so they heard the news firsthand, rather than via the TV I presume.

Kind of what I said but better

the news via text message to families wasnt the only way they found out, the malaysian government said this was one of many ways of the news being communicated to them.

no one knows what happened but im thinking there has been some kind of massive malfunction and when turning round the plane they have lost conscious and just carried on till running out of fuel.

or the pilots have committed suicide/hijacked.

they will only have 2 weeks now if that to get to the black box before it loses battery and lost forever.

Or 2 years and less easy to find, like the Air France one

[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26721975[/url

the malaysian black box will stop sending 'pings' out after 30 days..

they found the air france one two years later, but knew the location of where the plane crashed and had debris

Well if/when they find this one they'll have time to do that. The Air France one pinged for even less time apparently yet it was still found

Pingu the penguin is already on the case.

Psst. Nobody is laughing.

we shall see, or maybe not

Well quite

How come days after when relatives rang phones they would ring, and then as soon as the authorities were notified, they suddenly stopped?

And also some were logged into social networking sites, then as soon as the authorities were notified, they magically went offline?

The official explanations for the above seemed really weak.

Did that really happen? How long after was this? Was it possibly the same day it went missing and they stopped because it crashed or flew up out of signal range?

What would the other explanation be in this? What are the conspiracy theories saying?

What would be remarkable would be if not one of a jumbo-load of passengers with a working mobile and/or on text, Facebook, Twitter etc mentioned a word about anything amiss on the plane.

Why would a mobile phone network provider put a series of masts in the middle of the Indian Ocean on the off chance that a scheduled airline might stray off course and the passengers need a signal ?

still nothing found, surely must be getting very close now with all the satellite images that have come in recently, 200 objects seen floating... got to be a the plane!

They have had bad luck with weather, but they are making hard work of picking up a solitary piece of wreckage that will confirm it's from the plane.
I have visions of one of the ships and the possible wreckage being in the same satellite shot and them still not finding it.
They have its coordinates, they have wind /drift figures to make allowances ... I know it's easy from my armchair.

Things can sometimes seem over-simplified when you just follow the news stations for, erm, the news.

Just this very evening at 5.30pm my phone flashed up a breaking news item from BBC News to say that an aircraft had crashed into the sea in the Canary Islands area which got my attention because my youngest is in Lanzerote at the moment, searched for the online BBC News but nothing, not on Sky News online either.

One minute later BBC News sent out another "breaking news" bulletin - it wasn't a crashed aircraft at all, it was a boat that someone had mistaken for an aircraft fuselage.

Panic over, red faces at the BBC, maybe too quick to try and beat the other news networks to a story that never really existed ?

Courtesy of friends living on Tenerife, whose friend took the pics, I believe on Gran Canaria.

They reported it live on Sky News. Cribbed directly from Reuters, reports from the Canary Islands that a passenger plane had crashed in to the sea. No idea of how many passengers were on board. 5 minutes later they come back and say that someone had mistaken a boat for a crashed plane. An easy mistake to make, obviously.

If the pic above is genuine, quite possibly

It is ridiculous that an emergency service would actually tweet that a plane had crashed into the sea before even having a look. The merest glance through a half decent pair of binos would have told them it was not a plane and anyway, as it doesn't look as if it would travel at great speed - how come they never saw it until it got to that point? Where did they think it had come from? Didn't the fact that the alleged "coastguard" hadn't actually seen any plane in trouble, heading for the sea, register?

Sorry, but it is only "possibly" of your typical over-excited holidaymaker after a couple of sherbets, the sort of person that sees alien spaceships. It is unacceptable for a coastguard service.

Soon after the first route deviation, the plane climbed to 45,000ft. To de-pressurize the cabin at that height would hasten death by hypoxia. Dead people don't tend to be too good at texting or social networking.

The plane then looks to have taken a route that deliberately seems to avoid radar-heavy locations. Why?

The plane is believed to have descended to an altitude well below normal cruising height. Why?

I still say the most credible theory I've heard is that someone on the plane (IMO most likely one or both of the pilots) climbed to 45,000ft, depressurised the cabin to kill passengers & flight attendants, then descended and re-pressurised.

Motive? Theft.

Despite requests, the authorities have resolutely refused to release details of the cargo manifest. Note that Kuala Lumpur is home to one of the world's largest diamond bourses. The plane's destination, Beijing, is one of the world's greatest purchaser of diamonds.

Was there a huge shipment of diamonds aboard the plane? Perhaps $500m+?

Could the plane have landed at a remote airstrip, deposited the valuable cargo, then taken back off? There's an airstrip at Banda Aceh. It's remote, barely used, and shielded from mainstream radar by a range of 10,000ft high mountains.

Or, could the diamonds have been dropped out from the hold? I don't know enough about planes to know the answer, but could, like we've seen countless times in films, some form of cargo bay door be opened mid-flight? With a homing device attached, if the cargo was small enough (like a large consignment of diamonds), could it have been parachuted from the plane near co-ordinates pre-agreed with the other members of the heist team waiting in the Andaman Sea (for instance) in a boat?

The pilot then programmes the auto pilot to head southwards at a low altitude and speed, then bails out with a parachute. It's theoretically possible. There's an escape hatch behind the wings, and the tail fin stabilisers are high on a 777. Go slow enough - around 200mph (the 777 is capable of this) - and it's not impossible. Or perhaps the pilot carried the consignment of diamonds.

