apparently the italian passenger listed on the manifest never bought a ticket or boarded the flight. he had his passport stolen in thailand last year. could be ominous...

the plane in question also had an incident at an airport in 2012 where part of the wing was severed. could be some sort of maintenance error related to that causing a catastrophic failure. definitely has to have been something very sudden (bomb/missile/explosive decompression/similar).

and yeah i'll never forget listening to that japan air 123 audio. got completely obsessed with air crash investigation last year. watched all ~80 eps. started having some pretty messed up dreams by the end.

^Same. I've also read ~all wikipedia articles for plane crashes with significant fatalities like 3 times. These things are so fascinating yet obviously terrifying. Very interesting to find out more...

The same goes for the austrian passanger, he's well in austria and also got his passport stolen a while ago, very odd!!!

bomb, missile or pilot suicide

Actually, the problem is usually a combination of technical mechanical errors. While it could be one of the things you listed, the vast majority of crashes are not due to terrorists.

The two passengers with stolen passports and its sudden disappearance would definitely suggest a bomb type of thing though, as rare as it is.

Yeah, for like 2 minutes. Sounds a lot better than slowly wasting away/losing your mind over a period of months or years.

there weren't any distress signals from the plane.

Does anyone have a clue how common stolen passports are? Wouldn't think too many people are cruising around Asia on stolen European passports, but you never know.

It's definitely odd, I'm no expert in this but wouldn't even a bomb send some warning signals from the plane to the control center?

Indeed possible, although the inclusion of "missile" and "pilot suicide" as likely possibilities (even if either turn out true) is silly.

I would assume the authorities are operating under the assumption that foul play is probable and this is more than an accident investigation at this point.

WHAT?!? "Warning, bomb about to explode. Warning!" (Depends on the size and location of the bomb of course.)

You could be right, although like you, I've watched all the docs on air crashes and there are always plenty of coincidences and anomalies in every crash. My BIL appraises airliners around the world for a living and we discuss the disasters all the time. It amazes me how complex the investigations are.

He just flew in to Indonesia, but I assume if there was a problem, I would have been called.

2 options:
- You'll die in 2 minutes with no opportunity to contact your loved ones.
- You'll die in 2 years spending your remaining time getting your affairs in order, doing some things you've put off, sharing moments with family and friends, and yes, enduring pain and eventually dying of cancer or something.

You are saying you choose the first.

That's because you are also a ****ing idiot.

We have mostly biometric passports in europe, while that shouldn't be much of a help in this case, stolen passports are also tracked in a databank so that they can't be misused, which will raise some questions for the security staff in malaysia.

Speaking of the air disaster investigations, I've always been impressed how open-minded and complete they are. They ignore the competing interests (and politics) and focus on getting to the true cause. I would love to see similar responses in other areas.

Google trans from http://www.chinatimes.com/realtimene...8003502-260401

Maybe this is completely inaccurate but how does a black box not have some super strong radio/satellite signal to broadcast its position? I can remember a similair thing with an Air france flight over the atlantic close to south america a while ago? did they find the black box there eventually?

And yeah stolen passports looks like identity fraud and increases the chances of terrorists/bomb.

F that. Gimme time to make peace with death. A plane crash dont

When I was trying to decide what airline to fly home from KL all the cheapest ones were via Chinese airlines flying like KL->[Chinese city]->Europe. Being a bit of an accident-phobe after too many eps of ACI I always do a bit of research, and while I've forgotten about the details I ended up not choosing any of those, because there seemed to be a lot of attempted hijackings on these flights. Stuff like this: (wiki)



I found lots of other similar cases like this that seemed like semi close calls that I had never even heard of, and they were all on international flights to/from China.

So obviously this is just speculation (since that's what we're here for anyway, right?) but it struck me that there is a decent amount of commercial airline related terrorism type activity going on in China in recent years that I don't think most people are even aware of. MH370 was en route to Beijing and was almost all Chinese passengers, which after all I read makes me think the terrorism theory is somewhat likely at this point given the sudden disappearance, no distress calls, stolen passports, etc.

They do send out a signal, but it is relatively weak and you need to be in general vicinity. "Super strong" radio signals require significant power, obviously. You can't get high-energy radiation without a large energy source.

Also, here is the flight path and other stuff of the flight: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/M...35ZZ/WMKK/ZBAA pretty chilling how yesterday's flight doesn't have a landing time.

Does anyone know if there's a way to find out recent flights the exact plane has taken lately, like on a registration number or something?

I'm going to guess the airline knows where its planes have flown. So, yes, there is a way. Might not be readily accessible to armchair investigators, though.

ZOMG he disagrees with you!!! What an idiot he is.

Thanks for clarification, this is exactly what I wanted to know!

for people looking for other ways to follow this, pprune is quite good in terms of signal to noise. most of the posters there are pilots.

while obviously most plane crashes are due to a complex combination of mechanical/human factors, it's very unusual for a plane to disappear from the sky with no warning or contact. in those instances it often is something sinister.