What's the latest news of Flight 370, missing since March 8?
There is no new news, which means that speculation of its fate will fill the news hole more than ever. No one is saying now that the plane fell victim to an accident. And as I covered before, there is a growing consensus that the hijackers (whether of the passengers or the flight crew themselves) deliberately depressurized the passenger cabin to suffocate the passengers to prevent an uprising.
The dropdown masks in the passenger cabin supply oxygen for only about 15 minutes, long enough for the pilot to fly the plane below 15,000 feet where atmospheric O2 is sufficient. At 35,000 feet, where the plane was flying when it's course radically changed, useful consciousness without oxygen is a half minute or so, dropping as altitude increases. At 45,000 feet, which the plane was reported to have reached, it is less than 15 seconds. So: 15-1/4 minutes after cabin depressurization and that cruelty is accomplished.
If the passengers were so suffocated it means, of course, that theft of the airplane was the point, not ransoming the passengers.
We also know that satellite pings from the plane show it was airborne about 7-1/2 hours after transponder contact was lost; authorities say the plane was flying close to the time its fuel would have been exhausted. But there is no location data included in the satellite pings, so the area where the plane could have been located is bogglingly enormous and includes key places such as Iran, Pakistan and the central Asia's mostly Muslim countries:
So where did it go and why?
Richard Fernandez has a good summary and some informed guesswork. First that the known flight path of the airliner shows a high degree of planning and aviation skill:
Now here is the same track overlaid on the civil radar coverage apparently taken from Skyvector. It is suggested that the track shows an aircraft trying to stay out of radar coverage.
Evade
You don’t have to buy this analysis. First of all, I’m not sure the waypoints are accurate.
Here is my assessment as of today.
The plane did not crash into the ocean
No one goes through the massive planning, expense and training required to carry this out and then simply just drives the plane into the sea. If that was the intention, then why fly around for seven-plus hours beforehand? And would not some terror group have pretty quickly claimed responsibility?
This mitigates against a southern course after the last radar track point. The most reasonable conclusion is that the plane was heading then in the direction the hijackers wanted to go, generally northward toward Asia.
The only reason the plane would have crashed into the sea is that when suffocating the passengers, the hijackers wound up suffocating themselves, too, and the plane flew pilotlessly on until it ran out of fuel. I don't think so, however. The O2 supply to the flight crew is much greater than to the passengers. There should have been ample oxygen to supply the pilots while the passengers choked (if that is what happened) and then the cabin could simply be repressurized.
The plane was the prize
I first broached the idea two days after Flt 370 went missing that the theft of the plane itself, to be later repurposed for destructive ends, could be the point. To that possibility, back to Richard Fernandez's post:
[W]e can examine one idea doing the conspiracy rounds. Rather than crossing India, the conjecture is that MH370 went up through the Bay of Bengal (where the USN’s P-8 Poseidon’s are now searching) and made landfall at Bangladesh and there on to Bhutan and perhaps on to Central Asia.
The problem with that idea is there are a paucity of air routes to tailgate behind. However Keith Ledgerwood thinks he found it the plane MH370 snuck in behind: SIA68. Using Skyvector, Ledgerwood writes:
I quickly realized that SIA68 was in the immediate vicinity as the missing MH370 flight at precisely the same time. Moreover, SIA68 was en-route on a heading towards the same IGREX waypoint on airway P628 that the Malaysian military radar had shown MH370 headed towards at precisely the same time.
It became apparent as I inspected SIA68’s flight path history that MH370 had maneuvered itself directly behind SIA68 at approximately 17:00UTC over the next 15 minutes had been following SIA68. All the pieces of my theory had been fitting together with the facts that have been publically released and I began to feel a little uneasy.
Singapore Airlines Flight 68 proceeded across the Andaman Sea into the Bay of Bengal and finally into India’s airspace. From there it appears to have proceeded across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and finally Turkmenistan before proceeding onward across Europe to its final destination of Barcelona, Spain.
At what point did MH370 hypothetically break away from SIA68′s coattails? Did it continue across India? Or did it make landfall in Bangladesh? In any event, neither Bangladesh nor Bhutan is likely to have much of an air defense. That’s what Jeff Wise at Slate thinks has happened. Here’s a graph that examines that possibility.
In other words, Flight 370's hijackers "tailgated" a scheduled airliner until 370 was well inland, then flew northward as low as possible to avoid military radar detection until they reached their prearranged landing strip, where the plane was hidden from overhead view, emptied of cargo, corpses and seats and refueled for flight elsewhere.
