MH370 – Calling the bluff

We are now on the 12th day of the MH370 disappearance and no one is wiser. What is funny is that everyone seems to have seen the aircraft either on radar screen or with their naked eyes. The latest ruse came all the way from Maldives where some islanders were swearing that they saw a low flying aircraft in the MAS colours of red and white. Of course it is now confirmed that it was another imagination of the people eager to locate the aircraft.

There are still many bluffs hanging in the air. If one is to look at the effective range of a long range surveillance radar, the radar at KLIA cannot see the aircraft from where it was reported missing unless they locate the radar on top of the mountain range in central peninsula. Neither can the Thai military or civilian radar see the aircraft at the same location. Both sightings can be ignored as spurious and red herrings.

The only possibility for Malaysian and Thai military radars to see MH370 is for their radars to be located near the east coast of the Thai Malaysian border. Did the Malaysians have any military radar there when they kept quoting KLIA? Did the Thais have any military radar in the Pattani region? If both answers are no, then, like a judge in a court would to say, please ignore all radar sightings of MH370 claimed by the Thais and the Malaysians in that area.

The sightings nearer to Butterworth and in the Straits of Malacca are within the range of Butterworth military radar. It is credible but the information given has to be reliable and not another cooked up story or imagination. The Thais are unlikely to see anything in the Straits of Malacca except those that came within the range of air traffic radar in Phuket. All must remember that the Malaysian govt has not confirmed anything but said the radar blips could be MH370. It could be anything else.

The claimed sightings in the Maldives are likely to be a case of putting 1 and 1 together to get 2. In the case of MH370 landing at the Maldives, it could fly like a normal civilian aircraft at normal height without anyone knowing there was something unusual as long as the air traffickers are under the command and control of the hijacking team. There was no need to fly low level except to make a landing in a remote airfield. Gan comes to mind as it is at a small island at the tip of an atoll and could easily be isolated and concealed or the aircraft kept out of sight of the islanders.

We have ruled out a crash or an explosion after the first few days of search. Now we can rule out the radar sightings in the north eastern cost of peninsula Malaysia. The last clue, if real, was the sighting around Pulau Perak heading northwest. If this is eventually proven to be false, we are back to square one and the last quarter that has been ruled out is east of the South China Sea.

Hope they could find something in the Maldives or Mauritius, or even central Asia. This jigsaw puzzle is still missing alot of pieces and no clear picture has taken shape.

What the authorities should be doing now is not to search for a crash site but a landing sight. The probability of the aircraft being hijacked is now very high. They should be thinking like the hijackers and looking at possible landing sites be it on land or in the sea where the aircraft could ditch safely. It is obvious that the hijackers are not going to kill themselves or the passengers. Where would they bring their aircraft to should be the starting point for this phase of search. The Australians searching near the Antartic is simply unthinking. They are still thinking of a reckless crashing of the aircraft.

Kopi Level - Green