Flight 370 - Failed Terrorist Hijacking?

A British al Qaeda "supergrass" (slang for informer) told British authorities quite some time ago that al Qaeda had supplied Malaysian Islamists with shoe-borne explosives to use to gain access to a locked flight cockpit on a Malaysian airliner, a plot that had been in the works for at least two years.

(Grabbed from American Digest, reported in The Telegraph.)

In the last day or so we have learned that there is no longer any doubt that the flight was hijacked and that instead of staying in the air for four hours after communications ceased, its automatic electronic pinging of satellites continued for more than seven hours - right up to the time its fuel would have run out.

The final satellite contact was at 8.11am, five-and-a-half hours after the jet’s last known position. During that time, the aircraft could have flown 3,000 miles at its normal cruising speed.

Apparently the hijackers killed the passengers to prevent them from opposing:

"This is feeling like kind of a failed hijacking," a federal law enforcement official said, speaking anonymously because the investigation was ongoing.

He said U.S. authorities theorized that once the plane was diverted toward the Indian Ocean, it was flown erratically at high altitudes in an attempt to depressurize the cabin and render the passengers unconscious. "That could have neutralized any threat from them to take the plane back," he said.

A consensus seems to be emerging that the plane was then flown either to a Islamist-controlled area of Pakistan or to Iran. But forget the maximum range of the Boeing 777 aircraft of 7,000-plus miles. Flight 370 was not carrying that much fuel. The fuel range of the flight on that particular night was rather less. Iran was not in range and only the southeast corner of Pakistan was.

Meaning that the plane made an intermediate landing where the dead passengers and their baggage were dumped and more fuel taken, then took off again (for Iran, I would say), which I developed here, or in suffocating the passengers the hijackers managed to suffocate themselves, and the plane flew on until fuel ran out, then dropped into the sea.

Because we know that the plane was definitely airborne until very close to the time of fuel exhaustion, the latter case seems thankfully more likely (as of now, anyway). But it also means that the area where the plane could have gone down is in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of square miles, and there is no way of knowing where to start searching.

We may never know what happened to it.

Update: This diagram of possible flights path gives an idea of the vastness of possible destinations before it ran out of fuel (link). Note that the maximum range of Flight 370 reaches only a small part of Pakistan and none of Iran. The shaded arc illustrates only major land potential destinations, but to encompass the entire area the plane could have flow, the arc would need to be extended down to the bottom of the diagram.

Plus this: "... if it was diverted into the Indian Ocean, the task of the search teams becomes more difficult, as there are hundreds of uninhabited islands and the water reaches depths of around 23,000ft."

IIRC, that depth is greater than the range of the emergency locator transmitters aboard the plane, which are automatically activated by immersion or high g-forces of an impact.

Update: Here is the WaPo's map of the maximum distance the plane could have flown from last known location:

This is interesting, too:

Update: In 1996 hijackers took over Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 and forced the crew to fly the airliner until it ran out of fuel.

The plane crash-landed in the Indian Ocean near Grande Comore, Comoros Islands, due to fuel starvation; 125 of the 175 passengers and crew on board died, along with the hijackers

The crash was so close to shore that beach goers actually videoed the crash.