Possible motive
1. Kidnap passengers as hostages? You would have to know that the pax on this flight were typically Chinese (most) and Malaysian. I can't imagine China would be keen to negotiate, nor to facilitate negotiations by the relatives. So this would seem a very poor choice of flight for this purpose.
2. Theft of cargo? For this to work, you would need accomplices and logistics at other end. This takes time to set up. How much notice would you have of an upcoming valuable shipment? Presumably not enough to get yourself onto that flight and organise the other end. Could it have been a spur of the moment opportunistic theft? Possibly. But the details we have suggest the reversal of course (and other things) was done very skilfully, and this suggests detailed planning. And you would still have to set up the other end. So theft seems unlikely.
3. Steal plane for some future terrorist plot? This is probably the most likely scenario for the "northern corridor." However, you would imagine the customer was most likely in the Middle East. You would also imagine the customer would like his plane stolen with the least chance of things going wrong. So why steal a plane heading east, and then have to reverse course and avoid radar of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia etc? There are plenty of MAS flights from KL heading to Europe or Middle East. Why not steal one of these flights? You could even cross India (legally) and then disappear - which would give you much greater range (Pakistan or Iran). For ME terrorists, an added bonus of a Europe bound flight would be a greater number of westerners. Do we know if the crew flew other routes?
4. "Southern corridor" scenario. Hard to think of a reason other than suicide and disappear. If this happened, the guy didn't want anyone to know for sure - he could have left a note, or even come up on the radio and announced his intention. Nor did he want the plane found. Reverses course and possibly flies low to avoid primary radar - unlike the customer in option 3 who has nothing to gain by playing games with radar, it is possible the pilot here enjoys the challenge of defeating radar. He then heads NW up Straits of Malacca, before turning SW when he is sure he is out of primary radar coverage. Why turn NW first? Well he does not want to be found. If he is picked up by primary radar, heading NW he looks like lots of other traffic heading out of KL or Singapore. If he went immediately SW over Malaysia and then Sumatra, this would seem unusual if anyone did see him on primary radar.
Last edited by slats11; 17th Mar 2014 at 16:41.