I do not see that many posters 'from the east' on here and perhaps that in itself tells us something about the current western obsession with needing to know everything about an incident immediately , something we have been conditioned to expect by 'the media'. So after so many posts, some fascinating some bizarre I thought a few points of reflection about the overall incident might be an idea to bring a bit of perspective back, albeit from a personal point of view
I have visited Malaysia and worked with companies there .It is a complicated place politically and to western eyes there are a number of wrongs, it is said to be corrupt, but then who defines corruption and its political complexity is a reaction to the country's history and diversity. But their streets are pretty safe and not populated by druggies and 'gangstas' and their country pretty stable despite a potentially fairly inflammatory mix of races and religions. They don’t leave their elderly to starvation and mistreatment in state hospitals nor do their financial communities lie and cheat and steal money from governments and populace on a scale big enough to trigger global recession
Equally despite past troubles the ASEAN nations plus China and a few others get on quite well and certainly quite practically, as has been pointed out they do not have any reason to send Mach 2 interceptors after anyone with a radio failure.
All would agree that this is an unprecedented event and perhaps the US or Uk would have handled the media side more professionally but at the end of the day we would still know nothing more would we-making it quite clear that the media are not at all as important as they like to think they are .
Malaysia's preparedness for such an event, bizarre as it is, is probably no worse than any other country which has not had to deal with what could be 'an internal problem'. The US, for all their defence spending could not easily see rogue traffic over the domestic US pre 9/11 and worse still upheld the ludicrous idea that domestic passengers were subject to far less security than those on international flights.
As to the Malay Govt covering things up , well that's a hell of a risk to take for a small Asian country if the information you are hiding impacts China more than any other country, even their own.
Diego Garcia keeps popping up to, I am pretty sure if MH370 headed their the US Military would know about it, after he USS Vincennes tragedy though I think they would have been hugely reluctant to down another airliners , especially one from a friendly Muslim country. They would have been aware of its approach and identity for some time I am sure, and what real damage could it cause anyway, not least because it would be dark at DG at the time, Hitting a specific building would be close to impossible and a smoking hole on the airfield while tragic in terms of lives lost would have no material impact on the base itself. In any event who would be the target, DG is not American it is British.
So perhaps we should reflect a little before posting , especially if that is a critical and defamatory post, this is truly a mystery and hopefully will be solved on day , but for the countries involved and their experts and service personnel it is hard enough without the constant we know better attitudes displayed here and on so many TV news broadcasts.