The extent to which the rich or powerful go to hide their identities in China shouldn't surprise you if you've spent time in the culture.

FWIW, I've heard a US passport is worth about 10k USD (as is a kidney incidentally).

This obviously adds up but then I have a hard time imagining some Chinese bloke checking in as 'Christian Kozel' without raising eyebrows.
Are they able to smoothly fake the image on the stolen passports at least?

have you ever seen two asians that look different?

I think they need the holograms and security features of the document first and foremost, but obviously I have no idea. You're correct though, if the passport still has a Western name it might raise some flags.

I don't know how this could be done if these passports are anything like my EU passport. It's really quite mysterious how you are able to travel on a stolen passport unless you really look like the person in the passport. Or do they just not check at all in Malaysia?

That would be a plausible connection. Did some group take responsibility for the train station attack?

Do they use European passports for this on a regular basis? Of course you can be an European citizen with a Chinese ethnic background. But I would chose rather Australian or NZ passports for example.

Guys, for those discussing pilot, co-pilot interactions check out the link below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Resource_Management

Woxof mentioned this briefly, it's a training method put in place in response to exactly these issues.

Gladwell wrote about this in depth in one of his books.

Also, I flew out of Kuala Lumpur, on a 777, with Malaysian airways, about 6 hours before this plane did.

Freaked the hell out of my mum...

****, sorry for the chain post. Reports saying 5 people checked in and didn't board, but then had their luggage removed... Seems like a lot.

Rugby, since you just flew out of KL, can you detail the security procedures there? How easy would it be to fly out with a stolen passport? Does anyone ever check if the picture matches your face?

I was in transit from Australia, so didn't go through passport control.

I flew out of KL a couple of months back and didn't notice anything unusual. The staff seemed slightly grumpier and more bored than the usual ground staff though. Take that for what it's worth.

Death doesn't take no for an answer.

It took a while for them to find the Air France wreckage too remember.

Wow, I was fully expecting them to have found something by now. Iirc they found first pieces of the AF debris 36 hours after the crash but it took them 2 years to find it on the ocean floor. However that was in the middle of the atlantic where it's deep, when this is at 50 meters of water at most.

I flew out from KL and thought the passport control strictness seemed stricter than in many places in EU but less strict than in America. It's definitely not a piece of cake, like if I was a terrorist trying to carry out an attack on a false passport in Asia I'd probably choose any other airport over Singapore, HK and KL. Would be substantially easier to do that on like a Cambodia-Beijing flight or something. And also why would the alleged terrorists risk it all on fake passports unless they were on some international watch list (in which case would it not be smarter to recruit someone else?). Obv just plain speculation but I'm going to guess that the passports have nothing to do with it.

I had my passport stolen in Prague. Traveled there from Germany, stayed with a friend in his hostel. In an attempt to avoid paying occupancy, I slept on the floor in his room. We got caught by a front desk worker at night coming back to the hostel who wanted to check our names against the registry, but since he let me go up to the room thought we got away with it. The next day we went out and I foolishly left my passport behind. We were out all that day and into the night, and when I woke up the next morning my passport was gone. The room had been serviced while we were out.

To add to the fun, my friend flew out of Prague that day and I was supposed to be on a bus back to Germany, so I had no reserved/paid for lodging. Also, this was during the US invasion of Iraq, and there was significant anti-US sentiment in Europe. Someone had called in a bomb threat on the US embassy in Prague, so the whole street of embassies was blocked off and I was told I couldn't contact the US embassy for an emergency passport because they were on lockdown. Finally, I didn't have any more money and had forgotten the PIN to an emergency credit card, so I couldn't get a cash advance for the photo booth to take a passport photo and the embassy fee for an emergency passport.

I got out of the country a couple days later but my lasting lesson was that my passport has value, and any actions that leave it vulnerable - ie staying at a hotel without registering and then leaving it behind - are really dumb. I now never travel without my passport on my person.

Passports were stolen at different times weren't they? doesn't seem that likely imo.

I'm guessing it'll be mechanical failure possibly followed by pilot error.

Stolen at differen times means very little. They probably all fell into the hands of some organization that sells them for a lot of money.

I do agree these people likely had nothing to do with the plane crashing. Probably just bought these passports foolishly believing they could get into the EU using them and start a new life.

probably just some drug mules with fake passports

Yeah I would think this is much more likely

They were both also booked on a connecting flight out of Beijing

Just some unlucky crooks I would guess

the expert in this thread says the -vast- majority of plane crashes are not pilot related but rather mechanical. i've googled it several ways and the list seems to be pilot error, mechanical and weather, then it seems to go to sabotage/other human error. is all that stuff wrong? say from a website like this>http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

I think this airplane is at the bottom of the sea right now and we won't know what happened until they find the CVR and FDR.

But for those who like to speculate...

Making the plane "disappear" would be very dependent on the radar coverage over the flight path. If the coverage is poor then it's not that hard to do. Switching off the transponder would make the plane harder to track as it now becomes a simple primary target on radar which are filtered out on a controller's display (unless he is specifically looking for a primary). Perhaps a controller reading this could chime in on this.

The part about setting the plane down in a remote location is much harder. Unless you've got the aircrew involved in this, it's not a trivial matter to land this plane. It's one thing to learn how to fly a plane into a building and quite another to learn how to set one up for an approach and landing and then actually get it on the ground. I would assume that the landing site has no instrument landing system, so this would add another level of difficulty as it eliminates the use of the autoland feature and requires the landing to be hand flown with no glideslope guidance.

I have always thought most incidents take place during takeoff or landing, or I read this chart wrong?


Edit: Been also watcing these air crash investigation shows and it seems like most accidents have took place b/c of some mistake which would have been easily avoided. I wonder how many incompetent pilots and fked up aircrafts are out there, especially domestic flights in not so well to do and semi-corrupted countries.

You read the chart wrong. The important numbers are at the top; the numbers below the green curve just show the percentage of flight time for that particular stage.

Some interisting info regarding the fake passport from this article:

What I find most interesting about this is that all aviation experts seem to think something is up. (according to them) 777s are the safest airplanes there are and crashes like this should be near impossible. The plane according to all sources was in excellent condition as well.

The stolen passports thing+5 people not boarding is weird as well but I think you could make most flights seem suspicious if you would set a team of investigators on them with unlimited resources :P.


My prediction is that it was a failed hijack that was supposed to be something else. It would make sense that nobody has claimed it yet (since it failed, and they wouldn't want their intentions known as then they would know what likely targets were) AND hijacks tend to go wrong after 911 now people know they usually don't end well if you don't defend yourself.