The stolen passport and shadowy pax theorists seem to forget that if a hijacker (or hijackers) just wanted to down an aircraft and go down with it, they wouldn't be bothering to indulge in stolen passport shenanigans. They'd use their own passports because they wouldn't care about being identified. A stolen passport is used to evade proper ID, and the aim is to live in a foreign destination where they can't be picked up easily.
The aircraft is reported to have suddenly dropped around 700' from cruise, then altered direction some serious amount, somewhere in the range of 180 deg - then it totally disappeared - and not a shred of wreckage has been found after approximately 48 hrs.
Vietnam has 17 aircraft and 35 ships in the search, there are 8 other nations involved, with around another 40 aircraft and about 45 ships.
I'm beginning to think this is a suicidal hijack - the hijacker/s overpowered the crew, grabbed the controls and aimed the aircraft straight down vertically. It speared in vertical and buried itself in the sea bed, leaving very little surface wreckage, and badly damaging the FDR and pinger.
The FDR is designed to withstand an impact equating to approximately 310mph, but a vertical high-speed dive into relatively shallow water would cause serious damage to it.
After the recent stabbing attack in China, it would appear Muslim Uighurs would have enough reason to destroy an aircraft containing a large number of ethnic Chinese - and they would be able to do this more easily from a largely Muslim, multi-ethnic country - where the authorities would not be on high alert for Uighur terrorism, as the Chinese currently are.
The Uighurs have been linked to Al-Qaeda by the Chinese, and the Uighur stabbing attack is not the first terrorism attack on Chinese by Uighurs.
Last edited by onetrack; 9th Mar 2014 at 14:58.
Reason: update ..