Agreed, and there certainly wasn't for Egypt Air 990, for which the primary theory remains deliberate crash/ suicide.

They haven't found anything yet - the ships haven't recovered anything. At ease, at ease! The surveillance pics aren't identifiable as anything so nobody knows what they are. When they recover a piece of garbage, it's garbage. When they recover a piece of airplane, it's airtplane. It's the garbage patch because the currents go there; that's why they're looking for the wreckage there. When the aircraft return to Perth and de-brief we get the only valuable 2 minutes of news in the day, and so far it's just a bunch of floating bits.

I suspect they're looking too far south and the aircraft ran out of fuel further north. It is known that the plane was much lower than cruising altitude when it left Malaysian radar coverage, and at lower altitudes planes are much less efficient, so it may be significantly further north than they're looking.

Well, we know something very strange happened.

Beyond that, we don't know much. Hopefully the updated search area the Australians announced tonight will reveal something.

If he wanted to kill himself why fly all the way down there??? Thats what I don't get!

If it was intentional, they would presumably have thought it would never be found that way.

Personally, though, I suspect the crew were incapacitated somehow, and the plane just flew until out of fuel. It's happened before.

So not true. My grandmother and uncle, neither left a note. (they didn't do it at the same time, but 2 months apart.)

Obviously I am alive, but the time I did attempt, I left no letter.

Either (i) so as not to be found, or make it unduly difficult to find/ recover. Motive: suicide may prevent life insurance payout, OR (ii) he/ they killed himself/themselves while the plane was flying itself, so they (perhaps deliberately) weren't conscious/ alive at the time of the crash.

One of the theories is that they raised the plane to 45,000ft to knock everyone out as the plane isn't built to go that high. So they may have done that, then set the plane on a course where it would just fly until it went down, and then would go down in the ocean instead of on land.

And suicides don't always have a note left behind... possible one of the pilots was already on edge a bit and just had a breaking point. (A friend of a friend committed suicide around 2 years ago, he was suffering from depression. One day he was walking home from the grocery store and went over a rail bridge as a train was coming. He saw the opportunity and jumped. No note, and not a lot of premeditation - just jumped.)

There's no reason to suspect that he did; this is all unsubstantiated speculation. A theory that a baggage handler upset at China's stance on Taiwan hid a thermite bomb on the plane before take-off in order to kill as many Chinese people as he could has the same amount of credibility - none whatsoever.

Not really. That theory would have a hard time explaining most of the communications going off, the plane turning, and then flying for hours before it crashed; it's possible, if it happened to take out exactly the right set of electronics, but not likely.

No theory I've seen yet explains everything that's been reported.

I read that even if they do find the black box, a lot of the flight will still be left as a big question mark because the box only records the most recent 2 hours, then it loops on itself... so there won't be evidence of what happened when the flight went off-course in the first place, since it flew for another 6-7 hours after that.

The voice recorder only records 2 hours, because flights that crash almost always do so within 2 hours of the cause of the crash. The data recorder should have the entire flight.

It's also possible that whatever or whoever shut off communications shut off the voice recorder too, so it may have useful information on it. I don't believe the crew can shut off the data recorder.

That said, even the noises on the voice recorder might still provide useful info, if it was running for the entire flight.

I'm guessing the next generation of voice recorders will record the entire flight.

Ah interesting, I hadn't appreciated the difference. So at least they'd get something... and can figure out exactly what happened wtih the altitude and whatever else that the data recorder catches.

CBC had an article this morning that was talking about why the data isn't live-streamed... http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ma...data-1.2586966 . Makes an interesting read.

I think current ones already do, MH370 was built in 2002.