The Thai radar supposedly indicates gentle left turn of a primary radar target near the point where the Malaysian radar shows a sharp left turn of a primary target?

Yep, it's definitely those pilots causing all the trouble with air travel.

Government report: TSA employee misconduct up 26% in 3 years - CNN.com

Yep. I can see it now. Feds mandate GoPros on every flight deck with auto upload to YouTube. That will surely solve any future dilemmas of this nature.

A possible grand idea hatched from a hoot that was forced to resign suddenly becuase he was so inept and despised by just about everyone but possibly Vlad Putin.

Questions I have not seen addressed (at least publicly):

1) Was Capt's flight sim data simply deleted
or wiped to defeat forensic recovery?

2) Any background on either crew members religious (and/or fundamentalist) leanings? Malaysia is predominately Muslim. Just saying....

3) Was crew randomly assigned or did they buddy bid or otherwise ask to fly together?

Unless the HDDs were melted down, government agencies can probably recover the data if they want it bad enough. Typical commercial disc-cleaning apps are proof against hackers/criminals, not large intelligence agencies.

Nothing obvious, neither appeared devout as far as I've heard. The CA was political (opposition party) but that looks just political, not revolutionary (again as far as I've read into it).

Verified random, not buddy bid.

On this point, I disagree. Once data has been overwritten once, it becomes very difficult to recover; essentially you'd just be looking for a weak "shadow" signal of the previous magnetic bit.

Once data has been overwritten 4 or more times, it is absolutely impossible to figure out what was there before. And most off-the-shelf data wiping tools will do multiple overwrites.

If there is any source/evidence that a government agency can recover data that has been specifically wiped, I'm willing to listen. But short of that evidence, the idea goes against everything i know about hardware, software, and physics.

They can't find a freaking jumbo jet in this day and age with all this technology, i don't have much hope for it.

Listening to the media pretend to understand how a 777 works hurts my ears.

All this talk about programming, or pre-programing a turn is based on what?

I can use the FIX page to install a LAT/LONG or a Published Intersection and then use heading select to steer to that point. I can also just use MCP heading select to simply steer, no FMC input required.

Did this flight use CPDLC/ADS, FANS 1/A? Did the flight's FMC downlink a changed route via ACAARS (and if so why don't they look at the last waypoint in that downlink)? If CPDLC was used, there is the ability to uplink a new route, and if the crew accepted and executed an upload the aircraft would fly that route (on AP).

Just curious how sure they are of a pilot installed/uplinked a FMC flight plan vs. a heading select course on AP.

PS. To the media cursing this thread for info, please stop embarrassing yourselves.

Bingo! This is it.

I'm aware of more capability than four layers. Not a professional expert on this subject but based on casual conversations with actual experts...

After many wipes you lose the ability to identify discrete data quanta and then get into probabilities. Advanced software can attempt to rationalize those probabilities (akin to a dictionary attack). Wouldn't work for pure random numbers, saying a crypto key but apparently is useful where the source data has some degree of predictability.

Also heard that each write cycle may write in a very, very slightly different location which helps isolate "layers" of over-written data (the are mechanical devices after all).