It has been six weeks since a Boeing 777 with flight number 370 departed from the Kuala Lumpur Airport in Malaysia bound for Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew onboard. Within one hour the jumbo jet's transponders were shut off and the plane vanished into the late night hours of March 8, never to be heard from again. In the past six weeks, several countries have been spearheading search efforts to find this plane, only to by stymied repeatedly by false leads and dead ends. The story has been losing traction with the mainstream press, but there are so many unanswered question that should give one pause if they really think about everything as a whole.

This column is a discussion of my thoughts and opinions on Flight 370, which are my own and are just conjecture. With that disclaimer, I have questions that I feel have not been satisfactorily answered and should raise concerns.First, why did the pilot erase several flight simulations from software he had in his apartment? I think this answer will be obvious if forensics teams are able to recover any of the deleted files. The issue here is that they may not be able to do so, especially if the pilot deliberately erased the files and researched how to make them unrecoverable. We may never know what they discover, especially if the plane's destination was not to crash into an ocean.Second, a major fact in this case that seems to be deliberately ignored is the plane's transponders were shut off. We didn't lose contact with the plane because it crashed somewhere unknown. We lost contact with this plane because someone on-board turned the off the plane's tracking mechanisms. Consider this. If the pilot was about to crash the plane, why would he even bother shutting them off? If he was truly suicidal, I cannot imagine a scenario in which the plane being on radar could be stopped by anything before the pilot or a crew member purposefully crashed it. That makes no sense.What does make perfect sense is to shut off the transponder if someone is planning to hijack the plane in order to deliver it to someone or some location. In that case you would not want anyone to easily be able to determine the plane's location. If the authorities cannot find the plane, then someone could make use of it for other things from transportation to possibly a weapon of mass destruction. This is a jumbo jet that has a range of 7,700 miles, is 209 feet long and almost 200 feet wide and is about 60 feet tall. One just doesn't hide this plane in the forest. It would need to be an organized effort to effectively hide this plane.The passengers' cellphones continued to operate hours after the plane disappeared, ringing several times before going to voice mail. While not as strong evidence as what I have written above, it still makes me wonder. If a phone is turned off or loses power, it typically immediately rolls over to voice mail, however these phones rang several times. So where were they and the passengers to whom they belonged?One of the scenarios suggested is the pilots flew the plane up to 45,000 feet to asphyxiate the passengers to immobilize them so the plane could be taken without resistance. Once again, if a pilot was planning to crash the plane, why would they bother doing this, either?I think the most telling evidence that everything is not as it seems is the lack of wreckage.Very few planes I can recall crash intact into the ocean from the height of several thousand feet and do not disintegrate or at least breach the hull. Once that was done, there are several items in the fuselage that would float right out of the plane, meaning there would be wreckage all over the ocean around the location of the crash.Even more telling is this search for the black boxes. By the time searchers decided to locate the black boxes, they had only days' worth of signal left.Second, they have been claiming they are receiving pings but are unable to locate the source, and then toward the end of one of the searches, they receive a ping from Flight 370 only to report that it was a false alarm. How does one get a false ping from a submerged plane? Also, might I point out that if the plane was taken, how hard would it be to dismantle the black box and throw it somewhere into the ocean by a plane of some kind.Finally, southeastern Asia has been an area of high alert for our country for decades. I have a hard time believing that a plane could disappear from this area without a trace and some intelligence outfit in our government not having an educated idea where this plane is.Do I have the answers? No, none of us really have all the answers, but the questions that have been ignored speak volumes. Hopefully one day we will learn the full story. Until then, this will continue to be the strangest disappearance of an airplane in the 21st century.Till next time