Quote Originally Posted by AmericanPride View Post
If we accept the deliberate diversion or take over of the aircraft, I think that in large part precludes the Indian Ocean theory unless we also accept a technical failure or navigation error in conjunction.

(1) If the plane was hi-jacked for future use or extortion, where in the Indian Ocean is a viable landing area?
(2) If the plane was hi-jacked and deliberately crashed, why not immediately instead of ~7 hours later?
(3) Possibly there was a failed hi-jacking attempt, trapping one or both of the crew in the cockpit? But why not return to an airport and why the maneuvers to the Indian Ocean?

Also, as everyone mentioned, the Indian Ocean is big. Really big. If you wanted to make a plane or its passengers or its cargo disappear, crash it into the Indian Ocean. That's just speculation - assassination or sabotage. Since every theory is on the table, it's also possible that the passenger and cargo manifests were forged. Either with fake listings, or missing listings, or added listings. Why was the US quick (day 2 or 3?) to suggest the plane was hi-jacked for a future operation? Was a similar early assessment released after Air France disappeared?

I agree with the statement that the governments are either lying or staying closed-mouthed for the time being. That's partly because there are 10+ countries involved so there's a lot of moving pieces. But that doesn't have much explanatory power for the apparent disorganization of the Malaysian government, the almost-obstructionist involvement of China in the early phase of the search (why the rush to failure?) and America's tight noose around specific information. I think CNN or New York Times cited a "classified analysis" of the plane's potential location a few days ago, which means we're only getting part of the story.

Clandestinely downing a plane has precedence. So does accidentally or deliberately shooting down an aircraft and then later denying it. Why move valuable cargo by plane instead of boat, which is more secure? Perhaps the movers had no access to a boat. Maybe a group involved in proliferation or the movement of some other dangerous cargo. Or perhaps a small quantity on a person or persons or their luggage which would making sea transit impractical? Motive here would focus on Beijing, which is relatively quiet now.

I think technical failure including a fire and rapid or explosive decompression is also a viable theory, but that would be hard to square with the claims of "maneuvers" by the aircraft which suggest control of the plane, but we don't know the details of those maneuvers as far as I know.
You make some excellent points. Your third question, about having a pilot trapped in the cockpit doesn't compute, because he alone would have access to the radio circuit breakers. Simpler to suggest that the hijackers killed the pilots early on, had no idea how to use the FMS properly, cracked the sh!ts after a few turns despite killing the pilots, managed to work out how to turn the FMS autopilot off, dialled a heading into the autopilot and hit HDG mode assuming they'd hit landfall again soon.

Something important in relation to the technical failure part of your post: The appearance of human control does not always equal actual, real time human control, at least not in the way that you might normally think about it. Human control could also mean that the aircraft is following the plan in the FMS. That FMS is normally programmed as part of the pre-flight process, but it can be changed on the fly. AFAIK an ACARS message is generated when the plan in the FMS is changed, but it might also do so every time it passes a waypoint too. The important part is that you don't need a person sitting in the cockpit to have a flight appear to be human-controlled.

It would be oh-so-easy to find yourself in an emergency situation where you need to get out of the airway *now* whilst you deal with a critical event, to hit the MCP alt setting, hit a few waypoints in the FMS that aren't that important except to buy you time to deal with the actual problem (including target alt data which you might just bang in numbers that sound about right), and then finally get around to actually addressing the real issue. Only now, hypoxia has overcome you, you haven't selected a low enough alt on the MCP to bring you out of it, and because you didn't detect the hypoxia when it actually started setting in, half of the stuff you've actually punched into the FMS is increasingly error-prone and longterm unhelpful.