An aviation expert has again claimed that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was hijacked by Russians, saying that there was one Russian on board the plane seated in first-class who was only feet away from the aircraft’s electronics and equipment bay.
Jeff Wise, a CNN aviation panelist and science author who has followed the Flight 370 disappearance, has posited for months that the plane was taken to Kazakhstan. He, however, has admitted that he doesn’t know why Russia would want the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.
Wise told the South China Morning Post this week there were three Russians on board the plane, and one of them was seated just a few feet away from the area they needed to access the plane’s flight data. One of the Russians was sitting in first-class near the aircraft’s electronics and equipment bay, he said, adding a potential hijacker may have tampered with it to throw off authorities.
“That would require an almost inconceivably sophisticated hijack operation, one so complicated and technically demanding that it would almost certainly need state-level backing,” he said, according to the paper. “This was true conspiracy-theory material.”
Also writing for SCMP, Wise said that he could find no motive for Russia to hijack the plane, which had 239 people on board and disappeared March 8, 2014.
Analysts put together what happened to the plane, using satellite data from the plane, which was released by the Malaysian government last year. This is what happened, according to FreeMalaysiaToday:
Forty minutes after takeoff, the aircraft lost its electronics.
One hour later, it was tracked flying zigzag and at a high speed.
Then, it disappeared from military radar.
Three minutes later, the communications system logged back onto the satellite. This corresponded with the first ping.
It made 6 more pings over 6 hours as it moved away from the satellite.
The final handshake was not completed, leading to speculation that it had run out of fuel and crashed. The location of the presumed crash, however, could not be ascertained because uncertainty surrounded the speed, direction and how fast it was climbing.
Of this, Wise noted: “I was bothered by the lack of plane debris. And then there was the data. To fit both the BTO and BFO data well, the plane would need to have flown slowly, likely in a curving path.”
“But the more plausible autopilot settings and known performance constraints would have kept the plane flying faster and more nearly straight south. I began to suspect that the problem was with the BFO numbers - that they hadn’t been generated in the way we believed. If that were the case, perhaps the flight had gone north after all.”
On his website, Wise made claims that Flight 370 may have been taken to the Yubileyniy runway in Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome.
“My suspicion fell on Russia. With technically advanced satellite, avionics and aircraft-manufacturing industries, Russia was a paranoid fantasist’s dream. (The Russians, or at least Russian-backed militia, were also suspected in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July.) Why, exactly, would Vladimir Putin want to steal a Malaysian passenger plane? I had no idea,” he said.
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