What are your thoughts on the missing planes and conspiracy theories? I don’t think it is possible to just lose a plane because it would leave behind pieces of the plane if it crashed. I know the sharks may eat the people or it could have caught on fire but overall there would be some trace of the plane somewhere. I believe that the planes were high jacked and taken somewhere. Somewhere where our technology is foggy and unable to get an exact location of the coordinates. With our technology these days I find it hard to believe that we can’t find them.
It's rare for planes to just vanish, but it does happen. Over the past 20 years there have been around 20 passenger planes 'lost' for a period of time greater than a few days, and five of them are still missing. Ok two of these are smaller aircraft, a DHC-6 Twin Otter (also lost in the same area as MH 370) and a Beechcraft 65-a10 (lost over the jungles of Guyana) but the others are big planes, an Antonov An-72 cargo plane missing over the south Atlantic and a Boeing 727 last seen over Angola, and of course MH370. NO TRACE at all of any of these planes has yet been found, no wreckage, nothing. Here is a list of all the worlds missing aircraft going back to the earliest days of aviation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aerial_disappearances
Most lost aircraft do however turn up again at some point, although it can take weeks, months or even years to find the wreckage. An extreme case is a
BSAA Avro Lancastrian that went missing over the Andes in 1947, and was only found in 1998. More recent cases include
Air France 447, which was lost in 2009 over the Atlantic and not found for over two years and
Air Asia 8501 lost just before Christmas 2014 and not located for over three weeks, despite the plane going down over one of the worlds busiest air and shipping lanes.
In the case of MH370 all we know is that 1 hour into the flight the plane vanished from civilian radar screens for reasons unknown, it was then tracked by Malaysian military radar for another hour until it flew out of tracking range and has not been seen since. There are any number of reasons why this could happen. Yes hi-jacking is one, but there are a number of accidental scenarios that could also explain what happened, and until the aircraft, or its wreckage is located EVERYTHING is just conjecture.
Now finding the wreckage is the rub, the plane was carrying enough fuel to reach Beijing, plus emergency reserves, giving it around 7-8 hours of possible flying time, and over that period it could have gone a long way. That means searchers have a huge area of the earths surface to cover, even after narrowing the search area down based on last known headings and the possible satellite contact 7 and a half hours into the flight. (when the plane still had about 1 hour of fuel left by official calculations). As most of the possible crash area is over the south Indian and Southern Oceans, most of it well away from air corridors and shipping lanes, in seas many thousands of feet deep it would be very unlikely that any search planes or vessels could locate any wreckage quickly, and the longer the wreckage is unlocated the lesser the chances of anything being found. The plane itself will sink, any floating debris will be dispersed by wind and waves with in hours of the crash, and much of that will soon become waterlogged and also sink, and what little is left, will soon be scattered by wind and ocean currents over thousands and thousands of square miles.
Personally I feel the wreckage will never be found given the circumstances, all we may ever find of MH370 is maybe a life jacket or the like washed up on a beech somewhere. (and even that will be a lucky find)