Ok, so unless they were trying to rendezvous with the secret undersea Nazi base on the underwater volcano, it looks like the "steal the airplane" thing either was wrong entirely or went completely awry.
As for scenarios, based on what CNN had on their screens I would say of the media, they have pretty much jumped the shark.
I am more and more interested in what steps international authorities will take with regards to requirements for commercial aircraft. We have the technology to prevent disappearances like this from occurring again, so will they step up and require them? The costs of the search must be pretty high by now
One of the scenarios, which has been credited as reasonable, is a big fire in the aircraft [1].
In the scenario depicted, "all the busses are pulled", in which case the airplane goes silent, then restored one by one, except that because of the fire, restoration hasn't been possible.
If that will prove to be the case, I think prevention measures would be quite hard - circuits were silenced.
I believe you nailed that one! And some people doubted the value of speculation on forums in terms of aiding the investigation :-)
People have explained on other threads that the pilot can pretty much turn off anything they want on board, so I'm not sure how you'd prevent that. Maybe they should have some kind of black-box-transponder thing that's self contained and cannot harm the aircraft even if, say, the circuitry were to catch on fire. Shrug... not my area of expertise by a long shot.
Apparently they almost do: the emergency transponder beacon at the back of the plane can be triggered by G force, and has its own battery. http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re... That leads to the question of why this particular dog wasn't heard to bark when (and if) MH370 hit the water in the Indian Ocean, but that could probably be explained by assuming that the tail section sank fairly quickly: the beacon doesn't work underwater. But interestingly it also highlights what the Law of Unintended Consequences could do to self-powered, tamper-resistant systems: http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/18/news/dreamliner-fire-report/
You always have to assume that any device on the plane can be destroyed in an instant. Based on that assumption the real need is to detect loss of contact as quickly as possible and then respond to it in an appropriate and timely fashion. It is difficult to fuse data from hundreds of desperate sources into a coherent picture especially when they may be military.
I read somewhere around 5000 metres, double that of Air France 447. So if that is indeed the wreckage, it will take a while to recover the black boxes.
https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=-43.5834,90.5737 [from 1]
https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=-44.0302,91.1327 [from 2]
Based off these images:
[1] https://photos-4.dropbox.com/t/0/AAAFoSL9yTdmE2e4_DanfiQ5uk_...
[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjJuy3QCUAAHS7s.jpg:large