Quote:
Originally Posted by Skybird
Or mid-air-destruction by exploding fuel or engine, or explosive cabin depressurization, which still leaves the question of what caused it.
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I don't know of course, but that's what I'm thinking. And it might have been from a lightning strike, however unprobable that might be. At some point this happened to another airliner once - lightning struck the fuel tanks and caused an explosion. I've now also heard from the news that the parts of the wreckage are dispersed over a pretty wide area, which would favor a disintegration mid-air at high altitude.
Anything else makes it difficult to see how they were not able to send a mayday call. I know the "aviate, navigate, communicate" rule, but when you are outside radar coverage, over the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night, it must occur to you that reporting your position and status is like EXTREMELY important if you want to provide your passengers with any chance of survival. So if they didn't, either all electrical systems failed, which is somewhat improbable with the high redundancy in modern airplanes, or what happened must have been so disastrous to disable them at once. And that could only be an explosion or catastrophic depressurization.
Even a catastrophic loss of control due to a software or whatever failure with the airplane departing and entering a spin or whatever and the crew trying to recover, doesn't explain why they wouldn't send a radio call while the plane goes down from 11 km. Or they must have gone down like a comet to not make a call while their radio was still working.