evamodel00

oh, i found the answer

Iranian lawmaker: U.S. ?kidnapped? missing Malaysia Airlines plane - NY Daily News

rickair7777

Wouldn't work over open water, unless somebody had a iridium. And a iridium would really prefer an unobstructed view of the sky...might work if you had a window seat and all the stars lined up.

If they flew over land, you might or might not get normal cell reception depending on altitude and location.

UAL T38 Phlyer

This.

A typical cell-phone has a range of 2-3 miles. The reason they are called "cellular" is because they operate inside a "cell" of a certain electronic boundary. I found when working for an air-ambulance company that the cell-phones for the ambulance would lose coverage at about 150-160 knots on takeoff or landing.

The explanation given to me (which makes sense) is at that speed, the time time spent in a particular "Cell" was insufficient for the towers defining that cell to establish a connection. Just as it was establishing the connection on a specific frequency, it would lose coverage, and the process would start all over.

I also believe the tower propagation patterns are optimized for horizontal coverage, not vertical.

There may be exceptions in the states, where tower density is high. But certainly not over the open ocean, in Asia.

savall

With most cell phones being digital these days this is the case. For example on 9/11 the passengers were able to phone out because the cell system was still largely analog and needed to only pick up the right frequency and not scan for tower after tower (I could be wording that wrong). Analog cell phones were also the reason for the annoying buzz on occasion through the headset.

jrishaw

[Hi all, Network Engineer by career] Regarding a software hack:
I've worked on software for private jets, etc, and the only access points are direct (what we call) "thin net" direct connections.

The idea I've been reading that any passenger can access these, without having breached the cockpit, is absurd. Built-in plane security aside, even a compromise of a floor panel in the passenger area would require complete severing of wires - not to mention the obvious labor to even access the panel in the first place, and the tools to reassemble connectivity between the attacker and the jet.

This is paranoia, and should be put to rest.

jrishaw

95% certainty, Iridium would not work inside an airplane.
At least, it never has for me..

80ktsClamp

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA—Following a host of conflicting reports in the wake of the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 last Saturday, representatives from the Kuala Lumpur–based carrier acknowledged they had widened their investigation into the vanished Boeing 777 aircraft today to encompass not only the possibilities of mechanical failure, pilot error, terrorist activity, or a botched hijacking, but also the overarching scope of space, time, and humankind’s place in the universe.

The airline, now in its fifth day of searching for the passenger jet carrying 239 passengers and crew, has come under fire for its perceived mishandling of the investigation, whose confusing and contradictory reports have failed to provide definitive answers on everything from how long the missing plane remained aloft after losing contact with air traffic controllers, to whether the flight made a radical alteration in its heading, to the very dimensions of space-time and the nature of reality, and what exactly it is that brought us into existence and imbued us with this thing we call life.

Additionally, the airline confirmed it had expanded its active search area to include a several-hundred-square-mile zone in the Indian Ocean as well as each of the seven or 22 additional spatial dimensions posited by string theory.

“We continue to do everything in our power and explore every possible lead—both Cartesian and phenomenological—to locate the aircraft as quickly as possible,” said Malaysia’s civil aviation chief Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, who went on to say that authorities were still actively seeking tips from anyone claiming knowledge related either to the flight, or to the mechanisms by which consciousness arises, or to the question of why anything physical and finite exists instead of nothing at all. “At this stage, we can’t rule anything out: not crew interference with the transponders, not a catastrophic electrical failure, not the emergence of a complex topological feature of space-time such as an Einstein-Rosen bridge that could have deposited the flight at any location in the universe or a different time period altogether, nothing.”

“Could a parallel universe have immediately swelled up from random cosmological fluctuation according to the multiverse theory and swallowed the flight into its folds, or could ice have built up on an airspeed sensor? Those are both options we are currently considering,” Rahman added. “Everything’s on the table. That is, insofar as anything exists at all, which we’re also looking into.”

Rahman assured the press and families of passengers that officials would not rest until they locate the plane, provided that sensory experience can be verified beyond the existence of one’s own mind. Malaysian authorities also cautioned that they were dealing with an unprecedented aviation mystery and that it could take months to ascertain the airliner’s exact fate as well as, for that matter, the fate of mankind itself, assuming a linear theory of space-time in which the future is unknowable and objects travel in a forward trajectory which, authorities hasten to add, is not necessarily the case.

In addition, airline sources attempted to assuage an uneasy public by noting they had brought in top crash investigators from the Malaysian, Vietnamese, and Chinese governments, as well as U.S. Navy personnel, Boeing technicians, leading quantum physicists, theoretical cosmologists, metaphysicians, epistemologists, and determinist philosophers to help scour all conceivable and as yet inconceivable locations in which the plane might be located.

“The bottom line is that we have a sophisticated aircraft fresh off a safety inspection with no prior incident of malfunction, flying in good weather at a cruising altitude,” Rahman continued. “Why didn’t the pilot send a distress signal? Why aren’t we finding a debris path? What are we to make of the contradictory radar information? Where did the universe begin and can it be said to have a limit or an edge? What is mankind’s role in it? Is there a God? If so, what is God’s nature?”

“It’s too early to answer these questions right now, but I can assure you that Malaysia Airlines will get to the bottom of it,” Rahman added. “Our top people are on it right now.”


Malaysia Airlines Expands Investigation To Include General Scope Of Space, Time | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Cujo

I'm thinking "DieHard" movie plot....no terrorist or high jacking. What was in the cargo bays?

Gold? Diamonds? Bonds?

GogglesPisano

"Airport '77?"

rickair7777

I'm the furthest thing there ever was from paranoid, and will crush paranoia like a bug when I find it.

But as somebody with some insight into military cyber capabilities I can almost assure you that the only perfectly secure system is one with zero external connections, wired or wireless and that includes the power source. Military systems can, for example, insert malign code into a control system via an access point that's not even designed to serve as a comms device. Think about it, all you have to do is get the right trons to wiggle, and the trons don't care how you go about that.

The Iranians though the same way you do about their centrifuges

With all that said, the usual suspect bad guys wouldn't have the technical capacity, not even close. This sort of "black magic" attack would probably require a government entity...at least for now.