rickair7777

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.

rickair7777

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".

rickair7777

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.

jungle

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.

ATCBob

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.

rickair7777

"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.

blastoff

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

JamesNoBrakes

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.

Mazster

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.

Sorensen

So, hypothesis! Plane flying at altitude, has a mid-air collision with a smaller high altitude something, a drone, a small cargo plane, falling satellite pieces! Ok a long shot, but with all the planes in the sky it is a wonder that there are not more possibilities or consideration of collisions.
The burning debris Mike McKay sees is the result of the collision, BUT the flames seen are the smaller plane/drone/falling star whatever.
Flight MH370's 777 is a big plane, nicely stable in the air and it's wide body giving it great stability (flight MH370 does not go down). The cockpit area is damaged in the strike, windows implode, all electronics destroyed, responders go off as per switching off theory, but only because part of the cockpit area or where the switching is located is destroyed!
Pilots are dead, explosive decompression dominos throughout the plane, maybe some oxygen masks drop and some passengers still remain conscious. The cockpit area is destroyed, no chance of recovery.....BUT, one of the three slave computer systems, located in the rear of the plane takes over autopilot, the plane was bumped from it's flight path due to the impact, but after the slave computer came online it stabilized the plane(hence the direction change). The status is now a new heading assumed correct by the new computers autopilot, the autopilot oversees maintenance of all flight speeds, heights etc. nobody from within the plane crew or passengers if conscious are able to do anything, the plane now has no cockpit or even lost 5 meters of it's front section. Violent wind blasts through the plane and may cause significant speed loss! The plane fly's under the autopilot which goes another 500 km in one direction, over the Andaman Sea, then adjusts course according to degree of course change preset for a location beacon approximately near Hong Kong (but the plane is over Andaman Sea), this preset adjustment sends the plane deep into the Indian Ocean at altitude until it runs out of fuel. Or, the direction change takes it north into the second tracking zone assumed now by the satellite responders.