MH370 flew as low as 1,500m to avoid detection, says paper

Ignoring for the sake of argument the tragedy of hundreds of people getting murdered / kidnapped, this is the most captivating news event we've had in a while.

There isn't much precedent for this, and the vague stories which do exist are uncommon. Car theft is common and is a real risk.

Seriously though, nearly every unlikely theory has ended up being the truth. That just doesn't happen very often.

You make it sound so simple, when in reality it is anything but simple. Every component in a plane is tested extensively before it can be installed and used. When it comes to electronic components in a plane, things like interference to other aircraft, other components on the plane, power usage and interference to ground devices (radio stations, emergency frequencies, etc) are all tested and considered.

Planes are massive powerhouses of technological wonder, adding something new into such a machine would take considerable amounts of time and even then once you've got it installed, who is going to maintain it? You've got to pay for access to a satellite for the data to be tracked, where is the data stored? Is the data encrypted? How do you make sure only the eyes intended to see the data see it and nobody else? What kind of redundancy is there if the satellite security system fails? Does the plane need bigger batteries to power such a device, where does the power come from?

There are rules and processes to follow in the aviation industry and they're very strict. And that's just the hardware, then you've got to write the software, make sure it doesn't interfere with anything else on the plane, then you've got to make it work for different planes, planes wired differently, different hardware/software, controls. You're testing two different halves that make a whole.

One does not simply just install a new piece of technology into a plane. There's no DIY kit you can buy from Tandy.

Then there is a cost vs risk calculation thrown into the equation here. How often does a plane just vanish like this? It doesn't happen very often and probably not enough to warrant spending hundreds of millions of dollars implementing a terrorist proof tracking/data collection system. Cars are stolen everyday, it's a common thing, for planes it is not.

If things were that easy, they would have already done so, trust me. Nobody wants to see their planes return more than the airline who paid for the plane, paid for the maintenance, paid for the staff & fuel and need it to help recoup the costs and make the business money.

Are we also not forgetting planes have quite good data capturing and positioning systems already? The transponder was disabled which was the easy one (a flick of a switch) but the ACARS maintenance tracker was also disabled and as already highlighted, without advanced knowledge of the planes internals, isn't something you can just disable with the flick of a switch. Other advanced fall-back tracking methods were disabled, this isn't something your standard pilot would know about.