Someone I was talking to thought that it could have been shot down by one of the countries. If it was, that could explain quite a lot. I think the odds of it just exploding for no reason, are highly unlikely, as these planes are very safe, and the most dangerous part of the trip is landing and taking off.
I'm sure there's information out there that hasn't been revealed yet. Just knowing when the telemetry broadcasts stopped should give some idea of the areas they need to look.
Those telemetry broadcasts (as far as we - the general public know) ceased where flightradar etc lost the transponder signal. As I understand it, ACARS normally sends only a "handshake" signal. If it dropped very quickly more than 5,000 feet (so out of transponder range) due to some system failure then ACARS should have had some condition to report - which should have been received by the airline. Theory that it could have lost all power, but continued to fly elsewhere really isn't credible on a modern ETOPS certified jetliner. Even if they lost both engines, there's so much built in redundancy including APU, batteries. In the million to one chance it still could have lost power (but at least one engine still running) the chance of the pilot flying the thing any distance is about zero anyway. Speculation that it could have flown across Malaysia, half way across the Malacca Strait toward Indonesia airspace doesn't cut it IMO. It would have absolutely been seen by military radar, there's no way they'd not respond to an unscheduled flight from a jet plane across their airspace, from a plane with no transponder, that didn't respond to radio contact. Until they locate this plane and determine what happened, there's an awfully big question mark hanging over plenty of people.
Look up any model jet airliner, and you'll find such a list, but the fact is that these days they don't often fall to pieces and drop out of the sky, even if some kind of catastrophic failure like this was always on the list of possibilities - and will remain so until there's some evidence of anything else.
Hmmm - an afterthought though... If that did happen (hull failure starting from the satellite antenna) then that could explain why the transponder position signal was lost, yet radio contact was reportedly made after that happened, why there's no wreckage in the original search area, and also makes the report from the Kiwi on the oil rig hundreds of km N/NE more plausible.
Hmm, photo caption said "near where a Kiwi saw a burning object in the sky" but reading further, it seems that the areas where objects have been sighted may be some distance from the oil rig?
If china have an aerial photo of a possible crash site, I wonder why the company operating this crowd sourcing hasn't shown their version of the image yet, as we know the rough location of it, as their photos seem higher resolution.
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