Thank goodness for FE Hoppy and his common sense: his posts are well reasoned amid a myriad of posts which do little to provide an explanation for the disappearance of MH370.
As a sometime Laker DC-10 pilot and later as a pilot for many years of Gulfstreams fitted with upmarket avionics I can claim some familiarity, albeit getting very dated, with the MH370 night transit scenario.
Having followed the huge number of pprune versions of events for MH370 we had some non pprune chat three days ago amongst fellow aviators & produced this analysis ...... nothing seems to have changed since then.
1 Aircraft now appears to have kept flying until fuel exhaustion – about 6-7 hrs.
2 On autopilot – or it would probably have crashed earlier.
3 All major comms and auto electronic readouts disabled: BUT it seems that auto R-R engines monitor satellite report pinging cannot be deselected manually.
4 One of the crew is the culprit? Aircraft depressurised and all except hijacker pass out & die due to lack of oxygen. Eventually he goes too through cold or running out of his own oxygen supply.
5 Hijacked, but did hijackers have enough technical knowledge to disable all major systems yet keep flying?
6 Aircraft in the sea somewhere.
7 USA knows far more than it has disclosed.
All above are our best guesses on current hugely varied info.