Airliner missing between Malaysia and Cambodia/Vietnam, terrorism possible

[Dayuhan]

You would have to trace the route of a normal commercial airline. For all intents and purposes it would look like a normal commercial airline. Flown close enough to a plane already on that route, it could look like an echo.

I don't think it would be that simple. A radar contact without transponder data or contact with air traffic controllers is an anomaly and would trigger a response almost anywhere, even on a standard route: people do remember 9/11. Biggus would know more about it than I, but I don't think you could fly close enough to another plane to look like an echo without triggering some serious alarm and complaint from the pilots of the plane you were shadowing.

Yes, there would be complicity from Pakistan (or elements in the Pakistani security services who are pissed about the murder of bin Laden), but I am not sure that is really a stretch.

You'd still have to get it across India or China, and hide it. It's not the easiest thing to hide.

Re: possibility of the pilot being homosexual. Somewhere earlier today I read that his wife and children moved out of their home the day before the flight disappeared, but as with everything surrounding this, hard facts seem tough to come by.

ETA: Wife and kids moving out mentioned here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...detection.html

Maybe he came out, they moved out and instead of going to prison he ended it in protest?

London tabloids are notoriously unreliable sources.

The only reason anyone has suggested for believing that the pilot is gay was that someone somewhere extrapolated support for Anwar Ibrahim into "support for homosexuality", which of course we all know means you must be gay. If support for the PKR makes someone gay, there's a whole lot of gay people in KL.

Of course it's not impossible (few things are at this point), but there's also been no even marginally credible basis proposed for the theory.

Is air freight the best way to ship such a quantity of mangosteens? This seems rather odd. Smells more like smuggling than terror to me

It's the only way; they are perishable. This is very very common, there's high demand for tropical fruit in NE Asia, and flights from SE Asia to Japan, Korea, and northern China routinely carry large shipments of fruit.

My guess is that the first officer (maybe the captain was also involved) got paid off to deliver something somewhere that was loaded as mangosteens--gold or drugs, for example. Perhaps Malaysian radar post was also paid off. Once delivery was made the airplane was no longer needed.

Seems a very complicated way to smuggle something, and very risky as well.