Airliner missing between Malaysia and Cambodia/Vietnam, terrorism possible

[TheCurmudgeon]

A better question might be, why MAS? Ask it from both points of view.

1. Why would you transport something incredibly valuable on what is probably one of the sketchiest national carriers in the reasonably-developed world?

2. Why would you pick an MAS flight to China to hijack?

So that would lead one to believe that Cargo was not the target, so we are back to the plane.

As for number 2., I would have to assume that it is because they are such a sketchy company and they had the type of aircraft I wanted in the general locality I needed it to be.

You said something else that made me think. Could this have been perpetrated by ground crew who inserted a series of per-programed commands into the computer?

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.

In certain respects, if I wanted to accomplish this type of pre-programmed action, then the first thing you would want to do was to cut off the transmission of data from the plane that indicated something was amuse in the computer system. If the commands were already there, could they accomplish all of the actions necessary to disable the pilot/copilot and have the plane run a pre-established route on its own?