Unraveling the Mystery of MH370
Part 2 of 3
XI. Captain Zaharie and his Flight Simulator
In Section VI, I’ve discussed the absurdity of assuming a pilot committing long suicide after sophisticated maneuvers. However, it was evident that there was a media propaganda trying to frame captain Zaharie as the villain. Anyone who could just spend some time learning the daily life of Zaharie would find that he is just a normal person having enthusiasm in flying airplanes and a knack of cooking and fixing housewares. Even till days before the disappearance of MH370, he showed zero signs of suicidal inclination. Yet the media spared no efforts in depicting his political extremism in support of Anwar, spreading rumours of broken marriage and various slanderous remarks. Yet many people who knew Zaharie in all walks of life had been thoroughly interviewed by the Malaysian police and they unanimously expressed that there was nothing problematic in his daily life.
A more interesting point is captain Zaharie’s flight simulator at home. There is nothing unusual for a pilot to have a flight simulator at home. But for this case, there might be some clues from the simulator if Zaharie did really have some extraordinary plans to execute with his upcoming flight. I followed the news very closely since the first day. Initial reports by the local media in Malaysia stated that the flight simulator was first recovered by Malaysian Police, and it was found that close to the day of the disappearance, Zaharie had been simulating landing on five airports – in Sri Lanka, Male (Maldives), Diego Garcia and two in India, each with runway of 1000 metres (figure 19). It’s not unusual for pilots to challenge themselves in flight simulations. But for this case what’s the purpose? Hmm… at first glance it seemed like a strategically oriented array of airports (strangely including non-civilian airports). Another point of suspicion was that Malaysian government handed the flight simulator to FBI for ‘further scrutiny’. What kind of mandate was that? It requires minimal technical expertise to discover what was programmed in a flight simulator. Even if it involves something criminal, it ought to be the investigation task of the police of the local government. If one followed the case, the conclusion made in April 2014 by the FBI analysts was that “There is nothing suspicious whatsoever about what they found…There's nothing at all (criminal) about the pilot. Right now there is zero evidence of a criminal act by the flight crew," a senior U.S. official told ABC News.
Then months later, there were reports that some data had been deleted from the flight simulator. The recovered data sets from the Zaharie’s computer were included in a report compiled by the Royal Malaysian Police (RMP), of which a large portion was later made public. The recovered flight files include six unique coordinates that resembled ‘snapshots in time’. The first four data points suggested a simulated flight departing KLIA, cruising over the Malacca Strait and then the Andaman Sea. Then there were two isolated data points in the remote SIO near 45S 104E, with steep decrease of altitude between the points. The Independent Group (IG) conducted a study which found that if a great circle path (i.e. aircraft flying in LNAV mode) is extrapolated from the final points, it would cross McMurdo Station, Antarctica (figure 20) with fuel exhaustion before reaching there. Comparing these data files with the deduced flight path of MH370 from Inmarsat analysis would show similarities. But does it then implicate the captain? The first problem is that there was no evidence that the six data points in the recovered file were from a single flight simulation. The two isolated data points in the SIO seemed to have been ‘teleported’ by the user, which rendered the ‘long suicide practice’ implication dubious. Second, why the inconsistency with the FBI analysis? The so-called recovered files looked so suspicious that I inclined to believe they were deliberately planted in the simulator in order to substantiate the incrimination of the captain as the culprit!
XII. The Witnesses
There have been tons of technical papers written on MH370. However, there were surprisingly few serious studies on the accounts of possible eyewitnesses. One might attribute this to the conventional belief that eyewitness is often an unreliable source of information. Of course, eyewitnesses are just humans who are prone to errors. But is it premature to dismiss every witness account without further scrutiny? Could there be any systematic ways to separate the wheats from the chaff? I believe there are some objective criteria to judge the credibility of witnesses, such as coherence, consistency, personal background, state of mind, environmental conditions, physical possibility, etc. As I’ve been following very closely the firsthand news every day and delved deeply into them since the disappearance of the plane, I was able to capture and retain many details of the witness accounts, some of which led to great advancements in my investigation. I shall just highlight three most important witnesses reports here which I believe to be credible and have profound implications.
