My first thought was "Wow, two Caucasian terrorists", my second thought was "I wonder if Thailand is the place to buy stolen passports".
Certain areas of Thailand (Phuket) are well known for petty crimes and pickpocketing. I was stationed as an aircrew member in the Pacific in the 90's (airevac), and we were always being advised that passport theft was common-- even before 9/11. At the time, I carried both a military, and a civilian passport on all trips.
As for the feasibility of altering the passport photos, this is increasingly more difficult, as modern passports have the photos actually embedded into the paper of the passport. It's not like the old days when a photo was laminated onto a page of the booklet. There are a lot of embedded anti-forgery features in modern passports.
What is really disturbing is that at least one of these stolen passports was reported to Interpol-- and still slipped thru.
I also wanted to mention that I'm very hopeful that the passengers had only a few seconds of awareness. Time of useful consciousness at FL350 is only about 30-60 sec under good conditions-- and far less if there is explosive decompression. We used to simulate this in the hypobaric (altitude) chamber simulators. (What was really cool is the loss of your color vision at lower altitudes due to mild hypoxia-- the rods and cones in your eyes are very O2 sensitive. We used color wheels and other training aids to learn our own responses to hypoxia.)
[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Useful_Consciousness"]Time of useful consciousness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
A lot of pilots commenting on line seem to think some kind of explosive decompression could be a very likely cause-- either from mechanical failure, or criminal. If not, it takes about 3-4 min to fall out of the sky at 35,000 feet. Since there is no instrument evidence of the plane descending, and no cockpit messages or instrument calls, most pilots seem to be leaning toward a scenario that the plane broke up at altitude.
