"trader_4" wrote in message
news:9d892f83-15e7-4fd1-9229-
On Tuesday, April 1, 2014 11:48:20 AM UTC-4, wrote:
A FA could have gained access to the cockpit, capped the pilots and
done the rudimentary "video game:" flying necessary to fly a plane out
over the ocean then just waited for it to run out of fuel.
Maybe that explains the radical movements in the early part of the
takeover too. (S)he may have had a little learning curve.

The part that doesn't fit with that is disabling ACARS.
Depending on who you believe, it's either done via the diplay/keyboard
or by pulling a breaker that's apperently not readily identifiable.

At a recent DoD social event I attended with my wife, a retired special ops
type said some things I haven't yet run down but were intriguing
nonetheless. Apparently, while not generally known, that model airplane has
a number of emergency locator beacons along the fuselage that activate only
during a normal crash landing and not a deliberate nose dive into the ocean
at 500mph. Maybe you heard something about that since you've followed the
case closely on CNN. (BTW, the simulator "expert" they used got fired for
portraying his company in a bad light!)

More importantly, though, he said that although that plane *could* land on a
very short runway, not very many of the alternates proposed as landing sites
would actually accommodate that model of plane without collapsing the
landing gear. All airstrips, apparently, have a rating that indicates how
much weight they can support.

This guy, an ex-SEAL, went on to postulate that it *was* the pilot who was
so unhappy with the jailing of his friend that he took the plane hostage and
radioed a demand for his friend's release to authorities, threatening to
crash the plane if they didn't. While that might seem far-fetched, it does
raise an interesting question about why they got the handoff transmission so
completely wrong in the first transcript. The transmissions from the plane
were the pilot's negotiations with authorities who (wrongly) called his
bluff and now want to cover up any trace of their complicity.

It sort of fits in with my gut feeling that the Malaysian government doesn't
(and didn't) ever want to find that planes wreckage and the revelation that
they didn't believe the pilot would actually kill himself and all the
passengers. Plus, it provides a pretty strong motive for what seemed until
now to be a crime without a motive. The problem I see is that even if the
wreckage is found, if there was back-and-forth "hostage negotiation" taking
place, it got wiped out by the CVR recording over old material every two
hours.

--
Bobby G.