...Or the plane made a water landing due to engine failure, stayed in tact, took on water, and sunk leaving no floating traces.

Every seat cushion is a flotation device.

If the aircraft stayed intact and floating, the ELT should have started transmitting.

I do think the search is in the wrong area.

It seems that with this B-777 everything went wrong and the probability of that is very remote so my suspicion is that whatever happened was planned and deliberate.

- No Mayday call,
- Transponders turned OFF,
- Malaysian military tracking the aircraft to the Malacca Straits,
- No debris field reported anywhere,

One theory I heard today was that the aircraft continued and crashed in the Vietnamese jungle. Possible but then there's that ELT thingy.

Don't know, but I suspect foul play.

FWIW, $.02

I'm with you Russ, but that WSW turn after the transponder was turned off has me baffled. Of course, we're assuming the information we are getting out of Malaysia is accurate. As time goes on, we will likely find out that much of this information was inaccurate.

Floating seat cushions are only useful if the plane doors open. It's another thing that had to go wrongly...

If the plane landed on the water intact, then I would expect that at least some passengers would have escaped. Even if they subsequntly perished, life preservers, seat cushions, rafts or bodies should been located by now.
If the plane hit the water at speed and broke up, then survival is unlikely, but I would expect that the break up would release floating debris.

Recent reports indicate the Rolls Royce engines were reporting their status for four hours after the B-777 fell off the radar.
Wall Street Journal article

IIRC, and its been a while, is that RADAR isn't exactly hi-def, you simply see something vague which is why aircraft have transponders that reply with their ID. So if someone turns off that transponder the RADAR operators can't tell if its a plane or flock of birds or dense cloud so turning off the transponder you can sort of hide amongst all the noise (which is in part why they ground aircraft during situations like 9/11 for example).

Seems like they should make one transponder only accessible externally so they can't be turned off as I'm noticing that to be somewhat of a repeated theme in various hijackings and such.

Simply add a GPS field to the telemetry already being sent to Rolls Royce (or GE, depending on who made the engine). The signal is already being sent and all it needs is a GPS chip and a software change to allow for GPS lat/long/velocity (speed and vector) to be sent by both engines. For each pair of engines the GPS inputs should match and since they are both independent of the flight-station and each other... Should make for an easy fix which would be difficult to disrupt without direct access to the engines.

I feel terrible for family's of these people... In short, it seems like nobody really seems to know what is happening, and in a vacuum of information, incorrect information is quickly accepted as fact.

I still find it a little amazing that in the "surveillance" world we seem to live in today, when the governments of the world know who we email, our friends on Facebook, and who we talk to on the phone that we can still manage to lose something the size of a 777.

I remember a few years back, a famous golfer was in a private jet that apparently suffered depressurization. They actually tracked the plane across the united states, sending sever F-16's up to inspect it, finding the windows iced over and no life inside.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash

I am really wondering if this isn't the exact same situation. The only difference here is that the transponders stopped transmitting, which is strange. I wonder if their batteries are as impacted by extreme cold like any other battery? If that plane was flying @ 35,000 feet, the outside temperature would be -55C.

Hope the find it, they will eventually... at least it will bring closure to the families.

Malaysian government said they contacted Boeing and Rolls Royce and said the WSJ report is not accurate. Said the telemetry stopped minutes after they lost contact with the plane.