LAST EDITED ON 04-30-07 AT 05:43 PM (EST)

In preparation for Wednesday's episode, where we hope to get more "answers" to what the outside world has been told about the fate of Oceanic 815--true or false--I thought I'd try to compile what we know about the crash and offer some thoughts.

1) The flight was 6 hours out of Sydney when they lost radio contact and "no one could see" them.

2) The plane then turned and headed toward Fiji to land and was 1000 miles off course when it crashed

3) Desmond, seeing a tear in Inman's contamination suit, goes after him, confronts him, and kills him. This excursion causes him to fail to enter the numbers into the computer within the 108 minute window. During this time, 815 crosses through the island's airspace and crashes.

4) In today's podcast, DL says that "the button is not the only method" of bringing an aircraft down (see: Naomi's helicopter, the Nigerian plane), but "I would say that if you are an actual jumbo jet...it might require more than the average electro-magnetic pulse to bring you down".

5) Ben, and a group of Others, watch the plane split apart immediately after Desmond's failure to enter the numbers. He immediately sends Ethan and Goodwin to integrate with the survivors and asks for lists in 3 days.

6) Ben and Juliet then head to the Flame station and meet with Mikhail. Mikhail asks if they saw the plane. Ben asks for information about it. Mikhail tells him it was Oceanic 815, left Sydney bound for LA, 324 passengers (which just so happens to be 108x3), including flight crew. Ben asks for detailed files on every single passenger.

7) Naomi, the parachutist, says that Oceanic 815 was found and that there were no survivors.

OK, given that information, here are some thoughts

Something caused the break in communications between Oceanic 815 and the ground. If that something were initiated by a 3rd party (i.e. Widmore, Dharma, Jacob, etc.) they would know exactly where the plane was when it lost contact. If your goal is to get a plane to change course and fly over the island, you would pinpoint where in the flightplan to cause the event (communication loss) that would force the plane to take an alternate route that would put it on the course you want.

However, Ben and Mikhail either weren't expecting the plane, or they weren't prepared for it. Ben had to ask for information. If this was premeditated by Jacob or TPTB in the Others' hierarchy, wouldn't he have been given at least cursory information? If certain passengers had been organized in some fashion to be on the plane, wouldn't he have files on them already?

DL & CC mentioned 2 possibilities when discussing this in the podcast. 1) Naomi is lying and 2) conspiracy/cover up. They didn't dismiss any metaphyscial argument, they just plain didn't mention them. However, they dismissed the purgatory theory AGAIN.

The Desmond/Inman incident seems too random to have been planned to occur EXACTLY when it did, however it is remotely possible, I suppose.

To sum up, it would have been easier to cover up a plane crash if you knew it was going to happen ahead of time, which some entity could have planned--knocking out communications and forcing over dangerous airspace. However, getting it over the island's airspace wasn't enough. It needed the "system failure" that Desmond provided at a fairly precise moment, and that seems extremely unlikely to have been orchestrated considering how it happened.

If a third party was behind it, the likelihood of it being Jacob (or the Others) is smaller than it being Widmore or Dharma. Perhaps Dharma, having lost its war with the Others, wanted to bring in fresh blood to combat the Others and retake their stations? I'm not really sure why Widmore would want to crash a plane on the island, but if it were Jacob/the Others, I believe Ben would have been better prepared for their arrival.

The loss of communication, change of direction, and flight through the island's airspace at the exact moment of the EMP may have been a coincidence, and the coverup an afterthought, but that would be much more difficult to arrange on the fly and quickly enough to throw off suspicion.