Agreed, I would expect the base(s) in the region to be on some escalated level of alert as soon as the plane went missing in "9-11" style transponders off. Like a disturbed wasps nest some interceptors would be up and anchored navy ships put to sea. Based on past events if it showed up on defense radar they would have at least 2 interceptors.
Without doubt this appears to be a hijack given the prevailing data points. The alleged route appears to be have been very well planned.
I totally understand any intentional obfuscation by the Malaysian authorities. It is not in the best interest of authorities to immediately share all information with the public during an ongoing hijack/terrorist incident. It would potentially give too much feedback to perpetrators and enable them to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

#4191 map can be derived as follows.

You may infer from the strength of the last ping, how far away the plane was during the last ping. The "center" of the arc is eliminated, because this area is covered by some form of radar or other satellite, which did not see the aircraft. Based on the timing of the ping and the maximum speed of the aircraft, it would not be possible for the aircraft to make it to the left side of the circle.

Alright this post spells it out perfectly:

http://www.pprune.org/8379267-post4191.html

The arc is in fact from the last ping.

That being the case there must be other arcs from the other earlier pings we are not being shown. If the plane was just a bit farther north (or south really) when they lost contact these other arc might be such that one of the N/S duplicates would be impossible. They must have pings from when they actually knew where the plane was. It is an unfortunate coincidence that the plane was so close in the N/S direction to the satellite when they lost track of it...

Sorry, but it wont be easier to simply "hijack" the truck or trucks with that supposed Money or Gold when driving towards Kuala Int Airport?
Ok, supposing an abandoned cold war era field along Kirgyz/China border was used....it was night period...no fullmoon light at all, poor Navaids or even some ATC, lots of High Terrain in prox, after landed some sort of heavy handling material with some (lets say) dozens of persons for staff that operation was requested, and another miriad of other questions too???
What doing with the PAX after that?
At least some runway working illumination, me thinks...after that where to hide it? Even nowadays sitting normally on our rooms we still surf the earth with Google Maps and Earth,,,its not impossible, but would say, too much Hollywood for almost failing 99%.
And too many people involved without one of them simply breaking the silence pact!???

should westerly read southerly?

Interesting New snippets
 

Thought I would post a couple of interesting new pieces from the Telegraph.
Sorry if you've already read them:

This link talks about recent terror info regarding Malaysia and a shoe bomb, well worth a read...

Malaysia Airline MH370: 9/11-style terror allegations resurface in case of lost plane - Telegraph


.... at the end of this link:

MH370: profile of missing Malaysian Airline plane's pilots starts to emerge - Telegraph


It says:

American officials suggested on Saturday that three different pieces of signalling equipment had been disabled and that one of them was located outside the cockpit. The implication is that at least two people had collaborated to change the course of flight MH370 and make it and its crew and passengers disappear.
If the captain and co-pilot had been involved they will have given a new meaning to the term 'clean skins'.

Not necessarily. The distance from the satellite shown may be inferred from a single ping, based on the strength of the signal. This places it on the arc.

The center portion of the arc is removed by local radar or other source.

The left portion of the arc is ruled out because the plane at max speed couldn't possibly get from its last radar location to that far away.

Therefore, the red arc was its set of potential locations during the last ping. It should be noted that the path the aircraft took need not follow that arc the whole time. Only it means that the aircraft intersected the red portion at the time of that ping.

MTOW/MZFW and actual lift potential.
 

Since a new 777-200LR is about $300 million, it's a lot cheaper to steal one for purposes of a terror attack than to go and buy one.

Depending on how much fuel you have to load to reach your target, these things have an enormous lift capacity. On 9/11, it was not the impact of the aircraft, but rather the tens of thousands of gallons of fuel that did the most damage.

If you remove all the freight and reload with with explosives and just enough fuel to reach your destination, it occurs to me that you would have one heck of a flying bomb.

With careful maintenance, aircraft can be flown repeatedly at the maximum payload limits. But what if you didn't care about being able to fly the aircraft tomorrow?

If you could find a long enough strip with a headwind and no nearby obstructions, other factors being equal, how much could a plane like this lift off and eventually climb with?

I would never have asked this question immediately after the disappearance, but given what we know now, it doesn't seem so crazy.

Everyone is hungry for information but the amount of speculation about this is unbelievable!! It says something about human nature!!!! Listening to the likes of Sky News, BBC and every crappy paper under the sun beggars belief!! After over 200 pages, this forum sounds like the worst of them!

