By Jeff Wise, Slate 03/14/2014 Whenever a plane goes down, experienced air craft investigators look at the general circumstances and mentally draw up a list of the most likely causes not to leap to conclusions, but to prioritize lines of enquiry and organize competing hypotheses. As information comes in, it should be possible to eliminate those hypotheses one by one until at last a full understanding of the circumstances remains. The goal is to make sure that the problem will never again bring down an airliner. This philosophy works: Year by year, fewer commercial airliners are lost to accidents. The downside is that, as likely sources of aircraft accidents are eliminated, whats left behind are increasingly arcane and bizarre, once-in-a-million combinations of bad luck, incompetence, and malice. And the longer we go without any significant clues regarding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the more likely that its true cause will fall into that category. For instance? Some airline pilots have begun to speculate that one of the flight crew might have intentionally caused the plane to disappear and flown off with it to an undisclosed location. This line of speculation, outlandish as it may sound, was only bolstered when it was reported Wednesday that investigators were actively pursuing the possibility that the plane had been diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose. (Excerpt) Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-to-steal-a-boeing-777-2014-3 Hmm..., It's one thing to steal a plane. Where do you put it? You might be able to land it on a short runway, say about 4,500 ft., but you'll never take off, runway's too short, 777's need about 10,500 ft. (2 miles) minimum. Then there's matter of the runway itself. You need it to be concrete reinforced. Highways don't fill the bill, so if they landed the 777 they needed specially prepared landing areas. Stealing it is one thing landing and hiding it is quite a different this. Was it purely an accident or a suicide mission? That's still to be determined.
