Malaysian Airlines 777 with 239 Aboard Missing

No contact with the flight that left Kuala Lumpur headed to Beijing...

*developing*

Damn, I've taken a 777 on that route as well from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai several times.

Prayers for the crew and passengers.

Hmmm........you seem to know....more than the average person does about this particular route. But conveniently you were not on this flight.

Not a time for jokes. Cmon..

Praying for these people and their families.

It is my fervent hope these people are found safe and sound.

No dealing with this through humor, we have an invisible sky daddy to talk to.

Assuming the aircraft, crew and passengers have been lost.

I would guess a bomb aboard destroyed it. The Boeing 777 has an outstanding safety record and IIRC only about 5% of airliner disasters happen in midflight.

If the plane had landed ANYWHERE we would know about it.

It could not still be in the air given its fuel load.

There were (apparently) no communications from the plane indicating trouble.

All signs point to something sudden and catastrophic. I don't expect there will be survivors found.

Terrorism? Too soon to tell, but the 777 has been an incredibly reliable aircraft in the nearly 20 years it's been in service.

Fingers crossed for it just being a comms failure, as unlikely as that is.

Edit: oh, it's exceeded it's endurance? Damn.

The dopey news broke in with this at the tail end of "Hannibal".
"Breaking news!!!".
No, it fucking ain't, it's three hours old, and it was 15 minutes 'til the real news anyway.
Dumbasses.

Bad enough bad shit happens in the world, then these knuckleheads have to do their clown car routine on top of it.

That's the only possibility.

Sorry to derail the thread, but you laugh at people with AIDS. Your comment makes no sense.

Now the news says there's no accurate count of exactly who was on the bird, because of stolen or lost passports. That will never be sorted out, nature of the beast in aviation. That said, sorry if I upset anyone with my gallows humor. Not an excuse, but I did all my military time involved with aviation, air traffic control, etc. so we generally jump on that shit within seconds.
Good example, jet crashes at Mountain Home AFB Idaho in 1981. Within seconds, AF guys call in to the local radio station to request/dedicate Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" to that bird's Squadron, before the general public even got the news about the crash.
You had to be there.

Last I heard is that the Vietnamese airforce had spotted what looked like an oilspill, which may have been indication of an airliner having hit the sea...anything come of that?

Have heard nothing since, other than that the Vietnamese, Malaysians, and Chinese are all looking for the plane.

This doesn't look good.

Could be a coincidence.

If it was on it's way to China and they find the wreckage it won't matter, because a half hour later.........oh never mind.

Two passengers on the flight travelling with stolen passports? That's not proof of foul play in the airplane's demise, but it certainly draws immediate suspicion.

Might terrorists travel with stolen passports?

Might an intelligence service be willing to take down a plane full of innocents to get at a couple of enemy agents and/or terror suspects on board?

Do you have evidence this has ever happened? At least from a western nation?

Not necessarily terrorists, because "under the table" deals go down all the time, just follow the money trail. People that were supposed to be on board were not - they couldn't board because people stole their passport and impersonated them.
So now the average Westerner would think "hey! How could that work if Horimata Kushimota doesn't even closely resemble Giuseppe Mastrionani?"
Things work a little differently overseas, kids - trust oldfella on this one. How do you think weapons, drugs and bag guys/good guys get in and out of countries on a daily basis?

Maybe. But how important could two guys be such that killing them justifies killing hundreds of others and generating world-wide attention? And there were citizens of many countries on that flight; killing them to get at a couple of people would bring the wrath of all of those countries. It's difficult to see how such a plan would ever get approved. Especially post-9/11, such an action by a government would amount to a "please intervene militarily and depose me" request.

(The obvious example of such a case--Libya's bombing of Pan Am 103 back in 1988--is the exception that proves the rule. That attack wasn't promoted by any geopolitical or national security calculation; it was an act of sheer revenge on the part of a terrorist dictator. And Libya was already on everyone's shit list anyway.)

In any event, if you wanted to kill those two guys, it would've been simpler and far less risky to hit them at the airport or somewhere else on the ground.

I just find it weird in the 21st century that a plane can go down somewhere in the world and it takes more than 12 hours to find a clear sign of it. You'd figure that with radar tracking and satellite imagery, we'd at least be able to narrow down the crash site to a few tens of square miles in short order. Apparently not, however.

After you master Metaphors 101, you can apply for Hypotheticals 101.

Not hard at all. People have an unrealistic idea about what radars can detect and especially about satellites. Satellites can only look for something if they are told to look for it. Which is why the Soviets could build huge military facilities, like giant ABM radar arrays the size of football fields and the U.S. didn't even know they existed until tipped off by a defector.

And 9-11 showed just how hard it is to track a commercial airliner if it doesn't have a transponder on.

And you should be expected to provide evidence when you speculate on a claim comparable to that of 9-11 Truthers.