@hawkeye10,
hawkeye10 wrote:The fact that as of now not a single bit of this plane has been found washed up on some shore in my mind calls great doubt into the story that this thing went down in the water.
Also, I am now 95% sure that some government somewhere knows exactly what happened to this plane and is keeping it a secret. Top contenders by conventional wisdom are the Malaysians, Russians, Americans but I would put the Chinese right up there too.
I think the people who took the plane, be they crew or hijackers, flew it as close to Antarctica as fuel range would allow, then set it down softly in the water so that it would sink without a trace.
I think it was an al-Qa'ida test run for a larger attack that would simultaneously take multiple American planes and make them all vanish without a trace.
I do not know whether al-Qa'ida views their test as a success or not. While we haven't found the plane, we have likely tracked it better than they expected, and have potentially made changes that will make make future flights even easier to track.