Originally Posted by
Eclectic
The northern route potential land area is immense and a big plane going in fast and vertical only makes a fairly small crater. Also the ELTs wouldn't survive the impact.
Do this where there are no population and it may never be discovered.
Quite. Bill MacGillvary said this 4 days ago.
It is one of the options other than hijack etc where the consequence was not planned. It might have come down when fuel was exhausted in which case little or no fire and much of the aircraft buried.
Where could this have happened? Well looking at the maximum range arcs to the NW I think we can assume that it did not fly a direct track across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and probably none of the Stans. Similarly it may never have reached China but that still leave plenty of land area where it could have penetrated undetected and then crashed.