That's what I thought until I saw the (unofficial) track data. It shows straight lines and sharp turns at waypoints. A meandering jet roaming the skies at random would track smooth curves, not sharp turns at published checkpoints. The odds of that happening at random are very, very low indeed...for practical purposes, nil.

If the people who knew (or suspected) the plane was missing were talking to everyone else.

If it was a location where radar was known to be highly reliable.

If random general aviation flights were not allowed in the area.

If it wasn't international airspace where anyone is free to fly around at will (might not want to accidentally jump somebody else's fighters..tensions are a tad elevated out there with the PRC asserting themselves).

If the country in question even had fighters and crews handy. The US would do it but our defense budget is probably bigger than the rest of the world's combined.

Lot of big "Ifs".

If there's no indisputable evidence as to what actually happened, this might turn into another Egypt Air with Malaysia trying to CYA by blaming Boeing. Personally I think more highly of the Malaysians than the Egyptians but time will tell.

You need to start reading the Malaysian news, however highly you might think of them, there is a strong ongoing struggle against the supreme nanny state. It is a fact that the Captain was party to this struggle.

That's not really practical in a small country like Malaysia where a jet can overfly it in 15-20 minutes. By the time they confirmed civilian ATC wasn't working the target, then scrambled their own jets and caught up, it would already be outside their airspace and probably over a different country. Their mission is probably only to look for large formations of targets, and maybe not even that (does Malaysia even have an enemy)?

Actually we did have intercept aircraft on alert pre-9/11. Not many, but there were always some ready. NORAD would scramble them and ATC would work them to the intercept because NORAD at the time only looked outward and didn't have our radar feeds.

"Highly" relative to the Egyptians. I think it less likely Malayisa would attempt a blatant denial-of-facts campaign. I read the CA's facebook comments. Seems he was on the opposition side but he also seemed to be into elections, not Jihad. I'm not ready to hang the guy for having politics.

I've flown in that neck of the woods at that hour of the evening. You'd be lucky if someone was even AWAKE at their position to notice something on the radar, let alone scramble non-existent fighters on non-existent alert. Yes you watch too many movies :)

What, when I said that it was likely not fuel icing? Sorry, it's the investigator in me that is not ruling out anything until we know more, but what I do know is that 777s have fallen out of the sky before. Again, you'll probably take this to mean that I'm inferring a mechanical fault, which I'm not, I'm just inferring that we don't know at this point. The assumption that a certain make of aircraft doesn't "fall out of the sky" is flawed. In some rare cases, they do not...until they do. Sorry if it gets your panties in a bunch.

Regarding interception...in the Payne Stewart case fighters were sent to try and identify the problem and they could see that the cockpit glass was all frozen and opaque inside, giving them a fairly good indication what the situation was. I still think it would have been worth the effort to try an intercept.