There were reports that all passenger communications from that airplane ceased about 10 minutes before they crashed. If that was an intentional act - and not a heart attack of the copilot - then it would have been trivial for the copilot to flip a few switches and disable all these modern conveniences (onboard wi-fi, cellular repeaters, etc.) The pilots can control nearly every function of the airplane from the cockpit, that's why there are so many switches there. (Some equipment can be reached through access panels from the cabin, and it also has switches - but those are secondary.)
If the onboard repeaters were turned off then the passengers had hardly any hope to reach ground towers from the height of 30,000 feet, flying over the sea initially, and then over the mountains. The cell sites there are probably rare, and they are built to serve small communities. Most towers do not radiate upward, into space; they are optimized to service customers on the ground.
Still I'm unsure why would a Muslim terrorist do it this way. He'd be interested in letting his victims call everyone and tell that they are about to die. That's what terror is about - it's not about pretending to be a hardware problem or a navigational mistake.
If for these reasons this incident does not look like a terrorist act, then the next best guess is that the copilot simply decided to commit a very quick and painless suicide. In favor of that theory: the descent was smooth enough, so that nobody would notice; and the communications were shut off, so that people on the ground would not be traumatized. Not exactly the most believable scenario... but there are enough crazies out there, and you never know what happens in people's heads.
Maybe we’re seeing a new paradigm of terrorism.
Yep, plus the onboard phone system attached to the seat backs should have available. Looking more and more like an intentional crash, IMO.
Why don’t they have cameras on planes. Every 711 convenience store in the country has them and we always have to guess what happened with a plane crash? Seriously? They only have sound of pilot knocking, not video?