I dont think its nicely landed on a island and a Castaway re-enactment is occurring, but its not crazy to think that they attempted to pull something off, fucked up cause its a MASSIVE plane, and the plane is in a million pieces on an uninhabited island they havent looked at yet.
This is turning out to be an interesting mystery. If the most recent information is reliable, it points to at least one member of the flight crew doing something deliberate. The transponders were turned off separately, which rules out a power loss and cabin depressurization. If depressurization had happened, the aircraft would have continued to fly normally until it ran out of fuel, as happened in the Payne Stewart crash. The aircraft continued to ping satellites for a Boeing service to which it was not subscribed for about 5 hours after the transponders were shut down, which means the loss of the transponder signal doesn't coincide with a crash. It seems that a typical hijacker wouldn't have known that the transponders had to be disabled separately, and even if so, the flight crew could have faked one or the other. They also likely would have made some sort of distress call or left a mic open to transmit what was happening, so a hijacking is unlikely, especially considering the safeguards in place since 9/11. With all the info above, my guess at this point is a diversion to an alternate destination by one of the pilots for some reason. We've seen pilot suicides before and they have been much more dramatic. The flight crew seems to have been trying to hide the aircraft rather than destroy it, so it will be interesting to see whether they made it to somewhere or crashed in the Indian Ocean.
Maybe the members of the flight crew were evil henchmen who were ordered to steal the aircraft and hold everyone hostage... Spoiler
I don't understand what the big fuss is. It's obvious what happened. When was the last time you heard about a ship or plane disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle? Exactly. Global warming has caused the forcefield causing the BT to rotate around the earth to the Gulf of Thailand. Boom. You're welcome.
Now they're reporting the transponders were already turned off before the final signoff ("alright, goodnight"). So at this point, I think it's safe to say that they can rule out some catastrophic incident as being the reason at least for the transponders going off, if not the whole thing. Either the pilots, or someone else, wanted that plane somewhere else, and they didn't want anyone else to know where it was going.
Unless it failed electrically which is more than possible, basic components for electrical parts have a pretty standard failure rate, any of those boxes could fuck up. It's highly unlikely because of redundancies, but still not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. Assuming there was an incident like a shoot down or a crash that would just make the rate of failure go up. FDR's are generally near the tail of the plane; if it was a shootdown there's a decent probability a radar-guided missile would strike somewhere towards the tail / aft body. I sincerely doubt those things will take being hit by a missile if that's what happened, flight data recorders are strong, but people tend to overexaggerate, the FAA standard only requires them to be built to withstand an impact going like 270 knots (~310 MPH). I doubt it was a shoot down though, unless it got shot down over a very uninhabited area. There would be debris scattered for miles from a shoot down at altitude. Yeah, no way that plane would have entered into any countries mainland airspace without them knowing about it.
The longer this goes, the more I begin to suspect China was behind it, whether it was successful is another story.
News Flash: Plane still missing! Media still speculating harder than R. Kelly at a Wiggles concert! More at 5!
So now we know that the flight doubled-back and flew across Malaysia and was even picked up by Malaysian military radar. During a layover in Atlanta a few years ago, I had an interesting conversation with an Air Force member who was stationed at Tyndall AFB. Her basic description of what she did on night shift made it sound as if this would be impossible in U.S. airspace, i.e., every single commercial flight within U.S. airspace is constantly being monitored by the Air Force.
I've found the best info on The Guardian web site. The U.S. news media have been disappointing. Edit: Wikipedia also has a very good summary.
There is a Reddit thread that has been surprisingly good as well. Most interesting, and seemingly plausible, theory on that thread has been the plane purposely tracked closely behind another commercial 777 flight, thus obscuring its radar signature and allowing it to pass through Indian airspace "undetected". Given its transponder was off, the other plane and its pilot's wouldn't have known it was there. In that scenario, the plane was on the ground and landed before anyone in the greater global community knew it was missing. This story keeps getting more and more interesting, especially when you examine the potential players in the hijacking. And when you do, its even more obvious why China has been tight lipped about it. Unfortunately, even though it seems likely this plane didn't dive into the ocean like originally suspected, I wouldn't think that bodes any better for the passengers. A rebel militant group looking to make a statement isn't going to pleasantly hand over 250+ witnesses.
Every single flight in the US, commercial or otherwise, IS constantly being monitored and "controlled" by someone on the ground, but not necessarily the military, at least not directly. An ACC might report suspicious activity to a military installation that has a fighter alert program for an intercept, but within the US, as far as I know the military only really has full control of it's own control tower and TRACONs. They don't control or monitor whole zones of commercial flight traffic, other government agencies do that and contract the military when their assistance is needed. I could be talking out my ass, I'm not an air traffic controller but that's the way I understand it. <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_Control_Center" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_Control_Center</a> <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRACON#Approach_and_terminal_control" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRACON#App ... al_control</a>
<a class="postlink" href="https://twitter.com/jobarrow/status/445625608697954305" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">https://twitter.com/jobarrow/status/445625608697954305</a>
I don't think this is a typical hijack...a group would've taken responsibility for it by now. However, if stolen for use at a later date...that would explain why nobody's claimed responsibility. As far as non-nefarious reasons; I wonder if instead of a explosive decompression if instead they had a slow leak and experienced hypoxia before passing out entirely. That could explain reversing course, but I think there's too many other oddities and coincidences to make it likely. News reports said the the ACARS was disabled, but I do not know if it is a system the aircrew can turn off entirely. If not, it'll continue to send engine health and other miscellaneous maintenance data as long as the aircraft is running. The last broadcast from the ACARs is what the reported north/south segments the satellite ping are based on. The map with this article displays those segments and area the jet could've traveled to after the last ping: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight.html?_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world ... .html?_r=0</a> If curious, wiki link for ACARS: <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Communications_Addressing_and_Reporting_System" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_C ... ing_System</a> It's still relatively easy to disappear from radar even in today's modern world, even if you don't want to disappear. There are still large portions of the world with little or no coverage and that part of the world is one of them. the flight data recorders while tough are not impervious. They're supposed to transmit for 30 days, however it still took nearly two years to find the boxes from Air France Flt 447. And that was with floating debris serving as a starting point.
I like this theory. It's less sensational than some of the conspiracies being tossed around, but it's intelligent and makes sense. http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/