T1B

trev wrote:No one seems to know what happened at all.

poptart wrote:

trev wrote:No one seems to know what happened at all.

Some people know exactly where the plane is.

A government(s) is involved in this fiasco.


Jmo.

Mikey wrote:Obama should have seen it coming and done something about it in advance.

Left Seater wrote:While the right seater is a good place to start your investigation, it is a little early to focus too much energy there. However, you still managed to kick your own ass yet again when trying to make a funny. Turns out the right seater was inviting female guests to ride in the jump seat as recently as 2011.

LTS

Screw_Michigan wrote:

Mikey wrote:Obama should have seen it coming and done something about it in advance.

It was Russia.

smackaholic wrote:I realize that the plane was out of range from land based ATC radar, but, you would think there would have been some sort of Naval ship in the neighborhood painting it with their air search radar. And any target of that size with no accompanying IFF signature would definitely raise an eyebrow or two.

Trouble is, that ship would likely be chinese, and they are kind of funny about sharing info with us at times.

smackaholic wrote:Trouble is, that ship would likely be chinese, and they are kind of funny about sharing info with us at times.

smackaholic wrote:And subs generally don't run radar as it eliminates their advantage of being invisible.

smackaholic wrote:I would think the chink navy would have a pretty decent presence in that area. Of course the better part of it is likely their submarine force, which they have put a good deal of effort into over the last 20 years. And subs generally don't run radar as it eliminates their advantage of being invisible.

Derron wrote: I am assuming here and Lefty, please set me straight....but an airline flying very expensive planes is going to have a sat track on them, that gives a lot clearer data than what is out there. But maybe the slopes just say fuck it, run dead reckoning after radar is gone.

We will likely NEVER know what happened.

Left Seater wrote:
It may take awhile, but at some point we will start to find clues. Way to many parts that float to not turn up on a beach somewhere at some point. And all of those parts will have serial numbers.

Left Seater wrote:But even if that happened, 777s jut don't disappear.

trev wrote:A waitress? Are you talking about flight attendants? I've never heard them called waitresses.

(CNN) -- You -- the person now reading this story -- can help experts solve the mystery of what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared over the open sea.

In fact, thousands of aspiring good Samaritans are volunteering their time to scour part of the plane's search zone using detailed satellite images posted online by DigitalGlobe, a Colorado firm that owns one of the world's most advanced commercial satellite networks.

So many volunteers have joined the effort that the firm's website -- with its pinpoint pictures of everything floating in the ocean -- has crashed.

It is a busy week for "crowdsourcing," the Internet phenomenon where information is gathered from John and Jane Q. Public -- people like you -- and from your social media postings.

DigitalGlobe and tomnod.com offer their satellite photos of ocean in crowdsourcing effort."This is a real needle-in-the-haystack problem, except the haystack is in the middle of the ocean," Luke Barrington of DigitalGlobe told CNN affiliate KMGH. "I will ask you to mark anything that looks interesting, any signs of wreckage or life rafts."

DigitalGlobe's satellite photos taken 400 miles above the Gulf of Thailand can capture a detail as small as a home plate. The challenge is finding the manpower to scour 1,235 square miles of such images on one of DigitalGlobe's websites, Tomnod.com -- with more pictures to be posted this week from satellites above the Strait of Malacca, said Abby Van Uum, an Edelman publicist retained by DigitalGlobe.

That's where crowdsourcing comes in.

"In many cases, the areas covered are so large, or the things we're looking for are so hard to find, that without the help of hundreds of thousands of people online, we'd never be able to find them," Barrington said.

One volunteer, Mike Seberger, 43, found a fascinating image in a matter of minutes: the silhouette in the ocean has the scale of a Boeing 777-200, the same model of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

His discovery can be seen on his CNN iReport page, which is also a form of crowdsourcing used by CNN.

"At first, I skipped past it, thinking, 'Nah. No way I would find anything that quickly,' " Seberger told CNN on Tuesday. "But then I kept scrolling back to it and thinking to myself, 'It does resemble a plane....'

"I played with the zoom on my browser a bit, and took a screenshot at 200%, which is what I uploaded" to CNN iReport, said Seberger, a manager of information technology in the Chicago area.

But Seberger does have his doubts: "Looking at it objectively, the shape of 'my' object appears plane-like and the dimensions are consistent with a 777-200. That said, I feel it is more likely to be a boat."

DigitalGlobe and the Tomnod.com website officials have yet to respond to his flagging of the curious image. "Their site is getting slammed, apparently, because about half the time that I try to access it, I get an error page, and sometimes even though I log in, no map loads," Seberger said Tuesday. "The site got slammed like healthcare.gov."

Company officials weren't available to respond to CNN's requests for a comment Tuesday.

In response to the Malaysia Airlines plane's disappearance, DigitalGlobe activated its subscription service to emergency managers, which provides online access to satellite images before and after the incident, the firm said on its website. The photos are used for emergency response, damage assessment and recovery.

The company performed a similar "global crowdsourcing campaign" in November's Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, allowing volunteers to tag online more than 60,000 objects of interest from satellite photos. The information was forwarded to emergency responders, the firm said.

The firm also tracked damage last year in the Moore, Oklahoma, tornado and the Colorado floods. In another case, the satellite imagery also helped locate the remains of two missing hikers in Peru, the affiliate reported.

The firm, based in Longmont, also uses geospatial big data, which is "information and insight taken from imagery and derived from various sources such as social media," the firm said.

The company used the technology in satellite images of the recent Sochi Olympics in Russia and cross-referenced the photos with social media data "to analyze overall activity, linguistic composition and mood for people around Sochi," the firm said.

Police have been outside his Malaysia home every day since the plane vanished, a source told CNN. But they have not gone inside.

If they did, they might find a flight simulator there. In a YouTube video he apparently posted, Zaharie can be seen sitting in front of one.

And in a German online forum for simulator enthusiasts, X-Sim.de, there is a post from November 2012 in his name that says he built it himself.

"About a month ago I finish assembly of FSX and FS9 with 6 monitors." The message was signed Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah BOEING 777 MALAYSIA AIRLINES.

FSX and FS9 are over-the-counter flight simulator games made by Microsoft.

On Friday, the CEO of Malaysia Airlines said that everyone is allowed to pursue their hobbies.

Zaharie, a pilot with 18,365 flight hours under his belt, is reportedly also a flight instructor.

Left Seater wrote:Rooster,

Why would someone "steal" a 777 to part it out? Each and every part on that plane has a serial number that can be tracked. Further, to sell used parts will require a discount since 777 parts are easy to come by since it is still in production. And which 777 operator is looking to purchase parts on the black market?