[Zhang Fei]

Getting to the final ping site, at least to the more interesting northern option (and who'd elaborately plan a slow suicide) means avoiding many radars. Either defenses there are much worse than presumed or the perps had the knowledge and skill to evade them. Determining what the perps could have known about those defenses and reverse engineering their possible routes may be enlightening. In the least it would be a good exercise for some bright military pilots.

Would that even have been necessary? I bet it wasn't the first civilian plane to end up in airspace where it wasn't supposed to be. My guess is that most military radar personnel just let these things slide on the assumption that somebody down the line forgot to file his paperwork ahead of time. Who wants the infamy associated with shooting down a civilian plane?

[JohnBovenmyer]

The argument against the northern route is they couldn’t have reached it without being noticed. Absent some late announcement that Nepalese, etc. radar had seen them that argument fails IF they went north. It may be incompetence in which case someone’s superiors had better at least feign outrage. Or it may be their defenses, optimally run, aren’t as good as advertised, in which case someone’s taxpayers may be outraged. But if there are merely cracks in their systems, which MH370 exploited, there may be clues in how they learned such and there may be clues to their path and current position in discovering those cracks. It’s another angle on a problem for which we have little data. The US Air Force and Navy should contain folks able and willing to differentiate amongst those possibilities. If they don’t, even after 5 years of Obama, I’m outraged.