Default position for anything on the internet that seems a bit too good, ironic, coincidental, interesting, etc should be that it is false until investigated further. You said yourself you found it difficult to believe that Malaysian Airlines would keep ad copy like that on their website, that feeling should be what clues you in to it being a hoax.
One thing that struck me - since MH370 was flying without an active transponder, would the TCAS system on the (hypothetical) other plane be triggered? This is assuming that the “shadowing” theory is true, of course.
Yeah, that’s my point. While the odds are low that any random incident is due to a deliberate act by the pilot, in this case the EVIDENCE points to it.
So shame on the Malaysian government for what then?
No one is declaring anything. This is all just speculation.
Now French radar is reported to be seeing debris.
And… what evidence is that, exactly? I’ve seem a lot of assumptions, damn few hard facts here.
I’m not one of the people saying “shame” on any government, here.
Sure people are declaring things - they’re declaring one theory over all others. I’ve yet to see a theory that doesn’t have big, gaping holes in it proposed for this crash.
To clarify, a French satellite, not radar, has apparently captured images of debris in roughly the same area.
I’m thinking that Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is not managing his public statements on this matter very well. Unless Australia knows something that we don’t, more than once he has made pronouncements that can be read as “we’re on to something”, when in fact all he means is “this is a vague possibilty”. I suppose he’s new at the job and hasn’t learned to be infuriatingly cautious and circumspect yet. 
Um, yes, by “radar” I meant “satellite.”
(It’s midnight here at the end of a long day.)
We’ve had numerous reports of “debris” from satellite images. So far, none have been found or shown to be related to the plane.
The problem seems to stem from the poor resolution in the images (deliberately degraded by military?) and the extreme delay from the time the photo was taken to the time it was analyzed, not to mention the days that elapse before a search plane or ship gets there. So the debris sinks or drifts farther away and we’re back to nothing.
And just because the debris is large enough to be a plane wing doesn’t mean it is. Containers and pallets apparently fall off of ships all the time and pretend to be plane parts in an effort to gain their scarce 15 minutes of fame.
They have actually found a pallet already. One problem with these satellite images of debris is that they are perhaps too big, bigger than a container and in fact bigger than any one part of a Boeing 777, whose wing and fuselage are only a few metres wide, six at the most. The objects in these images are wider than that. Perhaps they’re fields of debris that are for some reason staying close to each other.
So this is totally outlandish, but at this point I’m fairly sure this plane will never be found so what the heck. The talk of motivations led me here - what if we are looking at something like Stuxnet for airliners, and this was just an initial, targeted test? The idea being the hardware/firmware and control software was completely compromised at some point in the past, and the pilots were essentially prisoners in their own plane after it went dark.
But maybe planes are physically / mechanically designed such that a complete software hijack like this is infeasible. (Sorry missed the edit window)
As with the comments about USN hydrophone arrays, I can’t help but think that the major military powers have VAST data to contribute - maybe even know with some precision where the wreck is - but can’t say so without compromising military capabilities.
They must feel a bit like Eisenhower, who had to take endless abuse over the “missile gap” even though he had data on his desk showing the US had considerable superiority. He couldn’t even mention it because of the source (U-2 overflights when their very existence was still secret).
Seems like one anonymous telegram could leak out. Maybe some of the sudden shifts in search patterns are from just such whispers. But I think we’ll find out one day that the USN and others were kind of looking at the ceiling and whistling during this period.
When I saw the news article last week that said, “Debris 72 foot long sighted off Australia,” my first thought was, “Is there something 72 feet long on a 777 that floats?”
No. The TCAS and transponder are a combined device on airliners. Once MH370’s transponder was turned off, it was no longer able to display TCAS traffic and it didn’t transmit anything that another aircraft’s TCAS could detect.
Just heard on CNN radio that the last ACARS transmission at 1:07 a.m. showed that the Flight Management System had not been changed at that time. The Beijing route was still programmed into it, which nullifies speculation about the FMS being changed before takeoff.
Yeah the Malaysians had made statements in the last couple of days that the route was to Beijing. I wonder what the source was for the original statements that the route had been changed.
Doing my Captain Obvious imitation: The Malaysian police department doesn’t own a photocopy machine?
I can’t imagine the Australians are demanding the original. If there is something secret on the original, can’t they have someone transcribe it leaving out the secret part?
Other sites that may be of interest are:
The Australian government maritime search site
Airliners.net forums, like pprune, a lot of noise but also some thoughtful professionals. 43 threads on MH370.
Now that’s just bizarre. Are they still thinking, “We got this”? Or is the manifest top secret?