Evidently they've identified a mystery passenger on the missing plane.

[Skip Intro]

BEIJING -- Malaysian authorities have identified one of the two men who used stolen passports to board the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the nation’s inspector general of police told local media Monday, as international search teams continued to look -- so far unsuccessfully -- for wreckage from the jet.

"I can confirm that he is not a Malaysian, but cannot divulge which country he is from yet," Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar told the Star, a major Malaysian newspaper. He added that the man is also not from Xinjiang, China -- a northwestern province of the mainland home to minority Uighurs. Uighur separatists have been blamed for a knifing rampage in southwestern China this month that left 29 dead.

Meanwhile, a Taiwanese official said national security officials received an anonymous tip last week warning that terrorists were targeting Beijing’s international airport. But the official, Cai Desheng, chief of Taiwan's national security bureau, told Taiwan’s official news agency that the call received last Tuesday was “not likely’’ to be linked to the mysterious disappearance four days later of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which was headed from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-malaysia-plane-passport-traveler-identified-20140310,0,5518335.story#ixzz2vcehJuGu

[Cha]

1. THanks, SI

[jtuck004]

2. According to their news conference, one is Iranian, using the passport to immigrate to Germany,

(it's pretty frequent that someone tries to move around outside the U.S. with a phony passport), and his mom is waiting for him to arrive.

Most likely not the problem.

And just a little blast from the past.

B772, Cairo Egypt, 2011 (FIRE AW) (On 29 July 2011 an oxygen-fed fire started in the flight deck of an Egypt Air Boeing 777-200 about to depart from Cairo with most passengers boarded. The fire rapidly took hold despite attempts at extinguishing it but all passengers were safely evacuated via the still-attached air bridge access to doors 1L and 2L. The flight deck and adjacent structure was severely damaged. The Investigation could not conclusively determine the cause of the fire but suspected that wiring damage attributable to inadequately secured cabling may have provided a source of ignition for an oxygen leak from the crew emergency supply)
-Wiki

The crew's own o2 supply started the fire. Something like this could easily be the cause, and could disable the crew in seconds.