Is there any reason why they can't take new satellite images of the entire area they are currently searching and release it for the public to search?

Huh? They diverted BEFORE he "signed off." If he still had radio communication why wouldn't he say anything about this "on-board emergency?"

Has there ever been a plane that was just never found?

Cause opening up searches to the public goes so well.

There is a company doing that tho right? Digital Globe or something?

Especially if you have them search the wrong area.

This one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_...ine_Flight_739

My understanding of how they've done stuff like this in the past is that the public search and if they see something they drop a marker on the area. Then any areas that have a lot of markers are checked out by the professionals. Just means many eyes get to scan the photos and any possibilities can be assessed.

so basically for it to be unintentional it has to be one of these:

1) something bad happened
2) pilots program in change
3) pilot reports good night - why no report of the something bad?
4) plane gets lost

or

1) pilots program in change - reason unknown
2) pilots report good night
3) something bad happens
4) plane gets lost

-----

i'm trying to figure out how either of those make sense. the top one really doesn't make any sense cause surely they would have reported something bad having happened. possibly it was something very minor that they weren't worried about at all, that got unexpectedly exponentially worse. still if it's bad enough that it would cause you to program in a course change, you think you'd notify it.

for the second one to make sense, there needs to be a logical reason the change was programmed.

i don't see any other logical orders of events if it was unintentional.

so i'm watching the news on cbs, and they do have ejectable, floatable black boxes. they work in conjunction with the actual black box, but when the plane is going down, they eject, land in the ocean, send out a beacon, and float. they are $100,000 per plane. they are in most military planes and some commercial airlines. malaysian airlines obviously opted against it. many other airlines have as well, so i'm not pointing blame at malaysian for not having them.

Well yes obviously if it's being ejected prior to crash it doesn't have to be fire resistant.

These might seem a bit contrived, and I might have misunderstood how the FMS works, but here goes.

The Captain is filling in his emergency course, putting it into the Standby route on the FMS, but his mind is on other things and he accidentally presses the button to swop it with the Active route. It's obvious at once what he has done, they can both see it. No harm done; he just presses the button again and swops them back. But the time is now 01:07:02 and ACARS has just sent the route change into the logs. Or the Captain has an idiosyncracy, he likes to see the Standby course in the Active route. He swops them over and back, and again the timing just happens to be right. Or the Captain has gone for a piss, and the First Officer is showing off to a new FA, or to a passenger. "See, I just press this button and it swops them over."

It looks suspicious that the course has been changed in the Active part of the FMS, but it isn't conclusive imo. There could be a reason.

I still think the cause of this could be pretty much anything, although alien activity and black holes seem unlikely.

One thing I have seen said is that suicide is unlikely because what would be the point of driving all that way? Well, the point would be money. I'm not an expert on insurance, but I imagine they won't pay out if you commit suicide, especially if you take a couple of hundred people with you. If you just disappear on a flight, on the other hand, they will. There could have been somebody on board desperate enough to clear his family's debts that this seemed the only way out.

Then there's this:
Check the pdf out. It's scary.

Imagine a relatively inexperienced first officer trying to deal with all that while the captain is off at the loo. The plane is climbing furiously, the throttle is wide open, and alarms are telling him the plane is sliding off to the side. Even when he disengages the autopilot they still climb because the autothrottle is out of control. He panics, and starts pulling circuit breakers. And then the fuselage fails slightly and decompression begins.

I still think it could have been anything, although as I say, I don't think aliens or black holes are likely to be involved.

Only question now is what colors the aliens are

Yes Digitalglobe the company whose images showed the potential wreckage are running a crowd sourced project about this.People report potential sightings of items of interest in the images and if a certain number of people report the same item then it is looked at by someone from the company to evaluate if it is relevant.

so lately i've just been checking this thread every couple days and skim the keywords. Earlier it was a fire and I think people seemed to believe that theory but now people are seriously thinkin its aliens? ****IN ALIENS?!?!!

None of this explains why the plane then actually executed that turn as planned. You know, after it signed off from ATC and turned the transponder/ACARS off, and before they made all those other turns through waypoints.

From reading PPRuNe, a lot of the other pilots were like w0x0f and didn't know the arcane details of ACARS. My assumption would be that whoever was in control of the plane didn't realise waypoint changes would be broadcast ahead of time and didn't realise SATCOM would keep pinging even after its use by systems in the plane had been disabled. Good job because otherwise hijacking would be a strong theory and not a certainty, and the plane would have no chance of being found.

Needing to look at millions (?, no good sense of this number) of satellite images for a few pixels that look suspicious seems like exactly the thing that we want to open up to the masses.

Well no, there would have to have been a fire or a sudden misbehaviour by the autopilot, or some such emergency. If warnings were telling them that they were sliding off to the right, they might even have turned left trying to stay straight. There's a story now that they were carrying lithium batteries as well, so fire is a distinct possibility.

I still think there are many things that could have caused this. Foul play is one possibility.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-a-zombie.html

Here's the battery story if anybody is interested.

brown obviously

Are we more likely to believe foul play gone wrong (crash) or foul play gone well (landed)?

If I had to pick of all the possibilities I'd probably go with fire/electrical problem combined with some level of pilot error.

My guess is the pilots had no idea the plane was being re-routed when they said goodbye. A shame the pilots can't clear their name though.

Also, lol at the people who think we are the only semi-intelligent creatures in all the universe. Like believing some pope knows all or the world was flat back in the day.

If I missed it sorry, but how was the plane re-routed without the pilots knowledge?

I believe the answer you are looking for is... Aliens.