1. Hijacking gone wrong and the plane is in the ocean.
2. Pilot suicide and the plane is in the ocean.
3. Hijacking gone right and the plane is parked somewhere and all the passengers are dead and/or being held captive (least likely option).
That's it. Nothing else could have happened.
Like Helios 522
It only needs one person to do this, out of hundreds aboard, to give us a clue what happened. Nothing has been reported. If anyone had received a message, we should have heard about it.
Yes, that's true, but it is not so useful, because it would not add much information to what we already know. A message from a passenger would give some clues about what happened.
>Nothing in your argument makes (say) hijacking more likely than mechanical issues.
In the absence of more evidence, I prefer the simplest theory.
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The simplest possible hijacking theory relies on one event:
1. A rogue pilot, acting alone, incapacitates the other pilot, disables the transponder, and incapacitates the passengers and crew by depressurizing the plane.
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The malfunction theory relies on an event that has all the following complex series of effects:
1 disables all communications ability suddenly
2 deactivates the transponder, and then disables a data transmitter system a few minutes later, after the plane has begun to turn
3 incapacitates most of the passengers and pilots swiftly, but without incapacitating everyone aboard
4 somehow prevents the person(s) in control of the plane from using a mobile phone when they are over land
Both theories suffer from the issue that a passenger or crew could have attempted to send a text message before they were incapacitated, which would have been transmitted when the plane passed over land, but apparently nobody did this. Passengers only have a few minutes of emergency oxygen, but crew have more, I think.
It might add plenty of information. It tells us the plane did not pass near a cell phone tower at all which at minimum rules out all the "plane landed safely at x/y/z" theories. Even if it passes over land, many of those are weaker signals and not going to pick up at all so we can rule out any argument based on whether people tried to send text messages or not.
> The simplest possible hijacking theory relies on one event:
Wait so in one case you count 4 things as "one event" and in the other case you count 4 things as a "complex series of effects"?
I honestly don't see the difference: sure one pilot could have done everything. There are also single things that can happen to a plane that could generate all those effects. I don't claim that is more likely than a hijacking or suicidal pilot but it seems about as reasonable as either.
I do think the hijacking and pilot suicide angles have serious issues with the facts that people tend to hand wave away.
One thing that sort of caught my attention, if you presume that they wanted to capture a plane rather than hold it hostage, is that it's a long-range variant, with a range of 7,725 nautical miles, enough to cross the Pacific and have a couple thousand miles of range left over.
Major crippling event and attempted recovery seems to also be more plausible than #2.
EDIT: Never mind, insurance explanation for #2 makes sense.
Question #2: Given the answer to #1, where could people like that land a plane?
Question #3: Isn't Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region about the same distance from the point of disappearance as Beijing, the flight's original destination?
Question #4: If the pilot wanted to avoid detection, what better flight path than north through the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh, the Tibetan plateau and the Himalayas at night?
Question #5: With the rampant speculation about this incident, and every kind of wild idea, why haven't we heard this wild idea anywhere?
"We have many radar systems operating in this area, but nothing was
picked up," Rear Admiral Sudhir Pillai, chief of staff of India's
Andamans and Nicobar Command, told Reuters. "It's possible that the
military radars were switched off as we operate on an 'as required' basis."
Separately, a defense source said that India did not keep its radar
facilities operational at all times because of cost. Asked what
the reason was, the source said: "Too expensive."
And why didn't the hijackers contact the authorities by now?
We also don't have to assume a successful landing, just an intent of one, e.g. the plane could have crashed before then or the landing could have been ugly.
That doesn't mean it's impossible for a hijacking to be done quietly, with no demands, but it's further complicated by the fact that the aircraft has to land somewhere. It's also somewhat difficult to hide a plane as large as a 777, much less find an airport to land it where it'll go unnoticed. This increases the likelihood that if it were a hijacking, it was probably similar to PSA flight 1771 [1] and more inline with a murder/suicide than a ransom.
Although, imagine the possibilities terrorists could use a 777 for. Load it with explosives, biological weapons, radioactive materials... It's enough to make a politician want to ban flying altogether. Let's hope they don't find my comment.
Regardless, I'm not especially comfortable wagering a bet on the cause of MA370's disappearance. My initial instinct was to presume foulplay or an in-flight fire. Now I'm not so sure.
If the aircraft isn't found, I suspect this might become the mystery of the century.
2. Pilot suicide and the plane is in the ocean.*
I am not informed in any way on this one - but what has been documented around propensity of pilot mass murder?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990
Wikipedia has a relevant category:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_accidents_an...
That category includes hijacked or stolen planes that were thought to have been deliberately crashed, not only suicide attempts by the official pilot of a scheduled flight. There are also seemingly cases there of suicide by passengers not involving a full-fledged hijacking but involving a crash.
EDIT: I tried to go through all of the Wikipedia articles in this category and subcategorize them according to perpetrator and circumstance.
* Passenger suicide resulting in crash (1)
* Passenger attack against pilots resulting in crash (6, including all Sept. 11 attacks)
* Suicide attempt by pilot resulting in deaths of others aboard (1)
* Suicide by pilot resulting in deaths of others aboard (2)
* Disputed suicide by pilot resulting in deaths of others aboard (2)
* Suicide by pilot not during scheduled flight, with no passengers aboard (2)
The latter cases both involved disgruntled pilots who wanted to get back at their employers. Unfortunately, in one of the two cases the pilot also succeeded in murdering, not passengers, but coworkers on the ground. (One of the fatal passenger-attacks-pilot cases also involved a disgruntled airline employee who was not a pilot.)
I imagine there might be other cases of general aviation pilots deliberately crashing their planes to commit suicide without intending to injure anyone else. Many of those cases may never have been identified as suicides by crash investigators.
... yeah, apparently there were 16 identified general aviation suicides (typically killing only the pilot) in the U.S. between 1993 and 2002 and 8 between 2003 and 2012.
http://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamt...
http://avstop.com/March_2014/aircraft_assisted_pilot_suicide...