Pilot involvement seems to be indicated, I agree. However, there seems to be no wreckage, and no emergency locator beacons detected. If the aircraft crashed, on land or in water, the redundant ELT system would have been activated with a high degree of certainty. And there are the ‘eyewitness’ reports coming out of Maldives regarding the unusual low-flying jumbo jet.
So as implausible as it sounds, the plane ‘must’ have set down somewhere in a controlled manner. If that aircraft set down on land, at least anywhere ‘near’ Maldives, I think that would indicate the involvement of a sovereign nation-state. The brother of the President of Maldives, he was autocratic President there until about 2008, and he is. . . shady.
Because of the probable pilot involvement, a purely remote hack seems inadequate to explain the circumstances. Maybe he (Shah) was coerced to do his part, hence his family relocating on the eve of the flight. Maybe he was involved in the overall plot.
Diego Garcia is, I think, almost impossible to consider as a location for that plane. If signal intelligence operators on Diego Garcia detected the plane, it may have been intercepted and brought there. Then, would it not have been a tremendous public relations coup for the U.S. to say they ‘rescued’ the plane? No need to disclose sources or methods. And, would Diego Garcia be operating something like a RQ-4 Global Hawk drone, conjoined I guess with an AWACS plane — which I believe would required to remotely operate the 777 — at all hours, as a matter of standard procedure?
If, as speculated, the U.S. ‘invited’ this operation, then we are truly through the looking glass. We’ll have to defer to Alex Jones for that hypothesis.
So, hypothetically, let’s say the aircraft landed in Maldives. The earlier climb to ~45,000 feet may have been to incapacitate (murder) the passengers, and if so that would probably have killed at least most of the Freescale employees. So most likely they were not a target of kidnapping.
That plane could not stay at an airport in Maldives for very long. So the second phase may be something much more complicated than a simple refuel and immediate flight to Western Asia. Such a scenario would have to involve other state actors — maybe a flight to Oman (friendly with Iran), a clandestine repaint there, then onto Iran itself? Why? If not personnel, then some kind of materiel?
Or it could be something like this:
Pilot-”Hey, look what I have been practicing at home on my simulator”
Co-pilot-”Oh yeah, what?”
Pilot-”Watch this”
Co-pilot-”Aw craaaaap”
Pilot-”Ooooops”
I read about the Maldives sightings and interpreted it as the plane flying over the islands and on to who-knows-where, but you're right that it could've landed. This 'operation', whatever it is, appears so clever and meticulous in its planning and execution that I think we're either dealing with a nation-state as you say, or perhaps just a captain who lost his mind. With so much information and no resolution, it seems to me that the story is either much bigger or much smaller than we're thinking right now. It's easy to mistake skillful action for rational thinking. It's easy to mistake conspiracy for incompetence - or the other way around.
We may well be through the looking glass. I don't know which of our proposed scenarios is more disturbing. I hope my instincts are wrong. I grew weary of constant air travel to weird places, seeing weird things. I also have grown very mistrustful of my government and even my military (at least its command.) I'll agree there are far worse state actors out there, and I hope that our fears about this plane are proven wrong. You and I agree that it almost certainly touched down somewhere. This much time having passed without knowing where or why eliminates a lot of possibilities. The ones remaining are not very good.
A General who has been commenting from the beginning of the story of FoxNews has consistently opined the plane landed somewhere. He had some very interesting statements on Hannity tonight, among one was that if the Pakistani’s don’t come forth soon with some official response to questioning and cooperation, that in itself will be seen as incriminating.
This guy seemed to have more info than he wanted to share despite Hannity’s questioning. In fact, he begged off being questioned too closely on some things. He seems to think that there will be developments break in the next day or so and say that the US Navy wouldn’t pull out unless they knew there was nothing to be found and that some of the best “leaks” on this story are coming out of our government’s resources. He thinks the government knows more than what has been released. It was an interesting interview.