re: Official Thread: Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

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U.S. investigators suspect that Malaysia Airlines 3786. Flight 370 stayed in the air for about four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, according to two people familiar with the details, raising the possibility that the plane could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky.

Aviation investigators and national security officials believe the plane flew for a total of five hours based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing Co. 777's engines as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program.

That raises a host of new questions and possibilities about what happened aboard the widebody jet carrying 239 people, which vanished from civilian air-traffic control radar over the weekend, about one hour into a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.

Six days after the mysterious disappearance prompted a massive international air and water search that so far hasn't produced any results, the investigation appears to be broadening in scope.

U.S. counterterrorism officials are pursuing the possibility that a pilot or someone else on board the plane may have diverted it toward an undisclosed location after intentionally turning off the jetliner's transponders to avoid radar detection, according to one person tracking the probe.

The investigation remains fluid, and it isn't clear whether investigators have evidence indicating possible terrorism or espionage. So far, U.S. national security officials have said that nothing specifically points toward terrorism, though they haven't ruled it out.

But the huge uncertainty about where the plane was headed, and why it apparently continued flying so long without working transponders, has raised theories among investigators that the aircraft may have been commandeered for a reason that appears unclear to U.S. authorities. Some of those theories have been laid out to national security officials and senior personnel from various U.S. agencies, according to one person familiar with the matter.

At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose."

As of Wednesday it remained unclear whether the plane reached an alternate destination or if it ultimately crashed, potentially hundreds of miles from where an international search effort has been focused.

In those scenarios, neither mechanical problems, pilot mistakes nor some other type of catastrophic incident caused the 250-ton plane to mysteriously vanish from radar.

The latest revelations come as local media reported that Malaysian police visited the home of at least one of the two pilots.

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Someone mentioned earlier they are made to be turned off so clear up things for air traffic controllers, especially if a plane is on the ground in a crowded airspace. You don't need that plane to be "on" so you turn off to clear the screen.

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What's most interesting about this new revelation is that the plane flew for only 5 total hours rather than the possible 7 hours it carried enough fuel for.

Why would someone hijack a flight only to crash it after 5 hours?

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Why would someone hijack a flight only to crash it after 5 hours?

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Particularly when the final destination was Beijing. You know... a city of almost twelve million people.

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Which makes me think it was hijacked

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The automatic messages are sent at takeoff, every 30 minutes during cruise flight, and then on landing. Therefore, they know if the flight has either crashed or landed if the WSJ article is true.

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