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Comment by houseofshards | Hacker News Reader

my guess is that if it was hijacked by terrorists, the act is yet to come. They are after the plane, not the people.

This theory keeps coming up, but it doesn't make much sense.

If your goal is to acquire a working Boeing 777, on a secret airfield somewhere in Western China or Eastern Kazakhstan (see this map for orientation: http://www.airliners.net/uf/109874/phpnIOEWi.jpeg), then you don't have to be particularly smart or rational to realize that hijacking a commercial flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 240 people on board, and then attempting to stealthily cross both India and Pakistan, as proposed in the OP, is not your best option.

This leads me to wonder if maybe the cargo was the target. We already heard that the manifest has not been released and that they left 50 seats empty to compensate for the weight.

They just said the cargo was 3-4 tons of mangosteen:

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/no-hazar...

Anything is possible, but my guess is that if they were hijacked, they had a plan that went wrong. It's far more likely, and it's happened before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_961

This seems the most likely in my opinion. I wonder if the fate of Flight 961 would have been known if the captain hadn't deliberately mislead the hijackers about the direction they were flying in and landed close to a beach?

Add to that list:

- A depressurization event, either as a result of an accident or a botched hijacking (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522)

- Pilot suicide, with a somewhat unexpected signature (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990)

Pretty much anything is possible, indeed. However, I'd recommend this post on airliners.net for a comprehensive sanity check: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

Thanks! That's a good summary post.

What i don't get: The aforementioned link to the Ethiopian water landing says: "The incident is the only true water landing of a widebody airliner with survivors."

But: Wikipedia on water landing (ditching) shows a high survival rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditching#Passenger_airplane_wat...

I'm confused.

Most of those are not "widebody airliner". The smaller the plane, the better the chances.

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