MH370: a conflict of interest for the search operations
In the past few days, I've read all sort of theories about the flight MH370: terrorisms (no claim?), emergency landing, cyber-hijacking (seriously? no, I mean, seriously?), landed somewhere and disassembled, re-sold on black market, hijacked because of the Freescale Semiconductor employees onboard - the list goes on and on.
What I found fascinating about all these theories, is that they all need a very complex explanation (Ockham's razor anyone?). So I have a theory - that is based on a very logical consequence of the original scenario.
First, the airplane has been diverted intentionally. The sharp turn, the contextual instrumentation turned off, the sequence of how instruments were turned off all suggest intentional hijack. No surprise here. By who? The pilots. From the type and complexity of maneuver, the sequence of events (first - transponder off, then cockpit communication), and the knowledge of how to disable ACARS / SAT leads to someone very experienced at the controls - very different from what happened on 9/11 for example. Not to mention that, at the time of the communications, they were still at the controls in the cockpit when the contact was lost.
I would rule out the emergency landing (one of the hottest theory today): they had still comms when transponder and other instruments were going down. And in an emergency landing, you want ground support - you don't want to get there and "surprise!". You want firefighters, support teams, ambulances to be there waiting for you. You are in an emergency landing, you will evacuate all your passengers in less than 90 seconds after you have stopped the engines: you are running against time. So you will broadcast on all available radio channels that you are coming down.
So what we know next, is that the plane went into one of two possible commercial corridors - one heading North, the other South. The one heading south goes a little bit in the middle of nowhere. If you want to hijack a plane, and you are fully aware of how much autonomy you have (expert pilots at the cockpit), why going in the middle of nowhere? If the goal is to just ditch the plane, you could do it anywhere. You might want to do it in a place where everyone can see it, and where perhaps local TV can broadcast its horror for days worldwide. You fly 8 hours, just to plumb into the open ocean? It does not make much sense.
So, you might want to go North. Many destinations there: China, India, all South Asia at your beck and call. Indeed, the latest public radar data seems to support this.
Ok, but then what happens next? Well, this is an "invisible" plane - the transponder off. But for commercial purposes, not military radars. Not for countries that are in constant battle mode [http://rt.com/news/japan-south-korea-china-432/]. Yes, you can fly low. Yes, you can follow some of the blind spots of military radars. But no, you cannot travel for so long (7, 8 hours?), touching so many different countries' borders and escape from everyone's radar / AWACS. Not with that cross section. Not in that area. It might be good for an episode of the TV-series 24, but it doesn't really work in real life. Nations have spent billion of dollars in developing stealth technologies, radar absorbent materials - and the only needed thing to be stealth, was to turn off the transponder? And indeed, the military's data is showing they have tracked the plane for some time - at least in some areas [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26603830].
So, the next question is: what would happen if you try to break into someone's airspace unannounced and uninvited? Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 Very likely, the military would scramble jet fighters to come to you and say hi. They have no idea about your intentions and, after September 11, they assume your intentions are the worst. If you don't collaborate or you don't respond, they will very likely shoot your plane down. This is what I believed it happened to flight MH370. The pilots might have not collaborated - thinking "they will never shoot us down". Or perhaps, this was the original intention: provoke a target country, if they shoot us down, 'they' will need to respond publicly of that action. We will probably never know the pilots' intentions.
Then why who has executed the military operation isn't saying anything?
Well, why would you turn yourself in [http://www.airforcemag.com/magazinearchive/pages/2013/january%202013/0113korean.aspx]? The plane is nowhere to be found, why claiming responsibility for such act and the public/diplomatic consequences of that? Yes, you can explain it, still you are bringing a huge problem to yourself. If the plane is under the sea, or scattered on top of a mountain or a desert, it will take a long time before someone would figure this out. The black boxes might be gone by that time. Till no one finds any evidence, nothing has happened, silence.
34 years after the Ustica's incident, we only know that "someone" has taken the plane down , but no nation has ever claimed responsibility for that act [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerolinee_Itavia_Flight_870]. It took 20 years for Russia to admit the responsibility of what happened with flight KAL007.
So, if that's what really happened, it's also clear that some of the parties currently involved in the search&rescue operations might have a good interest in avoiding the actual crash site. No crash site, no airplane, no smoking gun.