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Air Malaysia
Mar. 14th, 2014 03:05 pmSince everybody else is speculating about the missing Malaysian airliner (and I do mean everybody - two little old ladies in the line at the post office today were talking about it) herewith is my guess.
*** rampant guesswork ahead ***
This was a for-profit hijacking gone bad. We've seen fairly reliable reports that on at least one occasion a couple of pretty blonde babes were asked up to the flight deckto sit on the captain's lap socialize. I suspect that this happened, if not routinely, more than once. I further suspect that this was not entirely a secret. Flight attendants, frequent flyers and whomever they gossiped with would have known.
See, there are two problems with a hijacking in a post 9/11 world. One is a real risk of a passenger riot - although there have been hijackings after 9/11 without a riot. The second risk is that once the pilot says "I've been hijacked" everybody that can scramble a fighter jet does so. In the South China Sea, that's not a short list. Once the jets get there, the hijacked plane will get diverted to a military base, and most of the militaries in the region are not noted for patience in dealing with crooks.
So, the key to living long enough to ask for the money is to not alert the world about a hijacking. My suspicion, then, is that a suitably nubile woman or two were recruited to get the cockpit door opened. This was then followed by the arrival of the muscle, armed probably with knives (easier to make them look like an innocuous part of carry-on luggage or consumer electronics).
After the cockpit was quietly secured, the hijackers then shut down the transponders and reprogrammed the autopilot to take them to a "safer" country - someplace with weak military and police presence. New Guinea or the Philippines would be my vote. Once the plane gets reasonably close to the target area, the pilots could then be marched back into the cockpit, where they could, with suitable coaching, talk to ATC and land the plane.
Where I think things went wrong was in the reprogramming of the autopilot. Either a wrong heading was dialed in, or incorrect assumptions were made about fuel, or there was some relatively minor problem that kicked the plane out of autopilot, such that by the time the problem became apparent the pilots couldn't fix it. And so the plane crashed, with the passengers not being aware of a problem until it was way too late.
*** rampant guesswork ahead ***
This was a for-profit hijacking gone bad. We've seen fairly reliable reports that on at least one occasion a couple of pretty blonde babes were asked up to the flight deck
See, there are two problems with a hijacking in a post 9/11 world. One is a real risk of a passenger riot - although there have been hijackings after 9/11 without a riot. The second risk is that once the pilot says "I've been hijacked" everybody that can scramble a fighter jet does so. In the South China Sea, that's not a short list. Once the jets get there, the hijacked plane will get diverted to a military base, and most of the militaries in the region are not noted for patience in dealing with crooks.
So, the key to living long enough to ask for the money is to not alert the world about a hijacking. My suspicion, then, is that a suitably nubile woman or two were recruited to get the cockpit door opened. This was then followed by the arrival of the muscle, armed probably with knives (easier to make them look like an innocuous part of carry-on luggage or consumer electronics).
After the cockpit was quietly secured, the hijackers then shut down the transponders and reprogrammed the autopilot to take them to a "safer" country - someplace with weak military and police presence. New Guinea or the Philippines would be my vote. Once the plane gets reasonably close to the target area, the pilots could then be marched back into the cockpit, where they could, with suitable coaching, talk to ATC and land the plane.
Where I think things went wrong was in the reprogramming of the autopilot. Either a wrong heading was dialed in, or incorrect assumptions were made about fuel, or there was some relatively minor problem that kicked the plane out of autopilot, such that by the time the problem became apparent the pilots couldn't fix it. And so the plane crashed, with the passengers not being aware of a problem until it was way too late.
