If you’ve watched any 24/7 news network in the past 24 hours, it’s been non-stop coverage of the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370, and boy do they know how to cut to Breaking News without confirmation of it being real news.
Yesterday, I was watching CNN when it came back from commercial break with the typical intro to Breaking News. In comes Wolf Blitzer mindlessly looking into the camera where he said, no joke, something almost verbatim to, “Welcome to the Situation Room, I’m Wolf Blitzer. We have dramatic new information coming in about what MIGHT have happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.”
Might have happened? That is the general theme of where we are this morning. Let’s take a look at the latest speculation of the Malaysian PM Najib Razak discussing the probability of this being a deliberate action. Via CNN:
“Malaysian authorities have refocused their investigation on crew and passengers aboard,” Najib told reporters. “Evidence is consistent with someone acting deliberately from inside the plane.”
Najib stopped short of calling it a hijacking, saying investigators have not made a final determination.
“Despite media reports that the plane was hijacked, we are investigating all major possibilities on what caused MH370 to deviate,” he said.
In any case, since it has already been speculated to be a hijacking, a criminal investigation is underway. Via NY Times:
Malaysia turned the search for Flight 370 into a criminal investigation on Saturday, after the prime minister declared that the plane had been deliberately diverted from its planned route a week ago from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The plane then flew as much as seven hours to an unknown destination.
Sounds a lot like a hijacking to me, but that’s because I know how to read. Then there’s the speculation that the flight, after the last contact, diverted West, and then possibly split into two different paths. Again, CNN:
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 made drastic changes in altitude and direction after disappearing from civilian radar, U.S. officials told CNN on Friday, raising questions for investigators about just who was at the controls of the commercial jetliner that went missing one week ago with 239 people on board.
The more the United States learns about the flight’s pattern, “the more difficult to write off” the idea that some type of human intervention was involved, one of the officials familiar with the investigation said.
The revelation comes as CNN has learned that a classified analysis of electronic and satellite data suggests the flight likely crashed either in the Bay of Bengal or elsewhere in the Indian Ocean.
So, it could have went one way and crashed, and the other way to who knows where? It was also just reported that the plane could have been in the air for two-three hours longer than reported since last contact, which means it was in the air for seven hours after last contact. Via News.Com.Au:
Prime Minister Najib Razak has also revealed that the last communication with the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 — which was carrying 239 passengers — was at 8.11am last Saturday, seven hours later than originally thought.
Authorities are now searching in two separate corridors, including one in the Indian Ocean off the Western Australian coast.
Okay, so the plane is speculated to have been hijacked, the transponder was turned off, and then it flew seven hours past the point where last contact was established. If it was hijacked and did crash, was that the point of hijacking it? Seven hours is a long time to decide what to do if the plan was just to fly seven hours and crash. If there is no target to take out, why the seven hours? Or, what if the plane actually landed? Via ABC 15:
Yet another theory is taking shape about what might have happened to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Maybe it landed in a remote Indian Ocean island chain.
The suggestion — and it’s only that at this point — is based on analysis of radar data revealed Friday by Reuters suggesting that the plane wasn’t just blindly flying northwest from Malaysia.
Reuters, citing unidentified sources familiar with the investigation, reported that whoever was piloting the vanished jet was following navigational waypoints that would have taken the plane over the Andaman Islands.
The radar data doesn’t show the plane over the Andaman Islands, but only on a known route that would take it there, Reuters cited its sources as saying.
Yeah, so that is a gigantic leap of logic that drifts into a mid-season episode plot of 24. The cloud that hangs over this entire investigation is still the complete and utter lack of confident information that explains any of this. Everyone has a theory and attempts to tie all the strings together, but then a new theory with different information is tossed on the pile. I’d revert to Occam’s Razor for this usually, which means “When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.” In this case, we have several possible theories. The simplest one is that it crashed, but that doesn’t explain the seven hours of flight time. But, that could also mean it was just seven hours until it crashed, which leads back to the first logical conclusion. I’m sure as the weekend passes, many more theories will arise as Breaking News.
Via CNN, ABC 15, News.Com.Au, NY Times