I don't understand what the twenty Freescale employees have to do with anything and I keep seeing this fact mentioned in every discussion about MH370.
How could they be important/valuable/dangerous enough to justify the hijacking or destruction of a commercial airliner containing hundreds of passengers? That sounds completely insane to me.
It would be much much easier to get to any of the passengers while they were still on the ground. Hijacking the aircraft and stealthily landing it somewhere is such a complex plan that it's just too ridiculous.
Really? I don't see any sign yet that the flight 370 hijacking involved unusual danger, difficulty or expense for the culprits: so far, as best we can see, it looks like stealing candy from a baby. Obviously to get people off it alive you'd need manpower and infrastructure, but either a dusty old Soviet-era airbase in metaphorical or literal Kazakhstan, or a ship to pick people up after a ditching in calm water somewhere, would be sufficient. Many state actors could arrange one or both of those without serious difficulty (some non-state actors too). I can't think of a way to kidnap a handful of Freescale engineers all at once from urban China or urban Malaysia that could be described as much much easier.
That said, I think it's highly improbable that the Freescale guys were targeted like this, but mainly because the political consequences of being caught doing something like this would probably be much too painful for most of the states who might really benefit from debriefing those engineers at length.
Yes, really. You are looking at it after the fact. Paying off a pilot who is skilled enough to fly the aircraft evading all radar and land it unassisted at night or early dawn on some remote airbase would be a major expense. Paying someone to kill off the rest of the 220 passengers would be a big challenge as well. And everybody involved would know that and the additional risk and thus demand much more money. You would have to find such an airbase. And you would have people at the airbase to take care of everything, including hiding the jet from satellites. And the airbase would have to be unused and remote. Ditching the aircraft safely into calm waters is even more unrealistic. First of all AFAIK it has never been successfully done with a wide-body aircraft and even in a small-body aircraft it would be a major risk. It would require perfect weather and calm ocean. And it would have happened at night!
There are a ton of risks involved in all of this. How could they hijackers have known that the Malaysian air force wasn't properly looking at its radar? They could have scrambled jets at that point and all of this complicated plan would have been for nothing. What if the flight they allegedly used for the radar shadow would have been delayed or they would have been delayed? What if there had been a military ship with their own radar on an exercise or patrol? After all they flew over one of the busiest water lanes in the world with an active piracy problem. What if ...
You are looking at it after the fact and not from the perspective of someone who had to come up with the plan and evaluate all the risks.
I'm not saying that kidnapping or killing a handful of people on the ground would be easy. But compared to such an unprecedented and skilled aircraft hijacking plan it seems like a piece of cake. Not to forget all the attention that MH370 gets.
> What if the flight they allegedly used for the radar shadow would have been delayed or they would have been delayed?
A ground contact could easily watch for the shadow plane's takeoff and indicate via radio that the operation was a go. It's quite possible that they had multiple windows of opportunity if all they wanted was the plane. Of course if it had to be that particular flight due to passengers or cargo it would be a different story.
> Paying off a pilot who is skilled enough to fly the aircraft evading all radar and land it unassisted at night or early dawn on some remote airbase would be a major expense. Paying someone to kill off the rest of the 220 passengers would be a big challenge as well. And everybody involved would know that and the additional risk and thus demand much more money. You would have to find such an airbase. And you would have people at the airbase to take care of everything, including hiding the jet from satellites. And the airbase would have to be unused and remote.
If you wanted to use one of the actual Malaysian Airlines pilots to divert the plane, I expect you might have great difficulty being confident about approaching the right guy (if any) without first being turned down and reported. Likely nothing else in the above is unduly difficult for a number of state actors. The rest of the passengers might not be killed either.
> Ditching the aircraft safely into calm waters is even more unrealistic. First of all AFAIK it has never been successfully done with a wide-body aircraft and even in a small-body aircraft it would be a major risk. It would require perfect weather and calm ocean. And it would have happened at night!
Perhaps, though if the plane went south to the Indian Ocean SATCOM arc it would apparently have been daylight when it was last pinged. (Source: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re... ) The primary radar reports seem to suggest otherwise though.
