Originally Posted by
birdspeed
The Ancient Greek....true, there are not many facts, but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence.
1/ crew & passengers have all had their backgrounds checked, nothing suspicious found.
2/ there was a sudden event that disabled communication systems and possibly autopilot.
3/ one hour later satcom powers up.
4/ the aircraft continues to fuel exhaustion. When ever this happens it is usually due to decompression and crew incapacitation. Four past incidents I can think of. So,
5/ crew incapacitation.
This hamster-wheel was done to death last time:
2, There was no 'sudden event' the radiating aids were switched off
in the seconds after handoff from Malaysia in a
known area of poor radar cover, and the aircraft did not call Vietnam control.
3. The only comms system that was not switched off was SATCOM which maintained transport layer handshakes with the INMARSAT geostationary satellite. This is probably because very few if any crew members are either aware that SATCOM handshakes with the satellite even when not used and even if they were aware probably have no idea how to switch the SATCOM off. I would suspect that no non-engineers realize that these comms systems keep exchanging network messages even if untouched.
4. The aircraft did not just continue to fuel exhaustion. After all the radiating aids were switched off,
immediately after handoff, it climbed to its ceiling and then turned back to
fly along the Malaysian/Thai FIR boundary - across to
Penang (the captain's birthplace) where it appears to have descended, then
turned right North along the Malacca straits and
turned to left to parallel the airway toward Sri Lanka then after passing Banda Aceh and clearing Sumatra and
just after leaving radar cover, the aircraft turned South and flew into the Southern Indian Ocean.
What a chain of coincidences for a disabled aircraft
5. Someone in the crew was not incapacitated or 4, above would not be possible. Or of course someone else with the capability to operate a 777, but there were none on the passenger list.
As the report says - someone was flying the aircraft deliberately in a way to avoid suspicion and then to escape to somewhere it would not be found. Had it not been for the SATCOM and the rather strange figure of 8 orbit of the particular not-quite-geostationary satellite, and some very talented INMARSAT mathematicians the suspicion would have been that the aircraft ditched in the South China Sea. As it is, the aircraft was tracked to an area the size of Texas in the mainly unexplored South Indian Ocean. An area that
_purely coincidentally_ the Captain had been practicing flying to in his home flight simulator kit. The position of the crash and the fact that there was a crash was confirmed by what wreckage has washed up months later on the coasts to the West of the crash site.