Originally Posted by
Lemain
TRF4EVR -- OK, so can you sketch out how one (or both) bods at the front could have made the flight disappear in the way it did, with no trace, no signals, no radar plot... If he/they wanted to, how could they possibly have done it? If you can find a rational answer to that you have come up with the most plausible theory to date
and later post
Not many recorded cases of a 777 exceeding Vne with no contact from the cockpit, either. Bomb or shot down cannot be ruled out. .
Go to the first thread where this was hammered to death.
The answer is it was thought one of the pilots taking control of the aircraft was the simplest therefore more likely explanation for all of the recorded facts.
Note that it was not "with no trace, no signals, no radar plot".
Summary: The aircraft was tracked by a military 3D radar while each of its cooperative surveillance systems stopped transmitting, ACARS stopped, no RT. It then (if reports are to be believed) climbed to close to its ceiling as it turned back then descended relatively low as it crossed the peninsula- following the Thai border. The aircraft then turned North along the Malacca Straits then around the top end of Indonesia North of Banda Aceh where it turned West till out of radar range. Meanwhile it was providing signals from a system that pilots did not (then) know about the SatCom antenna systems were shaking hands with the IMARSAT satellite. Due to doppler effects of the satellite and aircraft motion, INMARSAT could provide range rings from their satellite's position that matched the original primary radar plotted flight. Using maths that has been crawled over by world experts, it was shown that the aircraft stayed airborne for more than 6 hours with the INMARSAT system reporting ranges from the handshakes and an initial attempted call on SatCom. The only path that makes sense on these range rings is a flight South from the North West of Indonesia to around 1000 miles off Perth, Australia. The computed path and range rings do not match a flight to Diego Garcia or the Maldives. Now a flaperon from a 777 washes up on La Reunion an area that was forecast over a year ago to be the likely place to find any floating debris from MH370 had it ditched in the area computed from the INMARSAT range rings. Had a 777 done a 'Sullenbeger' controlled ditching in the ocean one of the parts most likely to be torn off in the ditching would be a flaperon. This flaperon has damage not inconsistent with being torn off by a ditching and has barnacles growing on it that are of the right age to match the time of a ditching.
Each of the above are high probabilities only, with a few being
much higher probabilities than others. But taken as a set the probabilities add up to a high level of certainty that someone on board took control of the aircraft flew the aircraft out beyond Malaysian, Thai and Indonesian radar cover then turned South from its last radar contact and flew on for
hours to the South Indian Ocean until close to, or at fuel exhaustion and ditched. All the other explanations fail to meet the other facts/probabilities of the case.