26 countries, 11 days of international search operations and 1 missing plane. Undoubtedly, the search process of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 has become the longest in modern commercial aviation history. On March 8, 2014 this Boeing 777 airliner took off from Kuala Lumpur to disappear into the world of mystery that is yet to be revealed. In the meanwhile, there are many theories and speculations on the Web that people have come up with whatever information that is being said or revealed by the experts. If you browse the internet you will find so many sites with different viewpoints and information that you might end up spending your entire day and more on it. Interestingly, when you analyze most of the theories and speculations you end up on two major theories, crashed or hijacked. Here is an outline of both the theories for those who want to dig deeper into this matter.

Crashed Theory

There are many sites that claim that the airliner must have caught fire or it must have experienced electrical failure that disconnected the airliner from the ground support. The flight took off from Kuala Lumpur at 12:40 am (Malaysia Time) and it got disconnected at 1:20 am just 120 nautical miles off the east coast of Malaysia. It is also believed that the flight did take a sharp left turn. Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and China have already searched the waters of South China Sea and Malacca Strait and after 10 days they haven't found a single piece of evidence. While there are reports that Vietnamese people did find debris that look like something from the aircraft, but Malaysian authorities have rejected such claims. There is no oil slick found in these waters which also questions if MH370 is really deep inside the shallow waters in this region. It is also believed that the plane could have crashed in the Indian Ocean and now United States, Australia, New Zealand, and India are looking for the plane in the deep Indian Ocean and that probably will take weeks before anything can be commented on this. Another contradiction to this theory is that there are reports that the plane continued to fly for as much as five hours after it lost contact with the ground support and after both transponders were manually switched off. The last satellite ping that has been reported shows that the plane was near US naval base on Diego Garcia and Maldives. As per the latest news, many Maldives residents have claimed that they have seen a low flying commercial airplane at around 6:15 am (Maldives Time) something that they have never seen before.

Hijacked Theory

While it was largely believed that the plane has gone through electrical failure or must have caught fire and crashed in the Indian Ocean or Malacca Strait or South China Sea the latest evidence show a different picture. In one of the announcements, Malaysian authorities confirmed that the two communication systems of the airliner were deliberately turned off and involved manual intervention. This also throws doubt on the credibility of the captain and the co-pilot, but Malaysian authorities have cleared both and said that they have done a background check of both the pilots and have searched their homes as well, but found nothing suspicious. There are theories that claim that the plane is hijacked by Al-Qaeda and that the plane is in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Some theories claim that the plane flew to Kazakhstan or Taklamakan Desert in North West China. However, the question here is, if the plane flew to any of these countries in Asia or Central Asia, it would have to fly over India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and many other countries and it would have been detected by military radar. On the other hand, there is heavy air traffic in this region, so how can a large commercial airliner like Boeing 777 fly to its destination without any ground support in a heavy air traffic region and would not even show up as a blip on the radar? Also, if the plane is hijacked why no terrorist organization has come forward yet taking any responsibility?