Why tailgate the Singapore Airlines flight? Two reasons. First, flying close behind the other airliner - perhaps only a couple of hundred meters, if that much - enables the 777 to hide using the other plane's transponder signal. This would spoof military radar, too, whose operators will assume that the "bogey" is the Singapore plane. Second, it simplifies the hijackers' navigation once they fall behind the other plane, although navigation seems not to have been a major challenge so far.
Arguing against this scenario, though, is that the timing and skills needed to intercept the Singapore plane are incredibly high, especially by eyeball at night. Air Force fighter pilots are not always successful and they have very sophisticated radar guidance and technical systems and other ground or airborne controllers. If Singapore Airlines Flight 68 had departed only 15 minutes late it would have been 130-150 miles away from where the hijackers would have steered. So while possible, this scenario seems unlikely.
But tailgating another airliner, as it turns out, would not have even been necessary. That there are huge gaps in military radar coverage over the Indian Ocean is unsurprising. But there are large gaps approaching India and southern Asia, too - by design.
Analysts say the gaps in Southeast Asia's air defences are likely to be mirrored in other parts of the developing world, and may be much greater in areas with considerably lower geopolitical tensions.
"Several nations will be embarrassed by how easy it is to trespass their airspace," said Air Vice Marshal Michael Harwood, a retired British Royal Air Force pilot and ex-defence attache to Washington DC. "Too many movies and Predator (unmanned military drone) feeds from Afghanistan have suckered people into thinking we know everything and see everything. You get what you pay for. And the world, by and large, does not pay."
If the plane flew well inland into Asia, Pakistan, Iran or Afghanistan, it won't be to turn it into an ordinary flying bomb. It would be only to convert it into a flying WMD. And that can mean nothing except that the ultimate target is a major population center, if also a financial or political center, so much the better.
What sort of WMD?
Weapons of Mass Destruction consist of three types: nuclear, biological, chemical. IMO, we can toss out chemical because chemical weapons are frankly not destructive enough for terrorists' ends. I was trained as both a chemical and nuclear target analyst in my former career. The amount of chemicals needed to cause truly mass casualties to make this hijacking worthwhile is staggering and begs the question of just who would manufacture the weapons and where.
For much the same reason bioweapons can be discounted even though their potential destructiveness is extremely high. There is no need to hijack and steal an airliner to employ them. Countless fiction plots have shown realistically that infectious strains could be introduced into populations with little difficulty using ordinary transportation to move them around.
That leaves nukes. "The purpose of terror is to terrorize," said Vladimir Lenin, who certainly knew. Nothing would have the psychological, terrorizing impact on the target nation as much as an atomic attack. After all, the effects and horrors of atomic weapons are already familiar to Western and Asian populations. Chemical and bioweapons are lethal but destroy only lives. With atomic weapons there may be hundreds of thousands of casualties and massive property destruction. The optics of a nuke attack in worldwide news reports can't be beat.
With that in mind, the target city would not be a port city because a port city could be nuked from a surface vessel, of which countless available hulls could be obtained for much less than the cost of the Flight 370 hijacking. And obviously, if the target is landlocked a plane would be needed anyway. China has been having Muslim problems with the Uighurs, so the whole operation may not be directed at the West anyway. But I would not count on it.
Why hijack this airliner from this airline?
This is moving deeply into speculative territory. Malaysian Airlines was probably targeted because while its aircrews are considered highly skilled, its security procedures not so much according to various news reports (easy to say in hindsight, of course).
As for why hijack a Boeing 777, there are two possible answers. First is that the 777 simply was what was used for the chosen flight and that the type of airliner was not much relevant to the hijackers' overall purposes. This seems unlikely, though, based on the duration of the post-hijack flight the plane made.
That duration points toward the most likely reason: this is an extremely long-ranged aircraft. Its maximum design fuel capacity of 47,890 US gallons is enough to fly the plane under load,
7,825 nautical miles
(14,490 km)
Typical city pairs:
Los Angeles - Sydney
New York - Hong Kong
Singapore - London
Paris - Los Angeles
Dubai - New York
(Approx. 15 hours)
(Source: Boeing Corp.) If the terrorists have the materials and engineering skills and equipment, they could lengthen the range enormously by installing fuel bladders into the cargo compartment and/or passenger cabin.
