I've read pilots elsewhere saying the 2 hour limit isn't for technological reasons, but privacy. But I guess anyone can claim to be a pilot on the Internet .

That's a new one! Not sure why what one said three hours ago is more private than what was said in the past 2 hours?

The old magnetic tape CVR would record on a 30 minute loop, newer SSD recorders record 2 hours on a loop. As a rule, the most relevant conversation, the 'oh shit' moments come immediately before the event, certainly within 2 hours.

The FDR records aircraft systems parameters for up to 25 hours. Things going pear shaped in an aircraft can unfold over several hours, even several flights. Both are important, however the FDR data is more crucial than many hours of voice recordings to an investigation.

What about a hostage situ that lasts more than 2 hours? Wouldn't that mean that the initial hostage taking wouldn't be recorded?

Hijackings for hostages tend to last for days, though. Plus, if the hostages are released, they can tell everyone what happened.

But what if they are flown into the middle of the Indian Ocean to never be seen again!?

This is a conspiracy theorists dream scenario ay?

Disagree, the captain did it. Some of the details of how and why he did it are a bit shaky but the only other plausible explanation I can see is that the first officer did it. Apparently the captain wiped his computer in February, had relationship trouble, had the means to do it, etc.

Hijacking by someone else doesn't make sense because the ACAR wouldn't have been disabled. The fire theory has too many holes in it. The eyewitness stories have been disproven by radar and satellite.

Because he programmed the autopilot. The first waypoint is an airport on the Malaysian peninsula so it wouldn't have been a difficult route to program. Manual turn to the left, then turn right, turn left, turn left again out over the ocean. So if he took it up to 45,000 feet to asphyxiate them all, the plane would have carried on regardless. I suppose it is a bit odd to suffocate yourself rather than fly it into the ocean but my guess is that he wanted to make the plane recovery more difficult so there would always be a question mark. He couldn't fly it into the South China sea because it's too shallow and they would have figured it out and he couldn't deceive the first officer for very long so asphyxiation was apparently his chosen method.

Oxygen masks don't last very long, because the idea is that you descend to below 15,000 feet. And this is assuming he didn't disable the system like he did with ACAR.

I think the captain did it.

Well it wasn't the butler

Obviously I'm entirely speculating, but he also may have done it so that there would be a "point of no return", so to speak. There's no having second thoughts because he would have set it up to be a lost cause.

Also, if it was intention to go down in water, then going down in the Indian Ocean also made more sense than Pacific because he could get there more covertly... going out to the Pacific would have meant navigating through way more "occupied" airspace, as they would be passing by Vietnam, Brunei, the "other half" of Malaysia, the Philippines, and possibly Taiwan... that's a much harder route. Looping back over the northern Malaysian island and then out to the Indian Ocean was a much more simple route to accomplish that goal... and (obviously) a greater chance of going undetected as flying through the airspace of other countries may have resulted in fighter jets or escort planes being dispatched.

Sounds plausible enough. I just find it hard to believe a Malaysian pilot would be so callous to kill that many innocent people as part of his own suicide. I think there is more to it than a straight suicide, but do not know what. Certainly the 45000 climb is a key event. I wonder if the captain, being seemingly obsessive about flying, though he would try to take the plane as high as he could and then somehow list control or consciousness.

I agree, though - that's quite something to take out 238 other people in your own suicide. Maybe he just hit a breaking point and saw a way out and decided to take it?

I hope it was something more accidental or something though... though in the scenario you laid out, the flipside is that it doesn't explain the very deliberate flight route the plane took.

Before they knew it had gone so far south, one theory was that there was an electrical fire or something, and if that had occurred where the landing gear is, then the fumes from burning rubber could have taken everyone out. I almost LIKED that option because it just meant the whole thing was a horrible accident and not an intentional thing.

But it's hard to ignore the very, very deliberate flight path, and chalk it up to anything other than very deliberate movements.

And on that happy note, I am leaving work and going away for the weekend.

And you have a great and happy weekend

The idea that 'anyone' could do this and also whilst the passengers were aware or even vaguely aware of what was happening is more than disturbing. How is any family member going to come to terms with this?

The cockpit door may be reinforced, but not against 300 people beating on it for seven hours. I think it's pretty clear that the passengers were not conscious of what was going on.

However if 300 people all run to the front end to beat up the door, the aircraft would dive out of the sky anyway, unless there was some really big guy sitting at the back balancing the whole thing out.