Also, the answer might well be "what" instead of who. Many people have pointed out that the cargo manifest hasn't been published, and that the airline declared 50 less seats as available for boarding than the plane had. This means it had several tons of cargo on board.
totally agree. it must be a what/who scenario by merit of the lengths to which they went to get the entire plane. this is surely a state-level intelligence action.
the blocking off of passenger seats often indicates an especially heavy or oddly weighted cargo.
something else that is notable is that you know several large world governments have continuous satellite tracking of this flight but are not sharing any information about it.
(Not to join in on the conspiracy theories, but...)
If you were part of the plan to hide this plan, surely you'd go along with the ruse and send some search teams to go look at some empty water somewhere else.
I'd guess the crews on the ships and planes would have to do so many hours of training a year anyway, so them circling about for a while would probably count towards that.
Reportedly some 50 seats were blocked off to save weight for extra cargo. Suppose each person plus their baggage weighs 80 kg, that's 4000 kg. Let's say 50% of that is taken up by containers, packing, and security devices, yielding 2000 kg of gold. It comes out to 90MM USD at today's prices. A lot of money, but probably not enough to go to so much trouble.
I don't think gold is valuable enough for stealing a whole plane and killing 220 passengers.
Gold, for it's weight, is very expensive. Transporting gold of high enough volumes for it to be worth killing so many people, steal a plane as well as making all of that possible wouldn't be worth it, I would say.
2 tons of gold are something that a reasonable person can actually expect to be able to convert into money without undue risk to his person. A stolen airplane isn't.
People keep talking about how this needs so much sophistication that it's probably a state action.
All I can see is something that one person with good planning could have done. That is, the pilot or the co-pilot waits until the other guy visits bathroom, climbs high enough and disables pressurization to knock out/kill the passengers and the rest of the crew, then disable communications, turn off transponder, sneak out of controlled airspace behind another plane, land anywhere with an unused strip with a truck waiting, abscond with the cargo.
That requires sophistication and careful planning, but is not beyond the realm of the possible.
a reasonable person can convert 2 tons of gold to cash without undue risk?
Given that 2 tons of stolen gold can't be legally sold, I'd suspect that anyone with that kind of cash on hand might be the kind it would be risky to do business with...
Also, the answer might well be "what" instead of who. Many people have pointed out that the cargo manifest hasn't been published, and that the airline declared 50 less seats as available for boarding than the plane had. This means it had several tons of cargo on board.