Like I said...the best theory that I have read so far.
None of this makes any sense. The pilot/co-pilot/Navigator shouting Allah Akbar and trying to splash the plane works too.
The weird flight path makes a struggle for control look highly likely, and the victor(s) having only to sit back and fly in a direction where the plane simply runs out of fuel and ends up in the drink.
But usually those who are interested in martyrdom want the whole world to know it.
Exactly. Sorry, this just doesn't seem like hijacking or terrorism. I can't explain the transponders, but one could posit a scenario in which one pilot has a heart attack/aneurism/epileptic fit and pulls back hard on the controls. Maybe the co-pilot wasn't buckled in, was out of his seat, or otherwise knocked out for a few min. The plane ascends rapidly, causing everyone to black out. The pilot maybe comes to, maybe doesn't, maybe releases the controls enough that it banks. Who knows?
The reason I bring this up is a book called "Dead Mountain." It's the story of a group of nine Russian skiers back in 1959. They were on a kind of Boy Scout expedition for skiers to reach a milestone so they could be instructors. They camped on a mountain called "Dead Mountain" in the Urals. Then disappeared. Weeks later, rescue parties find their tent---nothing at all out of place, food and skis stacked, no sign of a fight, but some rips in the tent as though someone was trying to get in. They soon found the bodies---a few hundred to several hundred yards away, none of them in winter gear, some in virtually underwear, frozen to death. Something caused them to leave that tent in the middle of a Russian winter on a mountain without clothes or shoes!
For 40 years people have been unable to really figure out what happened. Theories that it was bandits were disproven; local villagers were all accounted for; and there was no violence in the tent.
The author recreated the trip and came to the astounding conclusion that at that spot on the mountain the wind, coming over the peaks, caused a sonic effect that basically causes you to go crazy. It disorients you, makes you paranoid, and it's like a mass hallucinogen. They RAN outside, thinking something was after them, when it was a sonic disruption of their brain patterns.
My point with this flight is, it could be something totally innocent, yet totally weird.