What's remarkable about this story is how convoluted it's been — false leads, conflicting reports, claims, denials, stories put forward, stories retracted, and a whole freaking plane remains missing.
Reshared post from +The Wire
Another apparent breakthrough in the case of the missing Malaysian flight is met with denials and backtracking.
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Even the onion has an article now.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/malaysian-airlines-expands-investigation-to-includ,35524/
+Phillip Scalo Yeah, saw that.
I feel a great deal of pity for the families and friends of those aboard the flight (and, I suppose, for those who were on it). But everything else about this story feels like Tom Clancy meets In Search Of The Bermuda Triangle.
There's a perfectly dreadful movie named Submerged that I reviewed years ago… keep being reminded of it when the story changes or another crackpot theory emerges. We were just discussing over dinner how the MH370 story reads like a bad Clive Cussler novel.
The Guardian has good coverage on their live blogs; the comments are worth reading for the combination of quick wit, airline savvy, and a unified field theory of everything in crackpottery.
A silly diversion: http://www.blogula-rasa.com/2004/11/21/submerged-a-perfectly-dreadful-movie/
This story just gets odder and odder, although I support in principle the prime minister's statement that he didn't want to officially release any information until it was confirmed. I think if the Malaysian government was publicizing every possibility, the situation would be so much worse.
I feel sorry for the Malay authorities. China is kicking up a stink because they haven’t found it, even though we are in needle/haystack territory. Crashed planes can go missing for years, until there is a lucky break.
One of the things to remember is that (I’m sure this is right) that most ATC isn’t done with RADAR as the man in the street understands it, but rather by transponders, which report the position. If it was turned off/damaged the plane disappears from the screen, even though it was still flying.
There’s a great infographic here (http://holykaw.alltop.com/washington-post-everything-re-mh370-infographic) that discusses (among other things) the way location is tracked.