Malaysia Airlines 777 Missing

No one has mentioned thermite yet, either. But they will.

The best conspiracy I’ve heard (and we are reduced to those now) is that it never took off.

That’s better than “Aliens abducted the entire plane” and it’s now docked at the mothership?

See, the aliens jammed our radar with their jamming beams, grabbed the plane with their tractor beams, and immobilized the pilots with their freeze beams. It’s all about the beams.

I said it was the “best” conspiracy theory I’ve heard, but it would be one hell of a big conspiracy.

Wikipedia says it took five days to find the first “major wreckage” from Air France 447. It’s almost incomprehensible that this is terrorism, which is good because it’s terrible to think about. On the other hand with no goals and no claim of responsibility - and no communications about a plot, according to the government - it’s not really terrorism. It could be a random lunatic, but at least that points to an individual and not a conspiracy. And there’s a little evidence that suggests there was no explosion.

As I recall (correct me if I’m wrong) there was communication from the plane just before it went down, and it was over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This has much more to it that is problematic.

and it’s held in place by pressure. You’re not opening the door at 35,000 feet.

IMHO, what I call “the illusion of control” leads us to assume we would be able to know everything and know it quickly. It’s not out of the question that we simply haven’t spotted floating wreckage even if we’re looking in the right area; we might also be looking in the wrong area or the entire plane could have gone under without breaking up, leaving little to no sign on the surface. It is indeed a big ocean.

I’m only addressing the issue of how long it’s taking to find this plane and how long it took to find the last one that “disappeared.” Or the last one I remember, anyway.

I almost hesitate to ask what the *worst *ones are.

Why? A bomb powerful enough to cripple the plane and crew, but not to break it up, would explain everything.

If you want to play Dictionary, go ahead, but I don’t think you’ll find much of a following.

Well aliens are always good; so are Fascists; then there is someone who saw something they shouldn’t have; and of course another dimension will work.

I’d be quite surprised if this was a terrorist incident. There have been no claims of responsibility and no particular reason for targeting a Malaysia to China flight. The passport fakers may have been petty criminals trying for whatever reason to get into China illegally. If it was a suicide bomber on board then the motivation is unknown and perhaps unknowable, which seems to me to be counterproductive. If one wants to go down in flames, wouldn’t he/she want to make it known why?

Perhaps we can monitor explosions, but there must be a lower limt of what can be detected. I think it’s possible that you could bring down a plan with an explosion smaller than what could be detected. Once the structural integrity is broken, the plane could be in smithereens in short order, similar to the Columbia except of course the shuttle was going a lot faster and subject to higher aerodynamic forces. So I’m guessing there was a checked bag with a bomb just big enough to make a hole in the plane just big enough to lead to rapid structural breakup. If the pieces are small enough and scattered over a wide enough area, it could well be some time before any wreckage is recovered.

The more I think about it the more an explosion makes sense: the sudden disappearance without a last broadcast and the difficulty finding anything over a large ocean where almost all of it would have sunk.

A bomb would explain why the plane crashed, but it doesn’t work as terrorism if nobody knows who did it and why. No message is received.

It’s not a dictionary thing; it’s a very obvious thing. But the point about the responsible people also matters: if there was a bomb planted by some random person on the plane, that person is dead. If it’s terrorism, the people responsible for the bombing could still be out there.

No. This reaction http://youtu.be/Z7Ilxsu-JlY took 2 hours.

What if the entire cabin crew somehow decided to disappear a plane? Or even two of the crew who could overpower the rest?

Just turn off the transponder and either nose her in to the ocean, or even set her down gently and hang out until it sinks…no debris field that way.

Not bad; you make a good conspiracy theorist.

It had a Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. Douglas Adams predicted it.

Or even one suicidal pilot, left alone in the cockpit so he could lock the others out and drive the plane into the water.

Sound crazy? That was Egyptair 990 and SilkAir 185.