I believe the pilot or pilots intended to fly on to India and degrade a ground target.
Likely, the maneuvers used up too much fuel and the pilot, realizing he couldn’t make the target, decided to nose-in to the Bay of Bengal before they were spotted by Indian radar.
Flying to the end of the aircraft’s range uses up fuel that would float to the surface and cause an easily detected fuel slick.
Choosing their flight plan likely considered that Thai and Burmese military radar are usually turned off after 2300.
Your explanation sounds good, except for, if the hijacker(s) were so sophisticated, how could they made the simple mistake of miscalculating the fuel?
Whoever did this - and it’s pretty clear by now that it was not an accident and in fact took pretty sustained intervention over a long period of time - knew an incredible amount about these planes, the conditions, the surroundings, etc. I doubt that it was a one-person job.
However, I find it hard to believe that, after having done all their homework, they wouldn’t have calculated exactly how much fuel they needed to reach their destination - under whatever circumstances - and even left fuel to spare. Why succeed on the complicated stuff and mess up on something so simple?
I think the plane is out there somewhere, and I’m not really sure what the target might be. The younger co-pilot who had a Middle Eastern Muslim name but very Chinese features might be a possibility, if the goal was to attack some power they thought was “dissing” the Muslims (China or Russia). On the other hand, the direction in which they were finally headed doesn’t seem as if that would be likely.
The first “wanted” photograph they issued was of a black Italian soccer star because supposedly the person with the stolen Italian passport “looked like” the soccer star, Mario Somebody-or-Other. What he looked like was African, from the large group of African refugees in Italy, while the stolen passport holder looked completely ME and did not resemble him in the least. So I wonder if somewhere, a photo of an African (Somali, Kenyan, Nigerian) with terrorist connections has turned up and this was a way of trying to get some identification of him.
From what I’ve read - and I know nothing except what I read, since the only thing I know about planes is that I like a window seat - the plane could have reached Africa around the region of Somalia or Madagascar. The biggest problem, according to another poster, would have been getting past Diego Garcia, but then, they seem to have figured out all the other ways of avoiding detection, so maybe they came up with something on this one too.
There were five Indian nationals on the passenger manifest.
Presumably investigators are looking into these individuals to see if any are radical muslims.
They need not have run out of fuel, a terrorist pilot might have just screwed up and splashed it as he reduced altitude approaching the Indian border and was trying to fly low just over the water to avoid being spotted by Indian air control radar.
Of course, because if you have the fantastic knowledge of avionics required for all this to have been done by a hijacker, you would have no idea about the fuel capacity of a B777.
I mean if one wants to attack a target in India using a hijacked jet the obvious place to hijack the jet would be over the Gulf of Thailand in a jet flying from Malaysia to China. Because as we all know there are no jet aircraft anywhere near India.