The Straits of Mollucca off Malaysia is the piracy capital of the world. I would not surprise me to discover that this was an attempted air piracy as the pirates branch out into new ventures. There are at least five remote unused or little-used runways big enough to land a 777 in the area. if they didn't make it to one of these, they likely crashed on the way. Still there is a lot that does not make sense. After making that turn and flying over Malaysia, cellphones on the plane should have been able to contact the ground, but that did not happen. So the passengers may not have known they had been hijacked. The perp could have been a pilot.
Seems hard to believe a pirate group could get a commercial airline pilot to steal a plane. I wouldn't take anything off the table though. To me it's more likely someone from the back came in and took control immediately turning off radio and transponder.
But it would be very easy to coerce a pilot by threatening his family. The US authorities are seething at the Malaysians for dawdling on a criminal investigation of everyone that was on that flight or connected with it on the ground. They haven't even searched the pilots homes for evidence. The Malaysians are worried about it being a Malaysian terrorist and looking bad. But their bungling of the investigation is making them look worse.
Unless the pilot was a pirate I don't see it. Hijacking and then controlling/steering a boat is something half the population could do. A commercial airliner with over 200 people? Not so much. Based on the change in flight path, the purposeful disabling of communication, and the drastic changes in altitude, it was the pilot or someone who was an adept pilot. At 45,000 feet, a pilot could depressurize the cabin and all passengers would perish in a matter of minutes, maybe less. I think the US knows a whole lot more than the public is being told. And I think this plane is on the ocean floor.
I agree. I just read a report that the 777 flew on for 7 hours after the last contact. A very strange flight event.
The 9/11 hijackers were not adept pilots, they had only flown on simulators, but they were good enough to get the job done. The erratic nature of the flight may also suggest that such a hijacker could have been flying the plane. Perhaps he intended to crash it into a target, but didn't have the navigational skills to find it . . . or the skill to land the plane. The flight was at night, unlike the 9/11 hijackers who could follow landmarks on the ground and see their targets. The changed flight course could have been an attempt to return to Kuala Lumpur, with four of the tallest buildings in the world.
I read somewhere that the Chinese claimed to have spotted wreckage on their satellite images. Do they have it and possibly reverse engineering it in order to make clones?
