Not So Fast, Talking Heads. There seems to be a tendency among talking heads to want the hijack scenario (Lemma 3) to go away. They are scared of it, because they fear being tainted with the brush of conspiracy cranks. Now that we know the aircraft did go into the Indian Ocean, there have been wipes of the brow and relieved statements to the effect that "Now we know all those far-out theories can't be true."

Baby With the Bath Water. Yes, the far-out theories were never true in the first place. MH370 was not hijacked by dark agents of the evil U.S. Government, or of Dan Brown's spooky Vatican that never existed, or of Martians from Area 51. Those are the shallow thoughts of people who lack information and critical thinking skills.

At Stake: Another 9/11. We must carefully think through all major lemmas (Accident, Sabotage, Hijack). We do not want to wake up one morning and learn that the Eiffel Tower, or St. Peter's in Rome, or St. Paul's in London, or the great cathedral in Cologne is forever just smoking rubble like the Buddhas of Bamiyan. These terrorists have already hit the Pentagon, destroyed the Twin Towers in Manhattan, and attempted to hit the White House on 9/11 before being taken down in a field at Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Their consistent pattern has been the use of aircraft, trains, and other mass transit vehicles in these spectacular assaults and mass murders. So—hello? Far fetched? Let us get real.

In The Drink: Now What? The fact that MH370 went down does not invalidate the hijack scenario now or in any future missing aircraft case. Why has there not been more debris? For one thing, the Indian Ocean is very big. A possible reason we have not seen a large, floating debris field (including seat cushions designed to serve as floatation devices) could be that, flying low, the plane went into the water gently enough that the fuselage remained intact. In fact, the flaperon might have detached from otherwise intact wings. Does the loss at sea prove it went down off western Australia? Not at all. It could have gone down near Maldives (after being sighted there, despite not very credible or explained denials from authorities), and the drifting pieces moved on that same gyre and its lesser eddies, to arrive off Africa some 500 days after MH370 vanished.

All Three Options Remain Open. The Accident lemma appears the least likely at present, given the various turns made by the plane when everyone on board would have been unconscious or dead. Skilled hijackers might have detached the black boxes and flown them south as a diversion during refueling at a hypothetical location in the Bay of Bengal region. The two human intervention options (Sabotage and Hijack) remain wide open at this time (3 August 2015).

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