Malaysian Air MH 370 mystery deepens -- cyberjack, piracy... are passengers still alive ?!?!?

All of us have been reading so much about - Malaysia Airlines passenger  Flight "MH370" that disappeared on 8 March 2014 after departing from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to its scheduled destination in Beijing, China. The aircraft servicing the flight, a Boeing 777-200ER, last made contact with air traffic control less than an hour after take-off. The aircraft was operated by Malaysia Airlines and was carrying 12 crew members and 227 passengers from 15 countries. Sadly, till date, the whereabouts of the crafts are still unknown……….. an unprecedented international effort is under way from space to track the missing Malaysian passenger jet as satellite operators, government agencies and rival nations sweep their gaze across two oceans in search of elusive debris or data. The search has now widened to the Andaman Sea, North-west of the Malay Peninsula, with only one precious clue-an ephemeral 'ping' detected five or six times after the plane lost contact-picked up in orbit.

It assumes some added significance to us in India that Malaysia's Premier Najib Razak on Sunday spoke to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seeking India's help in the massive search with Malaysian investigators suspecting  that the communication system in the missing aircraft was "deliberately disabled" and its transponder switched off before it veered from its path and flew for more than seven hours. With Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak's revelation that the missing flight could have gone anywhere in the Northern corridor from Kazakhstan to Thailand or in the Southern corridor into the Indian Ocean, the scope of search operation being carried out by the Indian armed forces has further expanded. The Indian military aircraft spent much of Saturday scanning the Bay of Bengal in what has already become one of the biggest hunts for a missing plane. That also rises some uncomfortable questions on the air defence systems.  If the flight did enter the Andaman Sea, on way to the Bay of Bengal, Indian air defence radars should have ideally detected it.  According to senior Indian Air Force (IAF) officials, India does maintain a radar north of Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. This radar is primarily directed at the Myanmar's Coco Islands, which is believed to serve as a base for Chinese military activity.

The internet has been abuzz with conspiracy theories about flight MH370’s disappearance, from terrorists to Tintin, some vaguely plausible, others simply ridiculous... one of them is that the plane has been taken to Vietnam, where it is waiting to be used as a weapon in a 9/11 style attack. Because some relatives of passengers have heard ringing tones on their loved ones’ mobiles, rather than being put straight through to voicemail, they believe it is evidence they were still alive.

Whether it had any extraordinary VIP on board could lend a totally different perspective……. Some reports suggest that it was ‘IT heavy’ – with an IBM executive and 20 members of a Texan IT company aboard…. In his comic book Flight 714, published in 1968, Belgian cartoonist Hergé penned a plot which resembles some aspects of the Malaysian mystery.

Malaysian authorities have remained stoic and perhaps are adding more angles …. FBI experts have been quoted as stating that  disappearance could be ‘act of piracy’, suggesting passengers are being held at undisclosed location… Police are also  investigating the possibility that the pilot of missing Flight MH370 hijacked his own aircraft in a bizarre political protest. The Mail reports  that Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was an ‘obsessive’ supporter of Malaysia’s opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim; hours before the doomed flight left Kuala Lumpur it is understood 53-year-old Shah attended a controversial trial in which Ibrahim was jailed for five years. The theory states that the Captain was a vocal political activist – and fear that the court decision left him profoundly upset. Malaysian police searched his house in the upmarket Kuala Lumpur suburb of Shah Alam, where he had installed a home-made flight simulator.

After the initial days of searching yielding no clues, came reports of Satellite data showing  hijacked MH370  last seen flying towards Pakistan Or Indian Ocean ……. according  to a map drawn up by U.S. radio station WNYC, there are 634 locations which could fit, from Australia to the Maldives to Pakistan ~ and it is further confounded by the saying that true number is likely to be even higher, as estimates of how far the plane could have travelled have been increased since the calculations were carried out.

Another pointer to human angle is that shortly afterwards, near the cross-over point between Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic controllers, the plane’s transponder, which emits an identifying signal, was switched off or, less likely, failed. According to a military radar, the aircraft then turned and flew back over Malaysia before heading in a north-west direction.

Technology is so advanced……….. it is stated that if an apple device goes missing – icloud can track easily the missing iphone, ipad, ipod touch or Mac on a map….. then one can decide the further course of action…  but more than a week after a plane went missing with invaluable human lives on board …. We are only confounded by more theories.  To conclude there is another dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area  called  the Twilight Zone.

The Twilight Zone is an American television anthology series created by Rod Serling. It is a series of unrelated stories containing drama, psychological thriller, fantasy, science fiction, suspense, and/or horror, often concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist. A popular and critical success, it introduced many Americans to serious science fiction and abstract ideas through television and also through a wide variety of Twilight Zone literature.

Sad human lives are lost…….. or is there still hope for those on board and their relatives ?

With regards – S. Sampathkumar.

16^th Mar 2o14

With inputs from news sources – predominantly Daily Mail.