RE: MH370 hijackers left fake southern data trail
March 12, 2015 at 9:48 pm
(This post was last modified: March 12, 2015 at 9:48 pm by mralstoner.)
Latest from Jeff Wise ...
Quote:The Malaysian Government Just Released a Huge Amount of New Data on the MH370 Crash. Here’s What It Reveals.Could the plane have flown straight into China, solving the radar and fuel puzzles?
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/201...epens.html
As recently as last week, Reuters ran a piece describing seven theories; CNN published one describing five. These stories don’t distinguish, however, between mere flights of fancy, which have been concocted without reference to anything we actually know, and testable scientific hypotheses grounded in the facts. By the latter definition, I count only three.
The first one, which I’ll called Suicide Pilot, imagines that the pilot locked himself in the cockpit and flew the plane into the southern ocean. This is, at present, the default scenario; on Saturday, the New York Times wrote a long story outlining its merits. The second theory, the Spoof, proposes that the plane was taken by a highly sophisticated hijack and flown north to Kazakahstan, as I outlined in this magazine last month. The third I’ll call Hero Pilot. It’s a version of a scenario laid out last March by Chris Goodfellow, who suggested that an accidental fire (or maybe unexpected depressurization) had rendered the pilots unconscious, so that the plane flew on into the southern ocean as a ghost plane. This idea was revisited last weekend at the Daily Beast by Clive Irving.
That’s it. These are the only three options that are currently making the rounds. If other scenarios are conceivable, no one is actively articulating them. These three theories all match the data to one degree or another, but they all have gaping holes. It’s like a baby beauty contest where all the contestants are ugly. The question is, which baby is the least ugly? ..
And, in my reading at least, I didn’t see any new evidence in Sunday’s report that made my hypothesis look any worse. Make no mistake, the Spoof is an ugly baby. It’s not clear how a plane traveling north could have evaded military radar detection in each of the countries it passed over, and it’s not clear how it could have flown as fast and as far as it did without running out of fuel. But to my eye, Sunday’s disclosure made it more attractive in comparison to its competitors. The game plays on....
