Malaysian Jet

Just flying off course if the intent is to crash in the ocean still doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Intentional turn to avert on board electrical emergency followed by trouble with oxygen system for cockpit with continued hypoxic flight to crew death makes sense. After that, plane flew on autopilot altitude hold provision until fuel exhaustion.

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This whole thing is completely off the wall and in my personal opinion the wreckage will never be found. I am completely perplexed as to what could have happened.
It would have been pilot suicide, that to me at least makes the most sense.
If there had been a fire or another catastrophic event then the plane would not have flown for a further 7 or 8 hours after contact was lost. This makes no sense to me.

Also, the exact turns after contact was lost, including acsent to FL450, then back down to FL310, then possibly diving down to under 6000 feet? That, at least to me says someone was in the cockpit flying the plane. Who.......well, that would be the million dollar question.

I hope they find the CVR and we can all stop speculating but I don't have much hope in that.....

CVR is a closed loop and often pertinent data is lost. Sometimes its not the conversations but the background noise levels and timing cues that are important.

I think electrical alarms suggestive of a major problem followed by oxygen system malfunction.

No evasive action. No ulterior motives. Just: Go on oxygen and soon find out there isn't any followed by hypoxemia and death.

I understand the loop is two hours. For typical accidents/incidents the most critical data would be in the last minutes, but in this case I'm thinking the last two hours could well be silent and the time six hours before is most pertinent but overwritten.

Interestingly Malaysia Air had an incident at Heathrow a couple years ago when an engine was lost and the plane returned to ground. Inadvertently the CVR was left running and all relevant recordings were lost.

A few bits: the CVR requirements changed from 30 minutes to 2 hours for air carrier operations in 2012, as chickenman noted, but could be longer. Chances are, for legal reasons, the recorders are set to meet the minimum standards (you don't want to retain records that can be FOIA'd against you one minute longer than required, if you're gov't or corp.; saw that a lot in ATC, where they were scrupulous about daily disposal of records/tapes). However, if they turned it off with everything else (fuses), it could retain critical clues. If they weren't able to disable it (and my guess is they weren't) electronically, then it might well be continuous quiet if everyone was dead AND the airplane stayed flying til fuel exhaustion. Any warnings from the airplane's systems would be duplicated in FDR data anyway.

The FDR holds last 25 hours with hundreds of parameters, so is likely to give a lot more information but probably no indication of intent. I guess it's possible that hypoxia is involved, but it would have to be deliberate and taking place after numerous other deliberate actions happened, such as switching off the ACARS, transponders, reprogramming the FMS, etc .

The air supply has a lot of fail-safes on it, but there is a cockpit panel that allows for temperature, system reset, and there almost have to be fuses that can be pulled (or overridden these days with glass cockpits) to disable it, though I can't imagine the computer would have allowed the air to be disabled when the other sensors were showing the aircraft at altitude under power. Perhaps it was a configuration unimaginable to the programmers and so they didn't cross-reference the possibility, but I think it's most likely they did post-Egypt Air.

Supplemental oxygen in the cabin is triggered by pressure sensors, and the individual cockpit oxygen masks are on a toggle switch (it's part of your cockpit checklist to turn it on, whether pilot or jump-seat rider). The primary airflow is built into the airframe, where air is collected by the engines at high heat, filtered and cooled through the wings into the cabin, and the outflow goes through floor vents into the underbelly, where the AC system is. It uses HEPA filters to scrub the air for bacteria and particles, expels some of it, and recirculates some of it with constant fresh-air feed from the engines.

They were up there way too long for inadvertent hypoxia; that would have happened within 5 minutes of leaving 14K feet, and they were up there a lot longer, in communication and with no indication of trouble. It would be a mercy (assuming they're dead, and compared to being aware the airplane is going down) if that's what happened to the cabin, because you get a little silly, a little dizzy, pass out, and wake up dead. So I guess it would be the second-best-case scenario, after alive and landed somewhere for some purpose (which is still what I think).

Assuming they can recover enough parts, at least a fire can probably be forensically identified if it spread enough to char different parts of the plane while still flying. I know they will reconstruct as much as the plane as they find in some hanger somewhere.

Some other causes will be more difficult without recordings of some sort.

Actually, they may even be able to detect unusual residue on non charred parts. But have no idea how much the ocean deep affects all that.

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....you get a little silly, a little dizzy, pass out, and wake up dead.

Ahhh, college. I miss those days ;)

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They were up there way too long for inadvertent hypoxia; that would have happened within 5 minutes of leaving 14K feet, and they were up there a lot longer, in communication and with no indication of trouble.

In normal operations, yes. One theory is that "Something Happened" and although some interpret it as "Conspirator Pilot Makes Evasive Turn to Avoid Surveillance", I think perhaps it should be interpreted as "Pilot suddenly opts to head for nearest long runway with a clear approach path". I am assuming that "Situation X" took place and was or at least appeared to be massive and critical. As a response to Situation X, of flurry of error messages that suggested Situation X, cockpit crew members started pulling every circuit breaker they could see, feel or thought might be there. This mad major shedding of electrical load to isolate a problem and restore reliable instrumentation is somehow theorized to have impacted cockpit oxygen systems, not ambient cockpit air.

Recall perhaps the maintenance firm that didn't know the difference between supplying supplemental AIR to a mask and supplemental OXYGEN to a mask? How about an oxygen bottle in the cockpit chock full of carbon monoxide due to mislabeling and a repairman forcing the connectors to mate? One line man fought with a nozzle for almost an hour before he could put jet fuel into a turbo charged Continental since he thought "turbo'' meant "turbojet".

So the well trained pilot simply perceived that "all hell was breaking loose", elected to immediate select a course for a direct approach to nearest runway not obstructed by mountainous terrain, switched to full cockpit oxygen and soon started getting slap happy and played pattycakes with the co-pilot as they deeply inhaled their carbon monoxide.