Occams Razor
: a scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.
The black boxes will be the judges, if they can be found and recovered.
I hope they will be found but remain a bit pessimistic.
To me the razor suggests a deliberate, selective disabling of key systems (those that would betray airplane movement) followed by maneuvers that suggest a) a turn toward safety, maybe, or b) a turn toward hours of evasion and eventual disappearance.
If the former, then a ghost plane could have developed one supposes, followed by loss in the sea, one also supposes. A crew of healthy mind and body and intent is not likely to drift to a remote ocean area unless there were overwhelming mechanical reasons. If that is the case then it would be awfully good to gain the remains - we need to learn how that happened.
If the latter, it's now moot - ain't going to work unless they just want to pile the missile into a backwater tower somewhere. Rah.
What follows the latter condition is also counter to living memory of terrorist events where there is typically an eagerness for credit; why? Premature? If the purpose was to use the plane for bad reasons - secrecy still needed. And it has failed, if so - Occam suggests to me if that was the case then it's too late - foiled, they'll never be able to do that now. Nothing to brag about.
And nothing the powers that be care to have the public worried about either. We should be more chilled by the prospect of a dead airplane wandering into the Indian Ocean to disappear than a stolen one that can be more easily understood. I have severe personal about a fine Boeing so well proven suddenly having a devastating self-inflicted wound. If a bomb, then how such massive crew and apparently passenger incapacitation yet airplane survival? A failed hijacking? Maybe something like that, but here the razor dulls for me.
I really do hope they find it out there, we need to know how it got to that place if that's the case. Not just for closure but for the learning - tombstone lessons are the most costly and shouldn't be wasted.
One last razor shot - the airworthiness regulators aren't very noisy on this one so far, so there must be a lot of confidence in the Boeing (as I also have)... so what do 'they' think really failed on that flight?