Originally Posted by
FE Hoppy
how does this supposed fire take out all coms voice/data/SSR immediately and yet leave the aircraft able to make deliberate turns for the next X minutes and straight flight for x hours?
IFF the tracking information is correct and the aircraft made a steady turn followed by a long continuous heading, followed by a turn northward when over the Malacca straits to avoid overflight of Indonesia, and finally a turn to the South when clear of Indonesia THEN the disabled crew/cockpit hypothesis is not supportable. This weakness is common to all the 'emergency on board' ideas.
The Egyptian fire was a blowtorch effect to the right of the first officer's seat. I would expect that the first officer might well be less than impressed and egress the area rather rapidly. The captain only has to press a transmit button to give an emergency call as the crew would have switched from one box to the other not dialed up the HCM center frequency on the same box. They would be on one center's frequency or the other's. So it would be very unlikely that the pilot would not have made a transmission of some kind.
And of course - the Boeing AD would have been carried out so there should not have been a repeat of the Egyptian fire on MH370.