The indicated track indicated by the Malaysian authorities puzzle me. If this information is well correct of course.
At 1721UTC/07 - 0121/08 Malaysian time - MAS370 is at, or by IGARI, and on a 25° heading. A right turn is then initiated towards BITOD, about 37NM away. Mag heading from IGARI to BITOD is 59°. Last recorded heading is 40°. Because the FR24 history playback is accelerated at a x12 speed, I believe that MAS370 was established on course to BITOD, because the recorded position is not precise enough. From there the military PSR is the only source of information, seemingly. We learn that, afterwards, the aircraft performed a right or left turn towards VAMPI. IGARI-VAMPI direct route is a 263° heading for about a 45 minutes flight time (361 NM-470 kts). At VAMPI, MAS370 initates a 125° right turn to the heading 28°and less than 7 minutes after, a 80°left turn to IGREX 268 NM away. I do believe this. But...
Professionnals pilots in command IMHO, not possible. Something else happened. My opinion is that someone tried to enter a routeing inside the FMS and could not because not familiar with the how to and/or having the wrong WPT entered. It would explain such erratics and incredible heading changes. Or the crew was under threat and tried to gain time...
I had thought that someone was trying to enter GIVAG instead of GIVAL to go back to KUL but for what reason, and why VAMPI then.
This flight was only less than 45 minutes on its way when the squawk was switched off. I do not know what sort of services MAS provides to its passengers on this route, but I believe that it was the dinner time or the aperitif just before. Learning what already happened with the F/O on a previous flight, may be that some nice looking person(s)ask to have a little visit to the flight deck and it was accepted... Or someone irrupted in the cockpit while one of the crew member was going in/out.

Roger that? Acknowledging a frequency change this way seems strange to me.

Correct, and it is the most important ping.
At that time they were close to fuel exhaustion so whatever remained of this aircraft must be close to the location of this ping.

You might want to look up trilateration. Indeed in 3-space, with 3 origins, if the origins of the spheres lie in a straight line with one another then you are not able to narrow your search down to two possible positions, which in the case with space-based geolocation is really only one since the other will be in space.

Trilateration is not what they were doing with these SATCOM pings. Knowing the difference between tx/rx time and the height of the satellite above ground at that exact point in time, it is possible to calculate a rough angle down to the surface of the earth. This creates a circle. By rejecting points on this circle that lie outside of the a/c's possible range, in combination with PSR data collected, allow you to narrow down the position to a point on an arc.

This will be *approximate* since millisecond differences can result in hundreds of kilometres of error when the receiver is in geostationary orbit.

Insulting the other poster by suggesting he take an elementary school math class is rude and asinine. None of this is grade school mathematics. This is advanced stuff (although perhaps not advanced in theory). I should know, I studied Mathematics.

To add; why would the red lines on the arc at 40 degrees EXCLUDE the area between Vietnam-Indonesia, where the last verified contact with MH370 was made? Primary radar plots from that point on were of an "unidentified object".
The red lines an the north/south extremities of the 40 degree arc are based on maximum range and fuel loadings, but is it possible that the plane ditched in the sea at approx LKP, intact enough for SATCOM to keep pinging?
Not suggesting this is likely, however interested to know why that part of the 40 degree arc has been excluded.

I am sure that the thing that puzzles many of us is the idea that one could arrange a suicide and not do it fairly quickly after the point of no return.

Would you really stand on a parapet and think "I will jump off in 7 hours time and in the meanwhile I will sit on this ledge so no-one can see me."?

This type of behaviour must be well outside of that expected by a person committed to suicide.

Accurate Google Earth KMZ file of Inmarsat arc
 

Since that diagram showing Inmarsat's ping arc is a bit low-res, I made an accurate version for Google Earth:

http://www.ogleearth.com/mh370.kmz

Article with context and method:

Flight MH370 ? search data in Google Earth | Ogle Earth

Geometric problem resulting from Inmarsat pings has North-South symmetry. Any pattern of pings consistent with northern route, has equivalent, North-South, mirror image. North-South symmetry of the pattern would only be perturbed by asymmetry in jet streams. For the moment both hypotheses need to be considered

Could it be that the Malaysian authorities know exactly where the aircraft is, which is why they're unwilling to give full information, as it's actually a hostage situation? There is theories all over so thought I may stick my ore in.

People committing suicide are not exactly in their most lucid frame of mind, why would you then exclude certain behaviours? I am sure if you dug into hundreds of jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge you would find amazing examples of inconsistencies. I see nothing hard to grasp when a suicidal pilot wants to do a final mischief and decides to bury himself in real deep waters. specially if it was within his reach.

I refer you to my post #4095 and Jonathan3141's post #4108. Suicide is a complex issue, and a long delay is not unusual.

<The sad thing is we would of knew 99.9% of this information 2/3 days ago if the Malaysians were being transparent and honest.>

Authorities DID know, they just didn't release info to the public. As far as the press conferences, Malaysia in over their heads especially when it came it international media scrutiny. Doesn't make them bad, just inexperienced in high profile matters.

<Could a plane really land without being noticed? >

Absolutely, especially if it was expected by certain parties.