Burchetta said the plane went off the right side of the runway, flipped over and burst into flames.
As I later learned, his story was inaccurate (actually, a Portugal-bound military plane went off course and hit the Reeks), but still, it captured my imagination.
Even as the plane went off Malaysian air traffic control's radar on 8 March, Inmarsat's satellites were "pinging" it.
The plane went off the highway and struck a fence before coming to a stop, but the passengers were not injured.
The airline says it is not ruling out any possible theories as to why the plane went off the radar, which includes the possibility of this being a terrorist attack.
Investigators are yet to officially release data or findings, but according to unverified reports from Russia, cockpit recordings reveal unusual sounds at the moment the plane went off the radar, but confirm there was no distress call from the pilots.
He reckons the biggest problem the pilots faced was the need to land an overweight plane, since the system that allows them to jettison fuel was not working.Had the plane gone off the runway and caught fire, or burst into flames because fuel was ignited by the overheated brakes, it is still entirely possible that everybody could have survived (see Air France in Toronto, et al).
But a real bomb that they had left in a public locker in the Grand Central subway station, to convince the authorities that they had real explosives on the plane, went off as the police tried to defuse it, killing one officer, partly blinding another and injuring two more.
The plane went off the radar near Vietnamese airspace, according to a statement on the Vietnamese government website.
