The 727 that Vanished
airspacemag.com
airspacemag.com
The mention of "maneuvering erratically" and taking off without headlights seems to further advance the simplest explanation... but everyone loves a good conspiracy theory.
I would think there would be an oil slick, and some floating debris. There's a lot of stuff in an airplane that floats. Surely these things would be spotted by air or satellite.
Now imagine the same thing without a good idea of where it went down. The ocean is a pretty big place. Maybe some debris will wash up on a shore somewhere, but that might very well be half the world away from the crash site.
Think about a comparable problem, finding shipwrecks on the ocean floor. The ocean floor is vast, the shipwreck is tiny, modern techniques rely on looking for the debris trail to focus the search for the shipwreck itself. But in these cases the advantage of the shipwreck remaining in one place and relatively unmodified are completely lost for debris on the surface, and there is far less of it. The oceans are big, the floating bits of a 727 are small.
As an aside, it's fascinating that the economics of diamond mining are such that you fly fuel to the mines.
They tend to be in the middle of the desert or other rough terrain, and the distances are enormous. In many cases there aren't any public roads they can (reliably) use for heavy freight, and maintaining their own would be costly. Staff are flown in anyway, so they already maintain regularly used airfields. (my dad used to be an engineer working at various African diamond mines, and my first cousin once removed still consults for them after retiring)
Desert doesn't suddenly become hard enough to support a tractor-trailer, but water does.
You might be interested to know that in WW2 American B29s operated from Chinese bases where they were supplied by flying supplies (including fuel) over the Himalayas from India. I think it was something like seven supply flights for each combat mission.
L O S T
(sorry, couldn't resist)