Why programme it to head south, though? Because the Southern Indian Ocean is widely regarded as amongst the most difficult regions to search for a downed plane, and what better place to hopefully hide/destroy evidence? Not unreasonable to assume that those involved in the heist didn't know Inmarsat would be able to extrapolate from the information the likely route.

Not saying it's right - but it certainly provides hypothetical answers to all of the little mysteries surrounding the actions of the pilot(s).

Ignoring your inappropriate sarcasm, at that point, the plane was within easy reach of populated land masses, so perhaps you could explain why, as the plane headed for space and the oxygen masks deployed, not a single one of these hundreds of passengers made a call, or sent a message? Hypoxia would kill them, sure, but not for at the very least 15 or 20 minutes. I agree that the most likely reason for taking the plane to 45000 ft would be to kill the passengers (on the basis that i cannot think of any other sensible reason for the plane to ascend) but it would not prevent any who had working comms from communicating.


I wouldn't agree. I can see no obvious explanation for the route (so far as it is known) other thhan at some point the autopilot was set for Antarctica and then the plane was just left to its own devices till it ran out of fuel. But that doesn't make much sense.


Well, "avoiding radar" wouldn't be anywhere near the top of my list. A plane that wanted to "avoid radar" would I presume want to avoid that radar for some reason. I cannot think of a single plausible reason why a pilot bent on suicide having killed all his passengers would have the slightest interest in avoiding radar. I am open of course to suggestions.

The most credible reason to me, by a long chalk, for a passenger jet descending to around 10,000 feet is because that happens to be around the altitude where you can survive without pressurisation. If I was wanting to "hide from radar" then why wouldn't I set the autopilot to (say) 500ft? I mean, the ocean is pretty flat?


The actions are explained, but the route and the result to me rules out the theory.



If I wanted to transport half a billion of diamonds i think I could afford my own plane.


No, from what we have been told, there isn't any chance at all that that plane landed anywhere. Anyway, how much would the gang pay a qualified 747 pilot to take off and kill himself?



No doubt it could. Why then not just either continue to your destination, or land at the nearest airport with a story about a hold door malfunction?


Leaving aside the inherent improbability, WHY? If there is a way to drop the diamonds - just DROP THE FECKIN DIAMONDS! If as you say there is "an escape hatch" - why not just throw the diamonds out of it??


I think the theories have more holes than a warehouse full of sieves, I'm afraid, but what evidence would you seek to hide? All you did was drop the diamonds. That involved no-one and nothing on the plane. There is no evidence. Let the plane crash from 35000 ft and there will be no evidence of the loss of the diamonds, ever. You don't need to find a quiet patch of remote ocean.

Why would such a heist not simply involve landing at Banda Aceh (or wherever), getting off the plane with the diamonds and taking a small plane somewhere else? Why would you need any of the other cloak and daggers? No, Occam rejects your theory, I'm afraid.

I agree the hijack/theft theory is plausible, but you're suddenly in the realm of conspiracy and more unanswered questions.

Banda Aceh saw nearly 18,000 aircraft movements in 2012, hardly barely used although like many airports it seems to close overnight. And even if they land in the middle of the night, you need cooperation from any number of airport staff, not to mention any local residents and airport workers who might wonder why the runway lights are on and a massive airliner is landing and then departing within minutes, all out of hours. And how would these people access the airport and runway given it's a secure area presumably with security personnel. And you simply could not land at night in a mountainous area without transponders, beacons, etc to provide your glide slope. Furthermore, the area around the airport is widely although not densely populated, and it's only 6km from the main town.

I suppose theoretically a gang could have shipped a parachute and beacon to be in the same cargo hold as the diamonds, but how they would ensure that they were definitely on the same flight is beyond me. It's unlikely a pilot could simply have carried them on.

I don't think (though I stand to be corrected) you can normally open any hatches at altitude due to the internal pressure of the aircraft being what, in part, seals the hatch in place. However - if the aircraft has been decompressed I assume this may be possible, although what the pilot is breathing, I don't know as standard oxygen supplies would have run out. If they had decompressed the aircraft at 45,000 the oxygen masks would have dropped automatically allowing the passengers to survive for about 10 minutes, unless they're relying on no-one else having time to empty their oxygen bottles (crew oxygen would be most accessible). It seems MH370 remained at that altitude for 23 minutes. But then why 45,000 feet? The same thing would happen at 35,000 or lower, although perhaps marginally more slowly.

Another reason for an ascent like that is to extinguish fire at (just above) the aircraft's ceiling where oxygen is thinner, and then perhaps to enter a steep dive, even a stall - I believe there is a precedent for extinguishing fire in this manner but no idea which incident it was.

As for flying low, this would be typical of an aircraft that has suffered decompression or some other event. The first thing you do is achieve a lower altitude to allow people to breath.

There is also the fact another B777 pilot ahead of MH370 contacted them briefly at the request of Vietnamese ATC around 11 minutes after the last voice message and heard mumbles and static in reply. Why would a hijacker respond at all at a time when they are carrying out a complex and critical sequence of actions? Some are pointing to this as a strong indication something catastrophic was happening on board.

The short answer is we just don't know, and the way things are looking, we may never know. Yes, it could be someone managed to kill everyone, programme the autopilot to fly a strange pattern into some of the remotest of seas, retrieved some booty from the cargo hold, and either attached a beacon and dumped it or jumped with it in his possession using a parachute he had somehow smuggled on board. It's possible, but then many other explanations are possible.

Sarah Palins version sounds the most plausible, it flew straight into heaven