Re: Malaysia Airlines Plane is Missing
Strangely enough, the more obscure the facts, the clearer the likely reality becomes.
Suicide - whatever motive - The least likely as the whole point of such an action is make sure everybody can see and knows why your doing it, or a spur of moment act of despair. Its either immediate or very high profile, you do not fly away to do it in private in the middle of nowhere, hours or days later. If you wanted privacy you would just do the job with Mogadon and Scotch behind closed doors somewhere.
Terrorism/Hijacking - Would certainly want to divert the plane, but be able to do unnoticed? If your average Hamas or Al Qidea group tried to pull this stunt, the alarm would no doubt be raised in 5 seconds and every resource put into the sky etc to try and stop/control the situation. Add to that, again its publicity that matters, so what is the point of doing this and keeping it secret, without claiming responsibility or issuing a demand?
The two key points here are that the action was deliberately done in secret and that at least one government has effectively colluded in maintaining that secrecy and have done so for a week!
I really need a lot of convincing that this is anything other than a State level Intelligence Operation, with the aim of preventing something or someone from reaching Beijing. Given the gravity of the action, it is also quite obvious that it is important or that critical information is missing, which is why time is needed to sort out the important item or passanger. Hence the need to secretly divert and detain the plane.
If it is an Intelligence operation and no doubt equally of an illegal and clandestine nature, then those responsible will need to ensure a high degree of plausible deniability. This will mean not taking the plane to any obvious State owned or run facility, which probably will rule out the "Southern Route" under discussion.
Instead I would be looking for a country, nearby, that owes others favours and has territory that it can argue to be not under its control.
I think we can discount Central Asia and Pakistan, as these are too far, enters too many other countries national air space and radar control etc to keep secret, including of course former Soviet air defences which are still strongly linked to Russia.
The best candidate I can think of is an Airstrip somewhere in a rebel zone of Myanmar, as this would tick all the boxes I can think of and is a convenient distance to fly.
The one positive of all this, is this the chances of the passengers and crew still being alive and coming out of this alive, are probably better than were earlier feared.
