? Huh?? You busting stones? Because if you are that is both well played and funny.

Alright, I have to ask this again about the ELT. Wouldn't a B777 in 2014 have a 406mhz ELT on it?

If it crashed then the ELT would have been activated by impact and within a minute an encoded digital message to a satelite saying the ELT's ID/aircraft ID, country code and coordinates. I've seen it work.

I just have a hard time believing that there could be a fire severe enough to incapacitate the crew and cause the transponder to fail, but yet the aircraft continues to fly for five hours afterwards. And how could a fire cause only part of the ACARS system to fail?

Considering what little information we do know, a deliberate act by someone seems more likely than some sort of catastrophic failure. My guess is they may never find the aircraft and we may never know the answer. It took two years to find most of the Air France wreckage and they had a much better idea of where to look.

Actually it is neither well-played or funny. The aircraft was a Cessna 337D, N2685S, that crashed on 4/1/1997. The FBO had requested that an industrial gas supplier set up a servicing unit. The gas company agent was used to dealing with fire departments and checked the wrong box, even though his company could have supplied aviators breathing oxygen. The bottles on the servicing dolly were painted a dark green, not the apple green used for oxygen bottles. After the accident several pressurized turboprop and turbojet were grounded until their bottles could be correctly serviced.

This!

And I'd postulate that other than a more-or-less-vertical dive into the ocean, said ELT would activate and be received until the hull sank.

Oh yes they work fine, but they don't work at all after a 200g impact which accordions the fuselage and engines.

CNN seems to think there are elt buoys that pop out, maybe they have been watching too many submarine movies.

Eastern ATC may have a point. In a lot of crashes the coaxial cable from the ELT to the fuselage mounted skin gets severed. The unit works fine after the crash but there is no antenna connection, so transmission is only for a few hundred feet, if that. In a water crash that is not too severe one second or so of ELT transmission before the cable is severed would not be out of the ordinary. If the aircraft hit a vertical rock face on a peak in Tibet, then no.

Above should read 'fuselage mounted skin antenna'. My bad.

No kidding. That's what happens when you have to transmit non-stop: you can't wait and to let the evidence drive the conclusions.

So I read that the plane snuck up on Diego Garcia, with the intent of refueling it, and moving onwards.

Brilliant!

I stand corrected, had not heard of that accident before. I'd be interested to read that report.

I am not aware of any difference between medical O2 and what is carried in crew bottles. It is all Oxygen. What we use at work is indeed simply compressed room air. Introducing 100% O2 to a fire situation has a fairly......negative effect.