Saturday, March 15, 2014

Where Is 9M-MRO?

9M-MRO is the tail number of the Boeing 777-2H6-ER aircraft that was designated as Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing last week.  The location of the aircraft, crew and passengers, remains unknown, but on Friday night (US time) the Malaysian government issued a statement that they believe the plane's South and Westerly flight paths towards the Indian Ocean - instead of the NE direct route intended to go to Beijing over the South China coast line - were the result of a hijacking, and are now treating the disappearance of the plane as a crime.


While this may sound grotesque, I hope a debris field or fuel slick in the Indian Ocean are found soon.  Why?  Because if the passengers are still alive, they are imprisoned, hostages, or worse.  If they are all dead, then their families can begin to have closure and mourn their losses.  

Why would they be alive, and the plane possibly landed somewhere?  Well, consider the following evidence:
- Rolls Royce's monitoring system (9M-MRO was equipped with RR engines, instead of GE90s) continued to get satellite "pings" from the plane, for more than an hour past the time it was supposed to land in Beijing; meaning, the engines were still on, and still running.
- The built in Boeing transponder that sends out location signals was manually turned off over the middle of the gulf of Thailand, just after Kuala Lumpur air traffic control handed over guidance of the air craft to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon, in southern Vietnam).  
- The pilots (Zaharie Ahmad Shah [Zaharie was also qualified as a flight instructor] & Fariq Abdul Hamid) never checked in with Ho Chi Minh city.  They told Kuala Lumpur "Good night", and then turned their plane around, away from the Beijing flight path, over the Malaysian mountains, and out towards the Indian Ocean.
- yes, both the pilot and co-pilot were Muslims
- Not a single cell phone, black berry, iPad, iPhone, smart phone, smart watch, laptop, tablet, or other device carried by the 227 passengers has been answered, or has sent out any kind of tweet, FB post, distress call, text message, or anything else.  If the passengers (from 15 countries, most of them device happy Chinese) are alive, all of their electronic devices have been totally confiscated.  Missing not a single one.  If the mobile devices had been destroyed, then they would not be "going to voice mail" or ringing without being answered.  They would be giving "no longer in service" responses, from their respective mobile provider networks.

So where is 9M-MRO?  Why don't I call it MH370?  Well...  my theory is that it will never be seen again as MH370, unless it has crashed somewhere and a debris field is found, or a fuel slick spotted in the Indian Ocean.  Instead, either a "State Actor" or a "Non State Actor" has stolen the plane, killed or imprisoned everyone on it, and they are in the process of re-painting it to look like another country's airline 777...  probably a United States based airline, like Delta, American, or United, or a Emirates or Qatar airlines 777.  If there is an old, abandoned WWII runway somewhere near the Indian Ocean, and Zaharie was able to land his plane there, my guess is it being repainted, the electronics are being re-configured to send out a less conspicuously serialized signature that no longer resembles MH370, and the plane is being loaded with fuel, and (probably) explosives, or a WMD.  

What would a State Actor do with such a stolen plane?  Well, "Red Dawn" showed what Cubans could do to the US with troop carriers disguised as commercial airlines.  Tom Clancy probably has several novels that could provide a road map as well.  It would have to be a state actor with few connections to the west - like North Korea or one of the former Soviet "disillusioned-stans".  If it is a non state actor, like Al Qaeda, Basque Separatists, Philippine Separatists, Shining Path, or a Bond villain, then all sorts of terrible things could be planned.
- fly it into a large commercial building, ubiquitous in SE Asian capitals
- fly it into a military base, again, ubiquitous 
- fly it into an LNG plant in the gulf (many to choose from)
- fly it near a US Carrier task force, and detonate a nuclear device within the plane, before the navy shoots it down
- land it in a Western airport, and then detonate the WMD (nuclear, chemical, or biological, basically destroying that airport for that city)
- execute one passenger every time a US drone strike takes place, anywhere in the world (it is well known that Al Qaeda fears drone strikes more than any thing else), delivering the video of the passenger execution to Al Jazeera each time it does, so it can't be traced as to where).  With 227 passengers, that will halt the drone  strike program.  

Like I said, I hope a debris field is found soon, and the families can begin the mourning and closure process.  If their family members are still alive, nefarious things are going to happen to them, or they will be used as bargaining chips and more pain and suffering and death will be brought to more people in the world.  

