If it's been depressurized everyone on board is unconscious (then dead) for this 6-7 hours.

This still doesn't rule out aliens.

They have to fly the equivalent of NYC to Colorado to search for 2 hours and then back again to NYC/Perth. It's off the coast of Perth like Bogota is off the coast of Miami.

Yeah "off the coast of Perth" has always been pretty lol.

That's how we roll in lolstralia. Adelaide to Melbourne, 500 miles, is considered a short trip.

Yeah, except for the fact that its both EXTREMELY easily done.

I am far from an expert on 3rd world pilot suicide, but if I really wanted to kill myself, are there not many other ways to do it without this high of a margin of error? Ok **** it , he doesn't care about the other people on board as long as he dies, that's possible, but doesn't he still have to execute a semi complicated plan to achieve his goal. Wouldn't any risk of failure, however minute, rule out this method of ending one's existence ?

Indeed. Is it normal for the first handoff to take longer?

If not, then I think this raises the probability of fire or mechanical failure quite a bit. Maybe these pilots just routinely took a while with handoffs.

I get that you don't understand this. But it happens. There's atleast half a dozen instances of a murder-suicide taking place (or attempted) on a plane.

In a lot of them insurance money seems to be a factor.

Edit: Here are some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific...nes_Flight_773
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific...es_Flight_1771
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa...es_Flight_2511

Lock the other pilot out of the cockpit (easy), put them all to sleep through de-pressurizing (easy) and its his plane. There are a lot of people that commit suicide in strange ways that are not always logic or over reasons that don't always make sense. This all has happened before so its certainly not impossible and very likely pretty easy.

@jake
Handoff isnt always immediat, W0X0F has talked about a few situations where one might not be handed off immediately (other ATC being busy, pilots being involved in other actions).

Here's a new idea I just thought of after hearing that the flight data recorders and cockpit audio recorders only record for a few hours and then overwrite themselves. Obviously a pilot would know this, and if he wanted to conceal the reality of his decision (a shameful suicide) he could depressurize the plane and then purposely let it run out of fuel to guarantee that when we find the recorders they will essentially be blank, because they recorded 6 hours of nothingness.

The data recorder doesn't overwrite itself after only a couple of hours, only the voice recorder.

But yes, that is one reason a pilot-suicide scenario may involve not immediately crashing the plane.

Not ruling out suicide, but am ruling out the insurance angle in this case. Didn't he just get dumped? I doubt he wants that hoe gettin paid!

How recent was the dumping?

You can't make judgements like this.

In one of the murder-suicides I believe the perpetrator did it to give money to his ex-wife to support herself and their children.

lol @ u.

Wolf Blitzer is doing work on this Inmarsat guy. It's not certain the plane went down.

pilot was a supporter of opposition, angry over opp politician's conviction. pilot thought that doing this would create so much bad press for malaysian govt that it would lead to the current govt losing power.

how about that?

Ok, so what do you kill 230 people for?

What do you kill yourself for?

You're assuming somebody who kills themselves is thinking clearly.

Look, this incident cannot simply be an accident. There is no way a catastrophe would result in the plane being deliberately flown into the middle of the ocean. That area is far too unique to just be coincidence. If there ever was a place to conceal evidence on this earth it would be precisely in that area.

How anyone can discount the suicide theory is beyond me. We live in a society where it's almost commonplace now for someone to walk into a school and slaughter as many children is possible before turning the gun on themselves. How is it that you are shocked someone finally upped the ante to 230 victims?

Do you think mass murderers are looking to go down in history as monsters? When someone like Adam Lanza walks into a school to massacre everybody, it's not because he wants his name in the papers. He just wants other people to hurt with him. This pilot might have been distraught and for whatever reason wanted to kill as many people as possible. He just wanted them to die because "f*** them, thats why". But he also knew the ramifications of his actions, the disgrace to his family, his name, and that he would be forever immortalized as a coward. So with this strategy it is left a mystery; he gets what he wanted, a bunch of dead people and the satisfaction of knowing their families will suffer, without his face becoming the new monster of the 21st century.

so what was it then?

Internet comments are the best. I like this one:

If you're not going to let the flight crew do anything, we might as well not have them around. And do we really believe not having a flight crew is safer?

just one step closer to skynet