I just returned safely from a pair of transatlantic flights and have been following this story since it first broke. I don't really like flying in the first place but this incident- especially the enduring mystery of the whole thing- really made this last trip especially nerve-wracking.
Anyway, my first theory once it came out that the place flew on for another 6 hours or so, and crossed the Malaysian peninsula heading west, is that it was terrorism/air-piracy. Looking at a map, the plane could have easily made it to Sri Lanka (Tamil Tigers, perhaps?). From there, who knows.
Now, based on its current suspected crash location, it looks like either a failure of the plane's electronic systems (resulting in the pilots becoming lost) or flight crew suicide. The former seems more likely to me. For the pilot to have done himself in in such a fashion, one imagines that the rest of the flight crew would have figured out that something was up and stepped in to stop him. Also, that long of a flight would give a suicidal pilot a much greater chance to have second thoughts.
But, if it was a matter of getting lost, why head south to find a landing spot rather than north? I doubt that pilots are routinely trained in navigation using the stars or the sun but I don't think it would be that hard to orient the plane correctly, using either method, and head north to where you know the bulk of the Asian continent must lie. Flying south searching for... Australia? That just seems a lot riskier.
Now, I favor a hybrid explanation. I think it may have been a hijacking where a small terrorist team took out the flight crew (apparently the pilots were quite lax with cockpit security) with some nefarious, 9-11-ish intent but subsequently got lost after shutting off the various IFF and navigation systems and ran out of fuel over a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean. I really hope that they locate the black boxes and recover the data recorded. Only then we'll we learn what really happened.
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