The cargo capacity, either by weight or volume, of the 777 is of little importance if it is to be an atomic bomber. Even a crude atomic bomb - say a mere duplicate of the ones dropped on Japan in 1945 - would pose no problem either of size nor weight. As a terror weapon, a nuke need not be even half so powerful as those.
Richard Fernandez writes that whatever the hijackers and their terror group wanted to do with the 777, it's blown now, a dead letter.
In any event, the official belief that it has not met an accident has changed everything. I do not believe that the plane can now be used to attack by air. The whole transponder-tailgate routine has been exposed. The 777 is now a liability. It points directly to the malefactors.
I disagree. There are thousands of airliners in the air every day. Even with a fully-functioning military radar system, it will prove impossible to scramble fighters to check out every potential tailgater blip. A tailgating flight crew can also count on intervals between detection, suspicion and action that may well give them quite enough time to reach a near-littoral target.
Where?
If all this speculation happens to be right (a huge leap, I admit) then what is the intended target? As Richard and I say, it can only be a city. Unless the target is in China, the city cannot be merely a city. It must also be a financial and/or political nexus of the target country, not far inland. In the United States, that means either New York or Washington, DC.
But New York is a port city, a very busy one. A nuke would not have to go off over Manhattan to achieve the terrorists' aims. Set off one in the harbor and not only have you terrorized America, you have shut down America's economy for an incalculable time. However, you don't need the 777 to do that; a tramp steamer will do fine.
Not so with Washington. Washington is not a port city so a ship-borne weapon won't work. However, It is one of the busiest air bubs in the country, offering round-the-clock tailgating opportunities. That it is the political center of the country (if not the whole world) hardly needs stating. An attack there would be no less economically destructive than against New York and politically far more destructive. It would strike to the very heart and soul of the American psyche and sense of being.
On the other hand . . .
Mitigating against such an attack is that its logistic challenges would be daunting:
1. Where exactly would they get an air-transportable atomic weapon? The easy answer is one of the central Asian 'Stans that used to be Soviet republics, but that's not nearly as likely as thriller writers would have us believe. The administrations of GWH Bush and Bill Clinton both devoted serious, sustained resources to ensuring the security of the atomic weapons the Soviet Union left behind when it fell apart - with the cooperation of successive Federation authorities. That terrorists could be supplied there is not impossible, but is not very likely, either.
That leaves three options: Iran, Pakistan or North Korea. Iran and Pakistan were both within range of Flight 370 on March 8. Pakistan has possessed atomic weapons for many years. Iran is developing them but is thought not yet to have them (unless supplied by Pakistan or North Korea).
Pakistan has the industrial ability to produce such a weapon, but it is difficult to see the upside for them for such an attack to be carried out. But terrorists cannot be accused of rational analysis very much.
Kim Jong-un's North Korea is just plain bat crazy so nothing should be put past them. That they have the technical-industrial base for producing such a weapon is doubtful but cannot be discounted.
2. The challenge of making a covert flight from Iran-Pakistan-Central Asia to America's eastern seaboard is a very significant. Once over the Atlantic the way would be mostly clear; with extended-range bladders major air routes could be avoided until tailgate time. It's getting to the Atlantic that would be hard. Flying eastward down the Mediterranean Sea is out since the Israelis have already announced increased alert for such a flight.
That means a route clear around the Horn of Africa, which would challenge even the range of the Boeing 777, or a shortcut route across sub-equatorial Africa, which would pose its own detection risks. But these may be risks the terrorists would be willing to take for such a high-value payoff. For them it would be an all-in mission.
But the terrorists may not be in an hurry. It may suit them to wait two years or so and let the heat cool off and the world return to business as usual. But this has its own risks, too, chief of which is that one should not confuse what the media are reporting with what intelligence agencies, police organizations and military special forces are paying attention to. A concerted, sustained, cooperative effort of such organizations among interested nations will almost certainly succeed.
Summary
Pretty much nothing about Flight 370's disappearance makes sense. I am still nagged that it probably fell into the south Indian Ocean because the hijackers thankfully managed to suffocate themselves along with the passengers. If so, eventually debris will wash up somewhere.
The bottom line is that may never know what happened to Flight 370. Even if it was landed where the hijackers wanted, its further use may be so compromised, as Richard thinks, that it will just rot in place. Or we may learn of its final fate by a breaking news bulletin announcing a mass-casualty attack.
But it seems apparent that the passengers and crew of the plane will never be seen again. In the terrorists' minds, their deaths are just collateral damage. May God be with their families.