Truly sad for the families of passengers and crew regardless

what I find incredible is that the concept of the plane flying itself in survival mode (ala 2001 space odyssey) with the entire manifest dead (presumably from decompression at 35000 asl)

The engineer's description of what the plane WOULD do (in a hypothetical situation of rapid decompression/crew unresponsiveness) is almost freaky: slowly shutting down non-essential systems as the plane's "health" deteriorated, sending messages via sub-systems to local air/land/sea receivers, etc.

You'd think someone would have installed a few automatically deployed EPRIB from the tail, or chaffe, or SOMETHING..

Or...maybe the plane was captured in flight by a giant stealth plane... by Dr. Evil. To be ransomed for ONE MEEELLLON DOLLARS