Missing Malaysia Flight 370

I haven't commented on this because everyone else has and because I have nothing to add.  But as I listen to all the speculation, I do have some thoughts on what might have happened.   Some of the key factors would seem to be:

• Intentional or Unintentional?
• Who?
• Why?

The chart starts to outline those choices:

The Why?

If it's intentional the two basic motives (I'm sure there must be more) that I can think of are personal and political/terror.

Personal could be any situation where someone wants revenge or to collect insurance or ??? - possibly in a way that can't be traced.  A business feud, a family feud, or any of the many different reasons people get very angry at each other.

Political/terror would be a situation where some group with relatively little legitimate power is using terror to make their statement.

That brings us back to Who?  There are the usual suspects

• Al Qaeda and various offshoots.  
• But this plane was headed to China and had lots of Chinese passengers.  And just on March 1, there was a terrorist attack in Kunming which the Chinese government tells us was mounted by Uighurs during the China's National People's Congress. So there's a possibility there too.
• Some organization that's either under the radar or not previously connected with terror attacks.

What?

If it was unintentional, something mechanical happened in the plane and it just went down.  But how do you account for the change in flight direction?  Were the pilots trying to go back after there were mechanical problems but the problems were too much?  Why no messages to aviation controllers?  Lots of questions here.

But if it was intentional, there are different options.

Personal

•  I'm not quite sure what would be required to bring down a plane while one passenger attempted to kill another.  I suspect a gun wouldn't be enough. 
• If someone loaded explosives into someone's luggage, this could have done the trick.
• And someone on the ground attacking with missiles seems a stretch, especially since they were flying at such a high altitude.  

And none of these scenarios is consistent with the plane making a radical course change and continuing to ping for so long


Political/Terror

Petronas Towers from What Do I Know?

Kidnapping - Uighurs possibly thought they could kidnap a plane full of Chinese hostages and negotiate with the Chinese government for concessions.  But given the other Uighur attack with knives in a train station, this seems like a pretty sophisticated plot.  And there is little likelihood the Chinese government would honor any promises that were made to save hostages.  More likely there would be harsh reprisals.

Suicide attack - The last major successful airplane suicide attack was 9/11.  Could plotters have tried to duplicate that effort by attacking the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur?  They were, for a while, the tallest buildings in the world.  What if they tried to take over the plane, but somehow the attempt was thwarted like the third plane in the 9/11 attacks and the plane went down? 


Obviously there are many possible scenarios.  I have no crystal ball, but I suspect that the eventual story, if we ever learn it, will fall within these options. 

Whatever the final story, one can't help but feel great sympathy for the passengers and for their families and friends as the agony of waiting drags on. 

Kuala Lumpur 3 - More Petronas Towers Pics

Those little white dashes at 5 o'clock and 8:30 around the moon are bats.

Looking up.

This one is this afternoon when it was still light out.

And this is the giant shopping mall inside.

From Greatbuldings.com:

ArchitectA	Architect: Cesar Pelli
Location	Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia map
Date	1998 timeline
Building Type	skyscraper, commercial office tower
Construction System	glass, steel, and concrete
Climate	tropical
Context	urban
Style	Modern
Notes	Tapering twin towers (connected by a sky bridge) share an Islamic-influenced geometrically polygonal plan. Featured extensively in "Entrapment", a cool action movie starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones.

Kuala Lumpur 2 - Pictures from Yesterday

This is our pretty empty Air Asia flight from Chiang Mai to Kuala Lumpur. I hope they start getting people on the plane or they'll consider cutting this flight.

The Malaysian coast line.

The bus into town from the airport.

Palm plantations along the road from the airport.

We got in at the LCC (Low Cost Carrier) airport.
(As I'm posting this I can hear the fireworks from where we were earlier
tonight at the Chinese Festival. Will post a bit on that in the next day or two.)

The bus got us into Sentral (Malaysia spelling is a lot easier to figure out than Thai) Station and then we took the monorail to the hotel. It began raining while we were on the monorail. We waited with the motorcycle drivers for about ten minutes until it was over.

This is the view from our room, pasted together with six photos, not using photoshop. The red roofed low buildings in front are the Malaysian visitors and information center, right across the street from the hotel, where I'm sitting now using their wifi. And where they had great music last night. If I find time I'll post some video.

These are the Petronas Twin towers. At one time it was the highest building in the world. Now I guess they claim it as the highest twin towers. At night it really was spectacular. The white lighting against the dark sky was pretty impressive. My pictures just don't do it justice. This is two pictures badly put together.