re: Official Thread: Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

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CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien called the fresh details about the flight a "game changer."

"Now we have no evidence the crew did anything wrong," he said. "And in fact, now, we should be operating with the primary assumption being that something bad happened to that plane shortly after they said good night."
If a crisis on board caused the plane to lose pressure, he said, pilots could have chosen to deliberately fly lower to save passengers onboard.
"You want to get down to 10,000 feet, because that is when you don't have to worry about pressurization. You have enough air in the atmosphere naturally to keep everybody alive," he said. "So part of the procedure for a rapid decompression ... it's called a high dive, and you go as quickly as you can down that to that altitude."
Military radar tracked the flight between 1:19 a.m. and 2:40 a.m. the day it went missing, the source told CNN, but it's not clear how long it took the plane to descend to 12,000 feet.

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If the latest information is accurate, the theory of pilots trying to save the plane fits, said Mark Weiss, a former American Airlines pilot and CNN aviation analyst.
But that's a big if, he said.
"We've had so much information come out and so much contradictory information come out, that I caution against jumping to any types of conclusions at this point," he said.

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On Saturday, searchers found a wooden pallet as well as strapping belts, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority's John Young said. The use of wooden pallets is common in the airline industry.
"It's a possible lead ... but pallets are used in the shipping industry as well," he said Sunday. Authorities have said random debris is often found in the ocean.

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the wreckage isn't in the focused search area.

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Something catastrophic happens, but it can still fly for 7 hours? I'm not buying it.

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To the list of characters to emerge from Central Asia onto the American psyche we now must add the Tsarnaev brothers, the sadly nonfictional ethnic Chechens who spent parts of their childhoods in Kyrgyzstan before eventually reaching Boston to set off bombs at the crowded marathon finish line. A rebellious people, long at odds with Russian colonizers, the Chechens were exiled en masse to Central Asia in 1944. The descendants of those exiles formed tight-knit diasporas across the region and watched from afar as their ancestral homeland, still part of the Russian Federation, got bulldozed in a separatist war in the 1990s, to be later rebuilt into a police statelet under Ramzan Kadyrov, a thuggish, Instagram-loving young vassal installed by Moscow.

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@ABC 20m NEW: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH066 to SKorea diverted to Hong Kong after electrical power generator malfunction - @WorldNews

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Wow. Any idea on if this is a 777?

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Airbus A330-300 (twin-jet)

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