Missing Malaysia plane: 'Oil slick seen'

That's why I was suggesting the aircraft could fly as far as Iran, I am not one for conspiracy theories, but vehicle theft had occurred to me.

There are problems with that idea though, a 777 is big and it would not be that easy to fly it any distance with it not transmitting any valid identification.

However if Iran had successfully acquired enough fissionable material to make a bomb the chances are that the bomb would be too large for any delivery system they have so stealing a plane that could carry that kind of load makes sense in that respect, target would have to be Israel as it's close enough that the flight could be short.

On the cargo theory there are other more valuable dense heavy metals other than gold.

So where might be the passengers? It's not a credible theory at all, but it's possible the plane may have made it to Iran given the 777's range, but who is holding the passengers for the last 7 days? Don't tell me, they dropped them off at a small remote island in the middle of nowhere, just waiting for international rescue aka Thunderbirds to rescue them, with Obama at the controls.

Normally any terrorist group holding a plane load of passengers will be parading them on TV by now.

Yes of course they do and it is probably a ridiculous theory, but stranger things and all that, we all know from experience that an aircraft is a very potent weapon.

When under water radio signals are more or less useless, radio waves do not propagate in water, it's going to be some kind of acoustic pinger and maybe that is only activated in the event of it being submerged, just checked and apparently that is the case.

Really? In this day and age of mobile phone and internet, it's going to be hard work hiding 230+ people for a week or more, someone is bound to say something, so no, I don't buy it.

I hadn't actually read Dave's link until now, but Fact #4 is unlikely, if the phones stayed online then the cellphone companies know within fairly narrow limits where the phones are and were, in other words if the phones were on then the flight was trackable, also if they were on for days then they had to be running on GSM not 3G and that implies they had to be in range of a fairly good signal or even on GSM the batteries would have run out really fast.