What island with a small runway would that be? (I obviously don't think it's there, just curious.)

Apparently it doesn't even have a name, and is actually in the far southern Indian Ocean:

My assumption would be that the island really exists but the runway doesn't.

Before some ****** mentions it, it is not Diego Garcia, which is in the mid-north of the Indian Ocean.

There's the Kerguelen Islands, Heard Island and McDonald Islands but I don't think any of those have runways.

EDIT: There's also the Crozet Islands. Pretty fascinating part of the world really, doesn't get more remote than this.

Craving for a Big Mac was too much?

just spent a few minute reading about the islands down there, pretty interesting stuff.

Seriously, blaming the pilot seems unfair. He probably had a hundred different destinations going N,E,W, or S and all over the world to practice with on his flight simulator. If he was having women problems, big deal, who doesn't?

I would be more concerned if the South Indian Ocean was the only destination on his flight simulator or if he had serious health or psychological problems or serious financial problems.

I hope the search continues.

Wow, I don't get it though, what would his plan be from then on lol?

I estimate about a 1.2% chance that they were randalled by Extraterrestrials.

I'll lay you 99/1 then

I'll escrow for any bet over $100,000.

lol I bet you will.

I'll escrow for over 50k, just ship it to my local strippers.

I would put up $10k. And if I lose, I wouldn't care because I have a feeling that the sovereign power behind the US monetary system would fall. Aliens would institute their own money. I for one, would openly welcome our new overlords.

Nb, send me 10k then and ur booked

Back in March:

Then some more banter where a bunch of people are like "LOL I DONT GET IT, how can hypoxia fly a plane for hours to nowhere?!":

oh hai there, best available current evidence:

Missing Flight MH370's Path Suggests Crew Became Incapacitated

Having said that, I assume at this point, there's no stopping people searching Google Earth around Diego Garcia for the next 50 years or so instead of just assuming something far less dramatic happened.

First, that's a pretty bold post considering we still don't actually know anything.

Second, I think (and I don't care enough to go back and check) that the objection was to hypoxia as the root cause of the accident and not about just the final state.

So the end result of an incapacitated crew could be quite likely. I think its still unlikely that there was no foul play and an accident/non-malicious error inducing hypoxia was the root cause of this whole incident.

lol DVaut, maybe read the report before declaring victory? In the section of the report where they say that, they have these paragraphs in BOLD for those who don't read so good:

The actual quote from the report in the article you posted says something similar:

In other words, when trying to compare this to other plane crashes, which should we look at? Well, this appears to be a crash in a situation where there were no flight inputs for a long period of time, followed by fuel exhaustion. By "the final stages of the unresponsive crew/hypoxia event type appeared to best fit the available evidence" they absolutely do not mean they think that's what happened. They mean if you're going to extrapolate from what happened in previous crash events, those are the ones you should look at. In other words this:

Is completely unfounded and does not appear in the report, in fact it's explicitly disavowed.

Just so you know DVaut, here are the events you're trying to explain:

17:19 - Last contact to ATC
17:22 - Transponder stops operating, plane turns west.
17:37 - Expected ACARS transmission not received
18:15 - Malaysian military radar last contact with plane here. You'll notice this suggests a flight path nothing like one taking it into the southern Indian Ocean.

Given the very high accuracy of Inmarsat ping data tracking the plane into the Southern Ocean (also described in the report), I'm all ears as to how hypoxia represents a "simple" explanation for the above. Like, PEOPLE DO CRAZY THINGS ON HYPOXIA BRO. They turn the plane 90 degrees to the west, shut off comms systems, fly for an hour then turn to the south for no reason! Classic hypoxia.

It definitely always looked to me like the plane was some kind of ghost plane for the latter stages of the flight. But both transponder and ACARS being shut off seem like deliberate actions with the purpose of making the plan untraceable.

My theory is pilot suicide, but perhaps suicide by depressurization. Hypoxia is supposedly a fairly pleasant way to go. The pilot didn't want to be found, shut off the comm systems, programmed the auto-pilot for the south pole and depressurized the plane, killing all on board, including himself, by slow asphyxiation.

I think this is most likely (by far, actually), but really whether the pilot was conscious when the plane went down or not isn't that relevant if you accept that he consciously caused prior events.

The Australian report seems to say, as a best guess, that the flight was deliberately diverted, and then in its final phase it became a hypoxic 'ghost flight'. We haven't seen a deliberately caused 'ghost flight' before, but technically it can be done.

Quite a while back, when the investigators went into the captain's house and started to examine his home simulator, I was waiting to see (like a lot of people) if they found files for flightplans over the far southern Indian Ocean which the captain had attempted to delete.

And, as we now know, they did.

Would the pilot be able to pull this off without the co pilot noticing? Or is this a situation where the co pilot was in on it or the pilot incapacitated/killed the co pilot?

there had better be god damn buzzers and flashing lights going off when you're even half way to passing out.

pilot had to have incapacitated the co-pilot right?

One theory is that you ask the co-pilot to step out of the cockpit for some reason ('Can you just go and...?') and then lock him out. There's no way back in if the person on the flight deck doesn't unlock the door.

W0X0F would know better (obviously), but a possible snag seems to be that a member of cabin crew is supposed to sit in if one pilot leaves the flight deck. Maybe you'd get round that by making a casual offhand suggestion, so no one's on the alert, and locking the door before the cabin-crew member comes in.

But basically, nobody knows.

Talk about running bad, another Malaysia Airlines 777 flight crashed in east Ukraine today on its way from Amsterdam to KL. 295 people on board.

Damn unbelievable