I theorized this on Monday of this week, when everyone in the media and all pilot experts were saying "it is too early to tell" and "we should not speculate".  BS.  Many humans are evil, and the smart ones who are evil have nasty plans for the rest of us.  Plan ahead to deal with such evil, and minimize its impact on the world.

8 comments:

  1. Quite a mystery, to be sure. Personally, if it were me, I'd rather take my chances with being alive than dead.

    In any case, I always look to askthepilot for analysis on these things: his take so far.

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  2. I am not sure that Patrick Smith has flown alot of Rolls Royce engined air craft - and being a US pilot, that makes sense, since US airlines favor P&W and GE engines nearly unanimously. I was unaware that RR had a satellite tracking system on all of their engines that provides in-flight diagnostic burst data, whenever the engine is running. The FACT that this data continued to stream to RR's data center, from 9M-MRO for a very long time (an hour past when it was supposed to have originally landed) means that the plane is still intact, somewhere. It didn't crash in the ocean like the Fedex plane in "Castaway" (engine still ludicrously spinning as Tom Hanks tries to swim away). It didn't plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic like Air France's AF447 with faulty pitot tubes causing the plane to stall & dive.

    I really really hope my "passengers as hostages to stop drone strikes" theory is wrong. il faut voir.

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  3. I think Tom Hanks' personal inertial dampener is what saved him in "Castaway". Normally when a plane hits water at a few hundred mph you don't get to wait politely for the wall of water to engulf you where you stand.

    The fault pitot tubes did not cause AF447 to stall. That was the pilots, overreacting/inappropriately reacting to the technical fault. If they'd done nothing, it would have been fine. The most chilling statement in the report was something along the lines of "[the pilots] lost cognitive control of the situation". Meaning, old primate brain went into a bad loop. Losing altitude. Pull back on stick. Losing altitude still. Pull back on stick. Repeat. They failed to realize they were in a stall.

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  4. right, they trusted their instruments instead of what they saw outside the window - granted, it was a dark night, in the middle of an Atlantic thunderstorm....

    This whole SE Asia missing plane thing bugs me because I've flown All Over that area. Sydney to Singapore, Singapore to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Frankfurt, Bangkok to Milan, Stockholm to Beijing, Hong Kong to Kaohsiung (far too many times), Taipei to Bangkok, Dubai to Bangalore, Paris to Bangalore, Frankfurt to Bangalore, SFO and LAX to Shenzhen, Guangzhou & Chengdu. While I've not been a passenger on Malaysia Airlines, I've flown nearly all of their local competitors (Thai Airways, Singapore Air, Qantas, Air New Zealand, Air China, Dragon Air, China Southern Airways, China Eastern, Emirates, Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa, Air France, United, British Air, ANA, JAL, Korean Air) and on nearly every corporate airline booking search I did, they'd come up as the 2nd or 3rd alternative. I'd very easily could have been on that flight at some point in the past, or may have to in the future.

    Unstable pilots, political agendas, state or non-state actors, all of these things really concern me when I leave the blissfully ignorant confines of the USA.

    I highly doubt the "Northern Route" was taken, as there's just too many civilian and military radar installations north of Sumatra. The "Southern Route" is much more likely. And the possibility exists that Zaharie flew his stolen 777 over the remote southern Indian Ocean until it ran out of fuel, all of his passengers dead (via suffocation, turning off the ventilation while everyone slept, and he breathed in flight deck crew mask supplied O2), and he did a Sully Sullenberger soft landing in the middle of no-where, a 1000 miles from the nearest human outpost, and the 777 sank, leaving no fuel slick whatsoever; pointless, and stupid, but people are capable of much worse.

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  5. It could have been a fire, perhaps. And maybe someday, years from now, Dr Ballard will discover where the remnants of the plane are on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The 23K is interesting.

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  6. Note: I intentionally did not mention kaiju, worm holes, space alien tractor beams, teleportation, sudden-rapture, or anything else for which there is currently little of "very weak" scientifically supportive evidence, adhering to Occam's razor theory. A crash 1/2 way between Western Australia and Maritius would be very difficult to search.

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  7. The Southern Route may have some clues:
    http://www.reuters.com/article/slideshow/idUSBREA2701720140320#a=1

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