Originally Posted by rickair7777

This is exactly what I thought...until I saw the track after the comms-loss. It's straight lines between waypoints with sharp turns at waypoints. That only happened if the plane was being positively controlled by a pilot or AP/FMS. And somebody had to load the new flight plan, for some reason.

I'll still acknowledge the remote possibility that a well-intentioned pilot fighting a casualty changed the flight plan to head back to land by pulling up an old or stored plan that headed in the direction he wanted to go. But that's not really very likely. Possible, but not likely.