This morning's conspiracy theories...

From The Times of India:

Was Malaysia Airlines' Flight 370 hijacked with the chillingly murderous intent of crashing it into a high-value building in an Indian city in a re-run of al-Qaida's 9/11 attack on the US?
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/w...w/32106334.cms

From the Daily Mail:
Doomed airliner pilot was political fanatic: Hours before taking control of flight MH370 he attended trial of jailed opposition leader
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz2w8TI7BVf

The latter might seem more credible if it didn't come from a notoriously unreliable source.

From Biggus:

I was puzzled as to why the remainder of the 40 degree circle was disregarded. I thought there might be an attempt to misdirect our attention away from Africa for whatever reason, but the explanation is much simpler. Here's the apparent answer:

The Malaysian map shows that the SAR team had concluded that the last ping came from somewhere on this 40 degree circle but they ruled out parts of the circle in the far East and also most of the west half of the circle.

A examination of the coverage of the INMARSATs explains this. The last ping must have been picked up by IOR over the Indian Ocean but not by POR over the Pacific or AOR-E over the Atlantic. Hence bits of the red circle are not valid and we end up with the two arcs, also described by the PM as coridoors.
Effectively, had MH370 been at any other point on that circle, it would have been picked up by at least one other satellite.
I was under the impression that the arcs were defined by the distance between the satellite and the aircraft, which was the only information they were able to deduce from the pings. The arcs drawn suggest that the distance remained fairly consistent through the period. Knowing the presumed route, the duration of the flight, and approximate speed might get them somewhere. I haven't seen anyone comparing the duration of the flight (as determined by the pigs, apparently 7 hrs) with the range of the aircraft with the fuel it had loaded. If the two are similar it might suggest that the aircraft flew until it ran out of fuel, a scenario consistent with the "disabled crew" scenarios discussed earlier. The southern arc, with the jet flying off into an empty expanse of ocean, might also be consistent with a disabled crew, possibly after a struggle. Flying a jet off to empty ocean with no possible place to land or attack would to me suggest either a disabled crew or a hijacker is a very disturbed frame of mind, but WTFDIK?

Here's an even weirder one: do the engines ping any time they are running, or only when the plane is airborne? If they sent regular pings for 7 hrs, and the pings remained at a relatively consistent distance from the satellite... could the plane have been on the ground for much or part of that time? It seems most peculiar that for 7 hrs the jet would follow an arc that kept it at a consistent distance from the satellite, but everything about this is most peculiar.

It will be interesting to see what more informed speculations emerge. I assume that the specialist aviation writers are running the new info past their networks and we'll see some analysis emerging by and by.

If it did go down at sea, it will take luck to find it... big piece of ocean, and the wreckage has had a week to disperse and sink.