The groundbreaking news today confirm our initial assessment, that Flight 370 was electronically hijacked, and open the way to speculations regarding the whereabouts of the missing plane. Since Flight 370 stayed in the air for up to four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, it could have traveled 2220 nautical miles. That’s long enough to land it in any of several island bases in the Indian ocean, some are well known like Diego Garcia, but there are probably others of more clandestine nature. One possible alternative could be Coco islands where the existence of a Chinese SIGINT station has been suggested in the past, but the place was also reported to be eyed by the US military as a future spy base (UPDATE: Radar data suggests Flight 370 flown toward Andaman Islands). Guesstimates renegading the motives and perpetrators remain unconfirmed at this point, so this could have been a black op by either the Chinese or the Americans.
From the Wall street Journal
U.S. investigators suspect that Malaysia Airlines3786.KU -4.08% Flight 370 stayed in the air for up to 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.
Former FBI agent Chris Voss joins the News Hub to discuss U.S. investigators’ suspicions that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stayed in the air for four hours after vanishing from civilian air-traffic control radar.
The investigators believe the plane flew for a total of up to five hours, according to these people, based on analysis of signals sent by the Boeing BA -2.04% 777’s satellite-communication link designed to automatically transmit the status of certain onboard systems to the ground.
Throughout the roughly four hours after the jet dropped from civilian radar screens, these people said, the link operated in a kind of standby mode and sought to establish contact with a satellite or satellites. These transmissions did not include data, they said, but the periodic contacts indicate to investigators that the plane was still intact and believed to be flying.