MH370 secretly landed in Kazakhstan, says
American author
Posted on February 26, 2015, Thursday
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia Airlines flight
MH370, lost for nearly a year, might have
secretly landed in Kazakhstan, says an
American science writer.
Jeff Wise, who is also CNN’s aviation analyst,
said there may have been ‘deliberate
tampering’ in the search data to make the
Boeing 777 appear to have gone in another
direction.
Wise earlier wrote an article for the New York
Magazine suggesting that its navigational data
had been meddled with, to leave trails of
inaccurate information which convinced
officials that the plane flew south.
He also said the plane was possibly hijacked by
perpetrators, who could have accessed the
flight controls and flew the plane to Baikonur
Cosmodrome, which is leased from Kazakhstan
by Russia.
Wise said his theory was established upon
satellite transmissions and ‘pings’ that the
plane fed off seven hours after it was missing.
Those transmissions were recorded by British
company Inmarsat, whose raw data was then
released by Malaysian officials in late May
2014.
In the article, however, Wise said he wasn’t
sure of why Russian President Vladimir Putin
wanted the Malaysian passenger plane.
“There’s no way to know. That’s the thing
about MH370 theory-making: It’s hard to come
up with a plausible motive for an act that has
no apparent beneficiaries,” he said.
He added that there were three Russians on
board of MH370, one of whom was a first-
class passenger seated near equipment, where
he could alter the navigation data and take
over the flight.
“He ran a lumber company in Irkutsk, and his
hobby was technical diving under the ice of
Lake Baikal,” Wise said, indicating that that
particular passenger could have possessed the
necessary skill sets to execute the
sophisticated hijack.
Meanwhile, a new book suggests that MH370
may have been the victim of cyber-jacking.
Authors Richard Belzer, David Wayne and
George Noory said in the book, “Someone is
Hiding Something”, remote-control hijacking
was the most likely scenario as the way in
which MH370 vanished from radar “defies all
logical explanation”.
“Cyber hijacking is about the only possibility
that fits the above circumstances insofar as the
known evidence regarding the actions of the
plane,” the authors were quoted as saying in a
report by The Australian.
“The notion perpetrated in the media that a
plane ‘disappears’ from tracking when the
transponder is turned off is patently false.
“It simply is not credible that the plane avoided
radar after it flew off its route.”
The authors panned the prevailing belief that
those on board MH370 had died of hypoxia, a
deadly condition caused by low oxygen
conditions. According to this theory, the pilots
were incapacitated because of a lack of oxygen
and the plane flew for hours on autopilot before
running out of fuel and crashing in an unknown
location.
“(There is) no evidence of this, or real motive
for it,” they were quoted as saying.
However, they added that cyber-jacking,
although the most likely scenario, was not
necessarily the answer to the mystery
surrounding MH370.
“We’re not saying that’s what happened,” they
said in the report. “We are saying that the
official version of ‘We lost the plane and it may
never be found’ is an obvious ruse and a very
weak one at that.”
US aviation safety expert Captain John Cox
meanwhile when weighing in on the theory
dismissed the possibility of a remote takeover,
calling it ‘far-fetched’.
“Airplanes are shielded to prevent such acts,”
he was quoted as saying.
Flight MH370 disappeared from radar on March
8, 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The Boeing 777 which was carrying 239 people
last made contact with air traffic control less
than an hour after takeoff, at a point over the
South China Sea.
The theory that it may have been hijacked via
remote control comes after news of a National
Geographic documentary which quoted aviation
experts as saying that MH370 had made three
turns after its last contact with air traffic
controllers.
According to the documentary, the aircraft first
made a turn to the left followed by two more
turns that took it westwards before it headed
south towards Antarctica.
MH370 was declared officially missing on
January 29, and all passengers and crew
members are presumed dead. No trace of the
plane has been found despite the largest
search operations in aviation history.