"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
"Robert Green" wrote:

I'm just afraid that we'll never know what happened, even if the
voice recorder is found because it overwrites previous recordings every
two
hours.

We can still get plenty of evidence. Is there just one voice on the
recorder? Are there extra voices? What is the content of any
conversations? Did the pilot at the end do a culture equivalent of Slim
Pickens riding down the bomb in Dr. Strangelove? All sorts of
interesting things are still possible.

But, as they say in the adult film biz, the "money shot" would be missing.
If a lone hijacker killed both pilots I suppose we might hear pounding on
the cabin door five hours later, but if the passengers were asphyxiated, as
some people have suggested, all we might hear is the heavy breathing of the
hijacker. And perhaps "low fuel, low altitude" alerts as the plane crashed.
Just finding wreckage seven flight hours away would have told us that
already.

Maybe if the hijacker was explaining how "peace on earth" equalled "purity
of essence" out loud to him imaginary friend Mandrake we could determine
they were shi+ stomping crazy . . . (-:
(Ironically a lot of Strangelove concerns a rogue plane flying under Russian
radar after the Russians wasted time pursuing decoy targets and got fu&ed -
life imitates art.)

My current thinking (which changes as each new data tidbit dribbles out)
is

I haven't seen anything yet that I would consider to be data. Rumors
and conjectures, but little data.

I think the end of the transponder tracking is trustworthy because it's
mutliply sourced. The Malaysian government and FlightRadar24 both confirm
that and FR24 uses independent listeners connected by the net. I believe
the pilots have had cabin guests before because someone published a picture
of them with a woman in the cockpit. I think it had enough fuel to get to
Beijing and then some. I believe that the transponders were manually
disabled, but indirectly because a) they stopped and b) if the plane broke
up, they'd likely have found the wreck once the adults arrived to help.
Everything beyond that gets sketchier and sketchier, I'll agree.

BTW, I called my buddy in Chicago who's flying home tonight to warn him of
the storm predicted for our area. I'm very familiar with the "ring pattern"
of his phone but this time it rang four rings longer before it went to
voicemail. Just saying - ring patterns don't mean much compared to all the
other non-evidence and innuendo we have.

In the end, both the airline and Boeing will find a way to blame the pilot.
It's a tradition! (Also, the pilots have the shallowest pockets.)

--
Bobby G.