> There are a ton of risks involved in all of this. How could they hijackers have known that the Malaysian air force wasn't properly looking at its radar? They could have scrambled jets at that point and all of this complicated plan would have been for nothing. What if the flight they allegedly used for the radar shadow would have been delayed or they would have been delayed? What if there had been a military ship with their own radar on an exercise or patrol? After all they flew over one of the busiest water lanes in the world with an active piracy problem. What if ...
Flight 370 in all probability was pinged several times by primary radar without any decisive response. Someone whose job was to be well-informed about these things a) might well choose to take the calculated risk that Malaysia would do nothing effective and b) would likely have been right.
> You are looking at it after the fact and not from the perspective of someone who had to come up with the plan and evaluate all the risks.
> I'm not saying that kidnapping or killing a handful of people on the ground would be easy. But compared to such an unprecedented and skilled aircraft hijacking plan it seems like a piece of cake.
On the contrary, I think that any such alternative plan to kidnap and interrogate a handful of the Freescale guys would probably seem at least as risky if you described it in some detail, then looked at it with as much scepticism as you've directed at the flight-370 version.
I think the real primary reason to discount it at the moment is indeed the attention: the political blowback for being caught would be too painful, even if you'd had the minimal good sense not to deliberately kill the Chinese or US citizens on board. It would be a huge causus belli, more or less a second 9/11. Any attempt to misdirect the blame would likely not hold up long. (And a few secondary ones: China is the #1 usual suspect for military-industrial espionage on the US at present, and there are several additional reasons it wouldn't want to, or have to, pull something like this. A state hijacker would presumably be well informed enough not to be caught out by the disabling-ACARS-doesn't-shut-down-SATCOM gotcha. And probably if you pull a random airliner off its course in SE Asia you're quite likely to catch a significant number of interesting-looking people like the Freescale group.)
> On the contrary, I think that any such alternative plan to kidnap and interrogate a handful of the Freescale guys would probably seem at least as risky if you described it in some detail, then looked at it with as much scepticism as you've directed at the flight-370 version.
I doubt it because the aircraft simply adds a huge amount of risk and has little benefit. The only two benefits are that they are all in one place and that they are on a vehicle which can bring them out of the country. But the former could certainly be achieved in another way. Where they on a business trip in Malaysia? That would simplify it a lot because you could get them easily in the hotel or even better on the transfer to the airport.
The latter is almost perfect. You hijack the minibusses used by the transfer company. You load up the unsuspecting employees. Drive them to a hideout and either force them with weapons or by using knock-out gas. Wait a few hours until it's night. And then you can drive them to the coast, load them into a small boat, and bring them to a larger vessel waiting off the coast. There are of course risks, like a random police encounter or someone noticing you loading people onto a small boat. But to me it seems they pale in comparison to successfully hijacking an aircraft, flying it unassisted while evading radar to a hidden location, which is far away from any civilians or foreign military infrastructure, getting rid of 220 people, getting rid of a huge aircraft.
But in the end who would be worth all this attention and money? I guess buying off the person you want would be cheaper. If some country wanted to hire the Freescale guys then promising each $1m/yr would probably be cheaper and significantly less risky.
This is a very important point. I haven't yet seen a satisfactory conspiracy theory that explains why anybody would pursue this sort of action in the full glare of international publicity, and it's hard to imagine someone being good enough to pull this off, yet not realize this would happen. There aren't many conspiracies that benefit from continuous, sustained attention of this scale, or that could plan on absolutely no incriminating piece of evidence being turned up anywhere, by anyone, on such a large scale.
>If they wanted to get rid of these guys stealthily this is not the way. //
Isn't it a "hidden in plain site" sort of stealth though.
Everyone assumes that the plane was lost naturally and so there is no-one looking to find those you've taken. Meanwhile you can have the plane melted down, dispose of bodies and cargo and keep whatever it was you wanted without any one (or country) knowing you've got it.
it's making a come-back. especially since the Malaysians have revised their timing on the comm-system shutdowns and there are no terror links to the passengers/crew.
