I do think there's a good chance that this is inspired by that Ethiopian flight a month or so ago (that is, that the flight crew had something to do with it). Flight simulator - yes and no. I'm curious how elaborate the setup was, I mean a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator and a joystick isn't that hard to come by, or to be considered a "simulator" by the media when this is such a big story. And yes, it's fun to think about for airline geeks like us, but a pilot? I would have expected them to be sick of flying as it is, and wouldn't really care to have a simulator on top of it.

My theory: flown for a few hours to erase whatever is on the blackbox (they only save the last 2 hours at any given point, then "tape over" the oldest data). Probably ditched into the ocean, maybe Mariana trench, though North Korea is probably most likely air option in my opinion.

I also know that the Landsat satellite happened to go by not long after. I took a remote sensing class in college, and know that different materials give different "signature" of electromagnetic radiation (not just red, green, and blue light as we see, but also infrared, gamma, and a whole host of others). Would be interesting to find out how best to detect aluminum and see what you can find. But I'm sure there are people much more qualified than myself that are already doing that.