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Ask your friend if he has any experience with the acquisition and maintenance habits of foreign 3rd world airlines.

There are very good reasons US airlines tend to never buy secondhand planes from companies like Malaysia Airlines. Their planes are bare bones to begin with and definitely not maintained to FAA nor manufacturer’s specs.

We already know MAS opted out of the Boeing Jet-Data Services. There is no way MAS brought their plane in for annual maintenance and asked Boeing to retrofit it with BUAP.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-12/malaysian-air-said-to-opt-out-of-boeing-plan-to-share-jets-data.html

But let’s just imagine for a second that this plane did have BUAP retrofitted. We must say retrofitted because BUAP didn’t exist in 2002 when 9M-MRO was manufactured. But lets say Boeing secretly installed it during it’s last avionics servicing. Why then was the transponder switched off by someone in the cockpit? Or are you saying that BUAP can switch the ACARS transponder off too? Personally I don’t know if BUAP is capable of that.

Any current avionics experts on this forum?

I’ll speculate to a certain point, but I refuse to guess about the full capabilities of the BUAP. Either way, I think it more likely than not that someone in the cockpit was actively participating in this event.

You have FReepmail.