Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
Biggus & Dayuhan:

You guys are on top of this. Have there been any reports about what kind of cargo/freight the aircraft was carrying? Another idle thought on my part.
There's a conspiracy theory doing the rounds that suggests that there was a large proportion of the staff of a semiconductor company on board, and that a competitor might have planted a bomb on board to assassinate them.

Quote Originally Posted by AmericanPride View Post
Since the aircraft was flying at night, is it possible that a malfunction could lead the pilots to losing their direction? I'm not familiar with the technical aspects of flying and aerial navigating. Is it also possible that a series of technical malfunctions or human error led to the sequential loss of navigation, transponder, and communication system(s) before the total loss of the aircraft (perhaps running out of fuel)? Does the 20-something minutes between the shut down of the data reporting system and the transponder preclude, say, the loss of cabin pressure and the aircraft operating on auto-pilot? And if the flight was deliberately taken off course, what destinations are in the Indian Ocean? Did they get lost? I'm also not familiar with the history of hi-jackings in this part of the world.
I don't yet buy into the hijacking theory. I don't see enough evidence just yet.

There's really not a lot that can go wrong in terms of navigation. Part of the pre-flight process is to set up the waypoints along the appropriate airway (think of it as an imaginary multi-level highway in the air) in the flight control system, and most airlines these days tend to make it SOP to do nearly everything on autopilot post-takeoff. Everything is done by checklist.

A very mild decompression loss would explain most of the unknowns reasonably well at this point. The scenario would effectively be that the crew would catch the onset of hypoxia early enough to start an emergency descent (spoilers and speedbrakes, close throttle, set the autopilot MCP to a lower altitude which might or might not initially have been FL295, hit HDG mode to change course and get out of the airway, transponder to 7700) but late enough to not go through the second part of the emergency descent checklist before succumbing. In this case, you'd have an aircraft that could fly until it ran out of fuel with no human input.

The transponder seems to be the most troubling aspect. Two other aircraft in the relevant timeframe experienced anomolies in their transponder output in a fairly small geographic area, KAL672 and CCA970. Some are suggesting perhaps an electronic warfare surface vessel might be responsible, but I don't really want to speculate too much on that. It might very well have been accidentally turned off in the rush to get the emergency descent procedures started, which would be within the realms of possibility. I'm neither familiar with the transponder in question nor MAS's checklists and I'm going from input from B777 crews from other airlines. It might very well be necessary to turn the transponder to standby before putting in the new code.

The ACARS data is one of the pivotal pieces of data right now. If it's true that there were data packets of any kind being sent from MH370 beyond 0107 local time, then the entire game changes in terms of searching for wreckage.