Be careful about making assumptions off that transcript.
I am seeing pilots claim that it may be bogus and seeing claims it could have been washed several times...especially through the hands of the Chinese. Chinese get it..translate..edit etc..and then it comes from there to the newspaper who posted it in English.
It’s missing certain things that should be there.
As for only one person speaking..apparently it is not unusual for the one not flying to be the one speaking. However, it has not been confirmed who was speaking..just a reporter making a claim.
That is not to say you aren’t right.
You could be.
It’s even possible the one doing the speaking was neither pilot and was the Hijacker since a lot of the transcript does not conform to actually ATC standards.
If the plane was shot down, it’s very likely to have been shot down by the Chinese; since so many of the passengers were Chinese, Beijing will do its best to obfuscate and misdirect. I agree with whomever it was up there somewhere in this thread that if the US has technology that can (and already has) locate (d) it, there may be reasons why that information can’t be shared.
My current best wild guess is, the pilot did not act alone; since the communication gizmos were systematically shut down, that’s very likely the result of at least one crewmember acting to do that.
Earliest eyewitness accounts of midair explosion and debris turned out to be bogus; every other report of debris has been checked and found wanting; there’s no floating fuel residue or oil residue (so far), and chances are that if none has been found to this point, it’s getting unlikely that any will remain to be found (it’ll dissipate below the level of detection, short of someone sailing right into it with a surface ship).
The most persistent and widespread eyewitness accounts point to a westward trajectory, and this is confirmed by radar data (otherwise there’s no explanation for the radar data).
Not too sure that the Boeing claim really supports a landing in Pakistan, and if it were in Pakistan, it would have been identified on the ground by the US, Russia, and China (at least, and maybe India and Israel) by now. It’s difficult to figure out why Pakistan would sit on something like this, even if the jet had been landed in one of the quasi-independent regions (and that would assume they had an airfield that would take it). If it’s about ransom, the pirates have been inexplicably quiet up until now.
The only group claiming responsibility was some Uighur group that I don’t think I’d ever heard of before. If the purpose was to just crash the plane, they did a really lousy job of it, because it wasn’t found immediately.
Probably the plane was bound to some place in southern Asia but west of India, and didn’t quite make the whole trip. If so, it probably won’t be found, since there’s zero talk about a search zone in the Arabian Sea.