(i) Kota Bharu and Tumpat, Malaysia
On 11 March 2014, there was a news report in Pasir Mas that a man saw a low flying plane near Kota Bharu between 01:30 and 01:45 local time. Normally, there are no planes flying through that particular area and in that direction. Meanwhile, a farmer in Tumpat claimed to have seen a low flying plane and even its MAS logo around 02:00 local time. He then lodged a report in the police station. Here we can see two independent witnesses claiming to have seen a low-flying plane. The time, location and flight attitude were coherent and consistent. The witnesses reported to the police, so they were taking the sighting seriously. During the time of their reporting, they had absolutely no idea of what’s happened with MH370.
On the same day, there was another news report in Marang that eight villagers claimed to have heard a loud noise coming from the northeast direction of Pulau Kapas when they were seated on a bench about 400 metres from the Marang beach at 01:20 local time. They described that the loud noise sounded like the fan of a jet engine. They then ran out to the beach but did not see anything unusual. These villagers also lodged police reports afterward. This separate report is at least not contradictory with the previous reports, though it’s no easy task to reconstruct the flight path with all these reports. The strangest thing about this report is the ‘loud noise like the jet engine’ they heard, yet they saw nothing from that direction. We will come back to this later.
(ii) Kudahuvadhoo, Maldives
This is perhaps the most well documented account of possible eyewitnesses of the missing plane. Multiple villagers in Kuda Huvadhoo located in southern Maldives independently claimed to see a large low flying plane around 06:15 local time (01:15UTC). Some described the plane having ‘blue/red’ stripes near the tail which matched the colour of MAS, while some heard ‘incredibly loud noise’ from the low-flying plane. The plane approached the island from the northwest and departed toward the south-southeast.
These reports were quickly dismissed by the Maldivian Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the local press. The CAA explained that the plane they saw was Maldivian domestic flight DQA149 which departed from Male and landed at the Thimarafushi airport at 06:33 local time (LT). There are at least three problems with this explanation: 1) It’s not hard to check up photos of the aircraft used for that domestic flight. It was a twin turbo propellers Dash-8 aircraft, which nowhere matched the plane described by the witnesses. What they saw was a large aircraft which they never had seen flying over the island before, and the plane had no propellers; 2) The normal flight route from Male to Thimarafushi (figure 21) passes well to the east of Kuda Huvadhoo. Yet the witnesses in Kuda Huvadhoo saw the plane coming from the northwest of the island, which didn’t match the flight route; 3) According to official flight records provided by Male Airport Operations and confirmed by the ATC, the earliest plane flying from Male to Thimarafushi departed Male at 07:35LT, more than one hour after the Kudahuvadhoo sighting. Moreover, the real flight DQA149 flew in the opposite direction landing at Male at 07:24LT. The flight from Thimarafushi takes about 37 minutes, meaning a takeoff near 06:47LT, also well after the sighting. This proves that narrative of Maldivian CAA and press reports regarding flight DQA149 were plain false.
Many witnesses were re-interviewed by the MH-hunter Blaine Gibson in 2016 and their stories remained remarkably coherent and consistent. While there is no definitive proof that the plane they saw was MH370, I found these reports robust and credible.
(iii) Kate Tee (Saucy Sailoress)
It is perhaps the most important eyewitness account imo, though it came from just a single person. Kate Tee is a British sailoress who I have no doubt to have well trained eyes. During the few days surrounding the disappearance of MH370, Kate was sailing with her husband Marc on a zigzag north/east route (what one would expect for a sailboat catching the winds) in the passage between North Sumatra and Great Nicobar Island (figure 22). On the night of the plane disappearance, her boat was on an east-northeastward segment near 6’37 N 94’26 E. She gave a precise account that she saw a “‘low-flying (~2000-4000ft altitude)’ plane with 'orange glow’, ‘black contrail’ and apparently ‘without windows’ except in the cockpit” approaching slowly from the north at 19:10UTC. It turned west-southwest near 19:20-19:25UTC and later turned slightly towards the south-southwest. Her sighting raised great interest of the Independent Group (IG) and was heavily interviewed by the IG members. She subsequently testified that about 5-20 minutes before the orange-glowing plane, she had seen a plane flying at a very high cruising altitude on a due southward course. She thought that was strange and wondered why it was heading towards the South Pole. In addition, Kate mentioned in her blog that she saw two planes flying close to one another at cruising altitude towards the northwest about the same time she saw the orange plane. These planes appeared to be lower than the earlier high southbound one. One of the planes was flying slightly lower and behind the other plane, which looked like they were flying in tandem or formation. On a single occasion, Kate Tee saw four planes which raised burning questions: What were the ‘orange-glowing’ plane, the high altitude south-bound plane and the two planes flying in formation? We shall address these questions later.
