Originally Posted by tequilatamm

Thanks to everyone for sharing all your thoughts on the subject of this missing flight.

I'm not a pilot, but I'm always curious when planes crash to find out the real insights from the people who actually fly them, rather than from unreliable news sources, so I always come here.

It seems to me (if we're going to speculate) pretty clear that something caused massive electronic and instrument failure on this plane, as many have been saying.

If it was terrorism, the automated messages that were sent out for 3 or 4 minutes probably wouldn't have happened, or there at least would have been some sort of emergency call from the pilot first. This seems to have been sudden and without much warning, but not so sudden that the plane just blew up.

And with the previous problems with some of the sophisticated systems on the Airbus 330, and the similarity of what few events we have information on with this flight, it sounds similar to the past problems, such as the Qantas Perth flight, and I think there was one other some years ago too (Wikipedia really did have a lot of information on this).

I reckon it's a question of, "If you have to ask did the instruments fail, you probably already know the answer."

But I guess time will tell. The media is being very coy about it all, saying they're not going to find the black boxes, but as someone pointed out earlier about the sophisticated equipment the US military has for finding such things, and the fact that they've already deployed such craft to the area, I'll bet we'll see a result.. and it sounds like they will be able to get a fair bit of insight from the debris once they can measure perhaps how hot the various bits got, etc... might tell whether it broke up in the air or once it hit the water.

My thoughts go out to all those families with relatives and friends on that flight... and to all of us really, because it's very scary when something like this happens.