Hijacking airplanes after 9/11 is much more risky. Until 9/11, there was never a plot that involved intentionally hijacking an airliner with the intent of using it as a weapon and killing everyone on board. The assumption was "Oh, if we just give them what they want they'll let us all live."
Post-9/11, if anyone tries to hijack an airplane they're going to have every able-bodied male between the ages of 18 and 40 come at them with the expectation that they're fighting for their life. I know I personally would take my chances that they don't have a bomb: if I do nothing, I would assume I am definitely going to die. If I do something, the passengers collectively could overpower them and hope were bluffing about the bomb. If they weren't, it's the same outcome as doing nothing.
>Until 9/11, there was never a plot that involved intentionally hijacking an airliner with the intent of using it as a weapon and killing everyone on board.
Fedex Flight 705 (7 April 1994), before 9/11. Pilot tried to kill other pilots so he could crash plane into FedEx hub and destroy it and employees. Was subdued, barely, by a pilot with cracked skull that then managed to land the plane.
Egypt Air 990 (31 October 1999), before 9/11. Pilot deliberately killed everyone on board, thought it wasn't a weapon.
True, but not necessarily decisive. If you're the pilot, or someone else with a way past that new-and-improved post-9/11 cockpit door, you can likely make it work for you. Or if you have some way of getting an automatic weapon or some other useful tool on board (far from easy of course!) you can still hold off large numbers of desperate, but unarmed, passengers.
Assuming the hijackers weren't already in the cockpit. It seems to me that the most likely people taking control of the plane in the situation stipulated were the people already in control of the plane when it left the ground.
The majority of hijackings have the original pilot at the controls under duress. In 9/11, it was unusual that the hijackers had done flight training and piloted the planes. That was because the pilots wouldn't have done what those hijackers wanted.
Because a lot of the people talking about the Freescale engineers are themselves one kind of engineer or another, and THEY are important, so ergo the Freescale employees have to be important.
It's like in other disasters where lots of people get killed but the news focuses on the two Americans standing nearby.
I also doubt that the employees had anything to do with it, but the most likely scenario I can think of that would involve the engineers is a country with sanctions imposed wanting to fabricate chips. On the other hand, any country capable of this probably could manage to get hold of as many chips as they wanted without kidnapping Freescale employees.
If you were a nation-state you could just create a start-up 'front' company, seeded with laundered money, and hire the best of those that apply.
And if you didn't have the money to actually continue funding a start-up, you could create the front, offer to fly all the employees to some destination-team-building exercise and kidnap them from there.
It's a bit Bond/cyberpunk-esque, but one could imagine a scenario where an evil villain could short a company's stock and then kill off 20 extremely valuable employees of said company. Not saying that's what happened here, but 20 of the right employees of a company could be very significant.
Probably not these employees, this company, or this time. NYSE:FSL peaked around $23 and is still around $22. There are 300 million shares, and from the chart it looks like recent volume of a few million, so the potential profit is probably less than what you could simply sell the 777 to the bad guys for.
Most companies with hundreds of billions in market cap would not send many important people on a single plane together. Freescale, not quite that large, arguably made a significant business mistake here, but the market impact so far seems limited.
It's a bit Bond/cyberpunk-esque, but one could imagine a scenario where an evil villain could short a company's stock and then kill off 20 extremely valuable employees of said company
When was the last time you heard of 20 employees of a company being murdered?
To do so by killing 220+ other people makes such a theory even more absurd.
It happened to 13 separate companies on September 11, 2001 (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/twintowers/). It was sort of not targeted at those companies, but on the other hand it sort of was. And it certainly had huge market impact.
It happened to 13 separate companies on September 11, 2001 (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/twintowers/). It was sort of not targeted at those companies, but on the other hand it sort of was. And it certainly had huge market impact.
I knew I should have specified something along the lines of "and as part of a criminal fraud or theft or deliberate talent destroying act, or..."
As you say, the sole purpose of 9/11 wasn't to target those specific companies.
