It has puzzled me throughout his thread that there has been little focus on the Vietnam aspect. After all it now seems likely that it is Vietnam who lost contact not Malaysia since the last words from the plane were to acknowledge a 'contact Vietnam on xxx.yyy.After that its goodnight as far as The Malay or Singapore area controller is concerned isn't it? So now we have an ATCO in Vietnam no doubt with a flight strip or electronic equivalent telling him MH370 is going to check in any moment.-Trouble is , it doesn't ,so what does he do-since an Atco needs decent English as well as an ability to work with complex equipment he is probably a young and keen and therefore alert guy since that's probably a good job in 'nam. He waits and waits and then starts calling MH370 gets no reply and then contacts the handing over party to say-where is MH370 . and given Vietnams status and history he probably has a Mil controller to hand who he can talk to in order to see if he can spot MH370 on his Mil kit. How long does all this take because it seems to me it could easily take 15-20 mins which is about 150 miles further down whatever track MH370 was headed and if the comms went before the plane headed downwards for whatever reason the real search area is pretty huge. And as has been suggested if the Chinese military have good satellite imagery coverage of the area they are not going to immediately blurt out 'guess what we have just seen' are they.
In addition some posters way back suggested that the engine parameter monitoring by RR was not continuous in terms of reporting but only when thrust levels change. If the 'transponder off-dive to 500' asl people are to be believed surely the engine thrust has to be substantially reduced (this triggering another set of engine data) to avoid the plane just wildly over speeding by diving with cruise thrust settings. What link is used to send the engine data to RR