Originally Posted by
Lineslug
Just conjecturing, but if they flew out of radio coverage with ATC, as frequently happens, they might have noticed the flashing acars msg or selcall chime. I've had it happen in the middle of the night when ATC forgets to hand you off and you fly out of coverage, and gotten an acars msg to contact ATC on xxx freq from dispatch.
Again, true, and don't disagree. As KC10 pointed out, most of us will never know what REALLY happened as far as the extent to which company/ATC tried to reach them.
Whether it was ATC calls that may have gone unnoticed, an ACARS that went unnoticed, ATC trying to relay to another aircraft to contact them as frequently happens, trying to reach them over guard/121.5, etc etc etc etc........