Furthermore, Kate Tee made a couple more strange observations in the sea prior to the night of the MH370 disappearance: 1) On the nights of March 4 and March 5 both Kate and Marc observed a slow-traveling, large bright white glow over the horizon to the southeast, estimated at about 180 nautical miles west of Banda Aceh. They initially thought the source of the light was a large cable maintenance ship or naval flotilla since the glow was brighter and larger than that generated by fishing boats. On March 5 their boat crossed to the south of the underwater cable, but on that night the glowing lights were still to their southeast. This convinced them it was not related to a cable maintenance ship, but rather a flotilla of Navy ships; 2) On March 7, they came across a black buoy located near 5’59 N 94’11 E which was like none they had ever seen before. They initially believed it was of military origin, but later identified it as an acoustical target buoy. Overall, the detailed reports by Kate Tee are truly remarkable and might be critical to the mystery of MH370.
Apart from the reports above, there were more eyewitness accounts on the missing plane. These include: 1) the oil-rig worker McKay who claimed to have spotted a plane on fire [report]; 2) Indonesian fishermen claiming to have seen a plane crashing into the Malacca Strait [report]; 3) a flight passenger Raja who claimed to have seen a floating plane in the Andaman Sea [report]; 4) witnesses claiming to have seen a low flying plane over WA [report]. Under critical review, these reports did not meet the objective criteria I stated earlier, and therefore were discredited.
XIII. Investigators and their Theories
Many theories on the fate of MH370 have been formulated by different researchers. There is certainly no room to go through every theory here. I’ll just give a brief survey of some theories that I found interesting. These theories can generally be differentiated into two groups: the first group (i – iii) takes the Inmarsat data seriously and believes that the end point of MH370 was near the 7th Arc; the second group (iv – vi) doubts the Inmarsat data and believes that MH370 ended up somewhere else.
(i) The glide-ditch theory was first proposed by the former pilot Simon Hardy. The theory proposed that the plane was under active pilot control till the end. It first underwent a steep dive on the 7th Arc during the final satellite handshake. Then the pilot recovered the plane from the dive and started gliding. The plane could have been temporarily powered by RAT after engine flameout. Finally, the pilot ditched the plane well beyond the 7thArc. Recently, Captain Blelly proposed a similar theory [7], with the new assumption that the pilot decided to shutdown voluntarily the last running engine timely before fuel exhaustion. By doing so, the APU could provide sufficient power to the aircraft control surfaces during the final gliding and the eventual ditching with the flaps fully extended. This theory can explain why the plane was not found in the search zone, and also the impact analysis of debris which points to ditching. However, it’s hard to contemplate the motive of the pilot other than being totally insane.
(ii) The curved-path theory proposed that MH370 underwent a curved flight route after the FMT. In this case the plane would have ended up in a much more northern location on the 7th Arc. There are two versions of this theory. The first version by researcher Oleksandr N [8], proposed that the plane suffered from a mechanical failure leading to inoperative Air Data Inertial Reference Unit (ADIRU). As such, the plane entered a particular autopilot-controlled mode which gradually curved to the left, ending up crashing into the sea to the north of the Broken Ridge. Another version of this theory was proposed by aviation expert Victor Iannello [9]. The theory first assumed that the plane had a late FMT. This is possible if the plane had somewhat undergone a descent before the FMT which generated the same BFO data as if it were already heading south (too technical to explain in detail here). Subsequent to the FMT, the plane entered a magnetic heading autopilot mode, which also caused it to curve to the left. This also took the plane further north on the 7th Arc beyond the search zone.
