The Mystery of MH370

This is starting to seem like something from the twilight zone. As I write this, there is no conclusion at all about the loss of the Boeing 777-200 that was owned by Malaysian Airlines and operated the overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing this past Friday night.

The lack of information here is startling in this day and age, and the mystery is starting to out-weigh the tragedy.

Here's what is known:

• the aircraft took off at 12:30am local time and tracked as normal towards Beijing, a 6.5 hour flight.  All weather is reported as fine en-route, and the crew and aircraft had no flags or issues around them - everything was supposed to be 'normal'
• at 01:30, about an hour into the flight when over the South China Sea having cleared peninsular Malaysia, the airplane cruising at and altitude of 35,000 feet, vanishes from radar
• there is no radio communication indicating an issue from the crew, there is no further communications from the aircraft systems, and the emergency beacons in various varieties do not go off. 

What could have happened ?

Well, let's look for the most obvious answer first - the airplane crashed.  When that happens, it falls from the sky and that takes about 2 minutes at that altitude. Lots of time for the crew to radio for help, lots of time for the telemetry interactions with ground stations to get info from the aircraft systems.  So unless something cataclysmic happened, it didn't just fall.  Add to that the lack of debris found.  So - it didn't crash in a traditional sense.

If something cataclysmic happened, that would explain the sudden lack of communication, but not the lack of debris on the ocean.  This is a chaotic event, and some larger pieces of the aircraft (those farthest from the explosion) would be sizeable enough to have survived the descent and would have been spotted.  This remains the most likely of scenarios, but there are still issues with this explanation as the evidence isn't consistent with this outcome.  As you think about other possible causes of an explosion, this one gets a little interesting again.

Let's begin looking at non-obvious answers too.

The airplane was abducted; hijacked (successfully or not) and or was the result of a suicide attempt.   Each of these has at it's core human interaction which would have invoked unexpected actions to silence the still-flying aircraft.  An abduction that took the aircraft silent, then below radar to some landing site isn't impossible to fathom, though a commercial 777 isn't easy to hide.  A hijack may explain this.  Alternatively, an unsuccessful hijack that results in a debris field far from where it was expected may be the case - we're looking in the wrong area.  A crew member suicide could be possible here, but no personal profile information highlights this possibility.  The other interesting non obvious answer could be the cause of the crash and an implicit cover-up - what if the Vietnamese government shot the aircraft down and now is charged with search  & recovery and is sanitizing found debris to allow for a cover up..?  That certainly explains the variables, but not motive. It would also be a hugely intricate task and many mouths to silence.  So, highly unlikely.

This is an interesting mystery, and growing more-so with each passing day.