If I was to steal a jumbo jet I would not be so complacent upon believing that philosophy. Cover any possibility the Evil Satan USA has some form of satellite or Predator drone nearby that can intercept even a simple cell phone call.
From a plane at 40,000 feet even.
It’s not a philosophy, it’s a fact and simple physics.
Cellphones would have been useless on this flight, and as for Iridium, while I’ve used one before, it wasn’t from inside the cabin of a 777. Might work just fine, but those phones are specialized and fairly rare. Coming from cosmopolitan KL and headed to massive Beijing, it’s unlikely anyone on board would have had one. This flight was not going from BFE to Timbuktu, remember.