Re: Glad the search is continuing
"That'd be like Mercedes Benz contributing to the costs of the investigation in to Princess Diana's death."
If there was a mystery about how the crash happened or how the car performed in it, they would.
Boeing and others have a huge interest in trying to find out how the whole thing happened. The problem is that unlike the Air France operation the plane clearly hit the water at speed - pulverising it, so there may not be enough left to solve the mystery.
To my mind the most likely scenario is a fire in or under the cockpit (possibly oxygen fed, there have been a few cockpit fires of this nature on the ground) causing the aircrew to switch off breakers (standard procedure) and turn back to Malaysia (it made a beeline for the longest runway in the area) with them becoming overcome by smoke shortly afterwards (which would easily explain why it didn't descend when approaching land and then flew where the winds blew it afterwards).
An oxygen-fed fire would easily pierce the pressure hull - the egyptair one being a good example, resulting in hypoxia killing everyone, or the fire could have knocked out the pressurisation system which would have had the same effect. Contrary to popular belief, jetliner oxygen systems - even in the cockpit - only last long enough to descend down below 10,000 feet - 20 mins at most. MAS was in deep financial trouble, with a dispirited workforce and had a number of major poor-maintenance related incidents in the months leading up to the disaster. This could easily have been another near-miss instead of a total loss.