CHENNAI: It has been over a week since the Malaysia Airline flight MH370 went missing with 239 people on board. With a huge amount of reports and analysis, anyone would know that the plane was en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur when it went missing and that it vanished shortly after takeoff, that two Iranians passengers with stolen passports were on board and the Malaysian government is covering up a lot of information.
Ever since the plane went missing from the South China Sea region, ghost stories and conspiracy theories have been flooding online. Many plots fail to catch attention or at times ridiculed by a larger online crowd as they lack sense.
One of such theories says the missing plane took diversion and flew further towards North West direction under the shadow of another Boeing 777. Another theory emerged on Tuesday raises the major allegation ever after the plane went missing that the US played behind the incident and diverted it to a highly secretive naval base, Diego Garcia, to protect a ‘suspicious cargo’ on board.
A Tumblr post of Ohio-based pilot Keith Ledgerwood has been trending for the last two days for obvious reasons including its convincing narration and technical details. He wrote that the missing plane flew above or below another Boeing 777, belonging to Singapore Airlines.
Ledgerwood, a hobby pilot and aviation enthusiast, said he discovered the theory noticing that another flight of Singapore Airlines (SIA68) was flying from Singapore over the Andaman Sea at the same time. Quoting the military radar data that traced the direction of the missing plane near Malacca Strait, he says it flew with disabled radars and transponders listening to ATC instructions to the Singapore Airlines (SIA68) in the vicinity.
“I investigated further and plotted the exact coordinates of Singapore Airlines flight number 68′s location at 1815UTC onto the aviation map. 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.”
Singapore Airlines flew across the Andaman Sea into the Bay of Bengal and finally into India’s airspace from there it to have proceeded across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and finally Turkmenistan before proceeding onward across Europe to its final destination of Barcelona, Spain.
Ledgerwood post on his Tumblr page, which is going viral, said thinks that MH370 likely flew in the shadow of SIA68 through India and Afghanistan airspace. “As MH370 was flying ‘dark’ without transponder / ADS-B output, SIA68 would have had no knowledge that MH370 was anywhere around and as it entered Indian airspace, it would have shown up as one single blip on the radar with only the transponder information of SIA68 lighting up ATC and military radar screens,” he writes.
Wouldn’t the Singapore Airlines flight have detected the missing plane flew in the vicinity? Ledgerwood says, ‘No.’
He writes that the Boeing 777 has a navigational system for traffic avoidance. His theory goes like this: “The Air Traffic Control Transponder system would ordinarily provide alerts and visualization to pilots if another airplane was too close. However, that system only operates by receiving the transponder information from other planes and displaying it for the pilot. If the missing plane was flying without the transponder, it would have been invisible to SIA68.”
However, the Indian authorities on Monday refuted this possibility. They said their radars surveillance did not trace the missing plane. “If at all there is a blip, it will be inaccurate to confirm it as the missing plane because primary radars could assess moving objects like an aircraft or even a dense cloud. Secondary radars are more accurate and neither of these surveillance data shows any suspicious flight movements on March 8,” said a senior ATC officer.
Primary radars do not require a plane to have a working transponder, while secondary radar sends out radio signals and listens for echoes that bounce off objects in the sky. A plane also uses radio satellite signals and sends regular updates through the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. Both of those systems were turned off in MH370.
Huge response to these theories from the cyber world may be due to lack of information being revealed by the investigators in Malaysia. Astrologers and aviation experts are in the race to weave in the missing links, producing hundreds of plots and conspiracy theories surrounding the missing plane.
A report emerged from the Russian and European Union media on Tuesday said the US had seized MH370. Quoting a statement claimed to be from the main intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU) at Kremlin in Russia, media reports said Russian agencies were ‘puzzled’ as to why the United States Navy captured and then diverted the plane to their vast and highly secretive naval base Diego Garcia in the southern part of the Indian Ocean.
The reports said the aircraft had been diverted by the US remotely with the help of a fly-by-wire (FBW) system that replaces the conventional manual flight controls with an electronic interface allowing it to be controlled like any drone-type aircraft.
The GRU was keeping a tab on the flight as it believed that there was a ‘suspicious’ cargo on board, which was earlier traced to the Republic of Seychelles where it kept aboard the US-flagged container ship, the MV Maersk Alabama.
The theory goes further attacking the US government by linking this cargo with the suspicious death of two highly trained US Navy Seals — Mark Daniel Kennedy, 43, and Jeffrey Keith Reynolds, 44, who had been allegedly protecting the cargo on board the US cargo ship. However, the deaths of Navy Seals was reported in the international media earlier. Also it adds that Moscow had alerted China’s ministry of state security (MSS) about the flight carrying ‘highly suspicious’ cargo before the flight.
Another ghost theory going viral in the social network sites is that the cellphones of the passengers on board the missing plane are still ringing. However, many telecommunication experts have already ruled out this possibility.
A senior operational in-charge of India government-owned telecommunication company BSNL said the recorded announcements of cellular operators need not to be accurate always as each announcement is limited to a few 100 or 200 calls at a time.
“Recorded announcements need not to be correct always. It may vary when you dial again. Repeated calls to the same number might give you different announcements such as ‘number is not available’ or ‘the network is busy’ or ‘the number is busy,” he said.
There won’t be any dearth of new theories surrounding the missing plane (till it is traced). These theories –as long as they say the plane has been hijacked and has safely landed somewhere — will keep the hope of the passengers’ relatives alive.
“When authorities repeat the possibilities of a hijack or purposeful act, it gives us hope. We hope that she is alive and return back home,” said the family member of Chandrika Sharma, an Indian who was on board the missing plane.
Malaysia Airlines mystery: Singapore Airlines shadow, US suspicious cargo and ...
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