I wonder where the trail of bred crumbs lead?
(Male airport in the Maldives is on Malaysian Airlines Route Map. It is within range of the plane. The plane was sighted there at a time consistent with a flight to that area.)
Commercial fleet vehicles like trucks use GPS trackers as well, providing management with real time positioning data and messaging services. Hard to believe airline management hasn’t equipped their fleet of multi-million dollar planes with these inexpensive gizmos. If I were running an airline, I’d sure want to know where my planes were. UPS already uses this system on there fleet of aircraft. Hard to believe Malaysian airlines doesn’t have something similar.
To say we don’t know where the plane went and where it is now is not credible. Probably at least one passenger’s family in China activated a GPS luggage tracker and got a signal that gave the lie to all the denials and we don’t knows by the officials. (Maybe that’s why they threw the water bottles) The people a Rolls Royce know, as does Boeing, and a lot of others.
I don’t know what happened to the plane or where it is now, but the ever changing official story does not add up, and neither does this story.

]]> By: vilma ramirez https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479314 Thu, 27 Mar 2014 19:59:13 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479314 This is my theory: the plane was hijacked before the last communication. The pilot turned to the west as required by the hackers and not mention anything under threats. He may have thought later on that instead of going northwest he will go southwest. In that way the hackers would not accomplish their goal. He would have understood that they were going to die anyway. The two young passengers with false passport could be a pair like the Boston marathon pair acting independently or the Russian Ukrainian couple may had been as well the hackers.just a thought….

]]> By: Kit Stevens https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479313 Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:08:49 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479313 As an ex-Royal Air Force aircraft electronics technician I can say with a measure of surety that these days it is all but impossible to lose an aircraft -either military or civilian -from the eyes of myriad electronic surveillance techniques available. In the case of flight 370 the best guess location is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean west to south west of Australia. There is no way a flight crew can turn off all aircraft electronic emissions and the modern ADS-B tracking system which uses three satellites to triangulate the position of any aircraft homes in. As to cellphones, smart or otherwise, they are what we in the military called “unsecure” communications. Anyone with a knowledge of electronic transmission can track a cellphone anywhere in the world.

]]> By: David Sanger https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479312 Wed, 26 Mar 2014 14:53:55 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479312 At the same time it might have been helpful in this case if they actually had known know where it was and that it was in trouble and was veering off course. Perhaps something could have been done to save it.

It’s always a balance, not a simple question.

]]> By: Tim Mullins https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479311 Mon, 24 Mar 2014 10:58:08 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479311 The statement that cell phones can’t be accurately tracked is ridiculous. Stop and think about that for a minute. How do they know what tower to pass you off to, as well as when to do so. The same thing applies to tracking within individual cells. If anyone here has a powerful enough memory, then they will remember when special legislation had to be passed back in the 1980s to protect individual rights because of this. Up until that time, the authorities could listed in on any cell phone conversation because it was a signal broadcast in the open, and was therefore up for grabs. But it was a very weak signal as well, and had to be tracked in order to maintain integrity of conversation.

A 777 is both different, and yet the same. Individual parts on the plane are in constant contact with home base. The people who did this were able to turn off all of these communication devices but one. The engines continued to check in on the set schedule. This would insinuate that while they don’t know the exact location of the plane, they do have a ball park fix. And why does something tell me that this is nowhere near the southern circumpolar gyre?

]]> By: holy cow https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479310 Mon, 24 Mar 2014 04:22:39 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479310 To add to the speculation, the manifest is pretty interesting in light of the recent reporting on American efforts to hack Chinese companies.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/22/nsa-huawei-china-telecoms-times-spiegel

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/09/us-malaysia-airlines-freescale-idUSBREA280T020140309

http://blogs.wsj.com/searealtime/2014/03/10/huawei-employees-among-passengers-on-missing-plane/

]]> By: Hank Roberts https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479309 Mon, 24 Mar 2014 01:22:31 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479309 My reaction to reading about the missing 777 was to wonder if Japan has any particular aircraft defenses around that huge tank farm at Fukushima. Talk about soft targets for terror.

Don’t tell me, if you know. Let’s just assume they’ve taken precautions there.

]]> By: holy cow https://gregladen.com/blog/2014/03/21/the-disappearance-of-flight-370-one-of-the-most-important-events-ever/#comment-479308 Sun, 23 Mar 2014 19:07:45 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=19161#comment-479308 One of the most important events ever was the media’s release of documents provided by Snowden. This missing plane is just network news fodder. You must be saying that with some degree of sarcasm, no?

It seems like the intention of this post is to have us relax, the NSA is no big deal. But it’s a dangerously misguided bit of advice.

First, you cannot make the claim that “Not only are you and I not being tracked, but clumps of hundreds of people all together… are able to vanish from the face of the Earth.” If intelligence agencies had the means to track those folks, there is no need for them to disclose it. In fact, we have every reason to believe they wouldn’t. Perjury doesn’t stop them from denying the existence of these programs. Why would the disappearance of MH370?

Second, a few hundred lost passengers are irrelevant. It seems like you are trying to deflate concerns about mass surveillance by portraying it as paranoia. Have you followed the releases by Greenwald closely, have you followed the responses made by network security professionals? A good bit of fear, not paranoia, is presented by Jacob Applebaum (‘To Infect and Protect’). If you think that phone in your pocket is dumb, you should look into what other people are capable of doing with it without you knowing. The fact that mass surveillance cannot find a few hundred missing people does nothing to diminish the fact that the data of billions of people, countless conversations and bits of personal data, are being captured and stored illegally.

It has been suggested that Snowden might be part of the NSA’s own strategy to reveal the existence of big brother, that intimidation is their aim and perhaps we aren’t completely pwned like the documents would have you believe. But so far I have only entertained that as paranoid conspiracy talk.

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