Or Alien Abduction or Rapture

Occam's razor is getting dusty.

Hey, if it worked in a Neal Stephenson book...

Was the missing airliner an advanced prototype of an aeroaquajet that turned into a submarine and is currently waiting deep in the Indian Ocean?

(Didn't some Star Trek film start off like this?)

Speaking of which, where is Steven Segal? Specifically. What are his whereabouts? He knows something.

@2: I'll take the bait: you're reference to the famous razor suggests you favor the simplest possible explanation. What's the simple explanation that corresponds to certain datalink communications equipment being shut off before the first officer calmly sent a final acknowledgement by radio, and which is consistent with the "pinging" going on for another half dozen hours, and with no country, other than Malaysia, reporting that they tracked a "bogie" radar echo that night? I can think of a several explanations, but all of them would have left Brother Occam with a bad case of razor burn on his face.

Just like how the Russians tricked Maverick and Iceman into thinking there were only two MiGs instead of six!!!

Collision avoidance software on the other plane would likely detect it.

meh, spekalashin.

It okay, everybody. Courtney Love has found the plane!

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/has_c…

@8 - He answers that question in his post:

Wouldn’t the SIA68 flight have detected MH370? NO! The Boeing 777 utilizes a TCAS system for traffic avoidance; the system would ordinarily provide alerts and visualization to pilots if another airplane was too close. However that system only operates by receiving the transponder information from other planes and displaying it for the pilot. If MH370 was flying without the transponder, it would have been invisible to SIA68.

A 777 is a big plane. A really big plane. A skilled pilot might be able to fly it in close formation with another jetliner for a short time, but not for hours.

A fun idea for a Tom Clancy novel or a plot for the next James Bond movie, but I'm not buying it.

There's one other way to fly undetected in controlled airspace.

In plain sight. With a transponder set to another flight number, one that someone filed a flight plan for, but never actually took off. Some scheduled flights aren't scheduled every day of the week. Might be enough to put one over on air traffic control.

I suspect there's a weakness in the air traffic control system. Planes self-report their existence. Airports don't report them to any centralized system for failing to take off. A "fake" flight strikes me as very possible to pull off.

Before the "ping" info was released, I had a theory that they could have headed in approximately their original direction, spoofing a code-share flight number for a Singapore/Asiana flight that was paralleling their path. This one took off a few minutes before (00:10) from Singapore (vs. 00:25 for MH370 from Kuala Lumpur), bound for Seoul. It would have overflown the same countries on its way to Seoul. After they cleared Chinese airspace, they could have proceeded to N. Korea with no one the wiser, since Seoul was only expecting one plane, not two. Making it more plausible to confuse ATC, Asiana and Singapore Airlines alternate their code-shares.

@7 beat me to it....

I'll throw something out there. What if the plane never came back to ground but instead kept climbing, to the point it left earth's atmosphere? I know that a space shuttle has insane amounts of thrust/force/speed to get off the ground and into space, but could a plane, already traveling at 40,000 feet doing 500+mph pull the nose up and just keep going? What if that plane was so fucking high that it just left the gravitational pull of the earth???!?

@16: debunked by www.askthepilot.com

Does Shutterstock not have any pictures of 777s???

@17 omg patrick smith is still writing!! thanks for the link, I lost track of him after Salon rebranded as a shitty website.

(and @16 wasn't serious...right?)

@19: dunno, but apparently there are enough similar questions out there that PS felt the need to address and dismiss it specifically.

@19: to wit:

As for some of the wackier ideas I’ve been hearing, my favorite is the one that goes like this: Would it be possible for the 777 to have climbed clear out of the atmosphere, so high that “it disintegrated,” went into orbit, or otherwise became impossible to track or locate? In normal circumstances I wouldn’t burden the rest of you with an answer to such nonsense, except that no fewer than five readers already have asked some version of this question. The answer is no. It is totally impossible for that to happen. At a certain altitude, a plane’s engines will no longer provide enough power and the wings will no longer provide enough lift. The plane will no longer be able to sustain flight. All commercial passenger jets have maximum certified cruising altitudes below 50,000 feet or so. And even this altitude isn’t always reachable. The maximum altitude at a given time depends on the plane’s weight, the air temperature and other factors.

The fact that A., this theory that the plane invisibly flew thousands of miles away inland even exists, and B., people are figuring out how theories like this could actually work pretty much proves that nobody has an actual fucking clue.

I came to make the Reamde reference, but #3 beat me to it.

@19-

No. Just some good copypasta.

@6 The simplest and most likely answer to the question "where's the plane" is "at the bottom of the ocean." How it got there is certainly still an open question, but the rampant speculation is getting out of hand. Over 80 airplanes have gone missing since WW2, never to be seen again. The most likely explanation? They crashed, and the world is a big place.

The wreck will either be found, or not - but regardless, everyone except the families of the lost (and the conspiracy theorists) will eventually forget about it.

@25 But.... but..... but...... but..... but.....

@8 - I believe the avoidance system is based on transponders.

@22 - The fact that this guy originally put out a very reasoned theory that the jet suffered decompression and now has a new (wilder) theory (based entirely on speculation and coincidence and not backed up by any actual evidence) makes me think he doesn't have a clue. After his first theory, he needs STFU already and admit he has no idea. He's not helping.

#25-" The wreck will either be found, or not - but regardless, everyone except the families of the lost (and the conspiracy theorists) will eventually forget about it."
So the pilot's life insurance policy will just pay out to the beneficiary, no questions asked? And his estate will pass to his heirs and assigns uncontested and unblemished?
Sounds like he finessed not only a successful suicide and the perfect crime, but...
A good death. He has covered himself with glory as we all marvel at his flying ability and his cunning, and...
in a ghoulish retelling of the old joke, he died doing what he loved, piloting some of the most sophisticated equipment known to man free and unencumbered... not screaming and wailing and soiling his pants like his 230-odd passengers.

@28 That's up to the insurance company in question, not me or you.

This endless speculation by the media, breathlessly touting more and more bizarre theories is *not* out of a desire to get to the bottom of this tragedy - rather, it's simply the current fodder for the perpetual news cycle, and will be dropped at the moment something more "clickable" occurs.