(iii) The loiter theory was proposed by some investigators including Dennis W (now deceased) and the CAPTIO team. One possible reason for the loiter of the plane was that there was a negotiation between the pilot and Malaysian government on certain political issues, with the aircraft loitering near Banda Aceh. As the negotiation went without success, the pilot attempted to land the plane on Cocos/Christmas Island. But unfortunately, the plane ultimately crashed into the sea due to fuel exhaustion. In this theory, the much more northern location of the crash could better explain the drift modeling results. However, there was no evidence of attempt made by anyone on board the plane to contact the ground to negotiate a hostage situation. Another major weakness of this theory is how an erratic loiter path could match so well with the successive arcs as determined by the BTO data, which could be much better matched with a straight and fast flight.
(iv) Aviation journalist Jeff Wise (hereafter JW) proposed a theory that MH370 was hijacked by Russian or Ukrainian passengers sitting near the unlocked hatch accessible to the E/E bay. The Inmarsat data (specifically the BFO data) was sophistically spoofed such that the plane appeared to have gone south while it indeed went north, all the way to a hanger in Kazakhstan. While technically feasible, I found it rather absurd that hijackers would bother to play this trick when no one had ever conducted, nor could possibly foresee the conduct of such mathematically complex analysis of the satellite pings to track a plane prior to this event.
(v) Investigative journalist Florence de Changy (hereafter FdC) proposed that MH370 might have been forced to divert, and finally shot down over the SCS in order to prevent a mysterious cargo from transferring to China. During the process, GPS and communication signals were jammed by U.S. AWACS planes, hence the disappearance from the radar and loss of contact with the ATC. FdC conducted very thorough research in the case and raised a lot of strong and solid criticisms of the official narrative. However, I found it too far fetched to cover up a shoot down in the SCS without a trace. The theory also failed to explain all the radar and satellite data, as well as the multiple debris findings around the Indian Ocean.
(vi) Researcher Ken S proposed an interesting theory which involves remote hijacking, fighter jet and decoy plane. He presented evidence of a Boeing patent on remote control take-over of aircraft, and was able to provide a mechanism for AES ID spoofing by the decoy plane [10]. He also took many witnesses accounts seriously. In his theory, MH370 took a low flying path across Malaysian Peninsula after the turn back near IGARI. Then it glided relatively slowly (~250 knots) towards Maldives and landed at Thimarafushi airport to unload a mysterious cargo. It then flew towards the Andaman Sea and ditched there. Meanwhile, a fighter jet took up the track at IGARI which was the unknown aircraft detected by the radar discussed in Section III. This was followed by a decoy plane over Malacca Strait which then took up the subsequent track to the SIO and pinged with the Inmarsat satellite. This theory can explain certain witnesses accounts in the previous section, plus Raja’s sighting of a floating aircraft in the Andaman Sea. It also fits with the remote hijack scenario discussed in Section VI. While having great respect to his laborious work and sharing a number of his insights, my strongest disagreement with his theory is the “slow gliding towards Maldives” hypothesis, which does not make sense for an urgent transfer of the mysterious cargo. The plane would also be prone to dangerous stalling situation. Moreover, the theory has conflict with the eyewitnesses in Kudahuvadhoo who saw the plane approaching from the northwest rather than east-northeast (as expected from the gliding path from Malacca Strait). It also doesn’t match well with Kate Tee’s eyewitness account. Besides, Raja’s sighting of a floating plane at cruising altitude is highly unrealistic. Furthermore, the ‘cargo’ would have great problems to get rid of or transfer to somewhere else if it was unloaded in Thimarafushi, which is surrounded by so many islands in Maldives. Regarding the decoy plane, I’ll have more to say in the later section.
XIV. Conspiracies
Before starting this session, bear in mind this most important axiom: Conspiracist is part of the Conspiracy.Whenever there is a covert, nefarious plot executed, there would be many conspiracy theories emerging which muddle the waters. The tactics often run as follows: the ‘conspiracists’ which are controlled by some high-power perpetrators would invent subtle variations of the true story which look outlandish for the rational investigator. The upshot was to distract the investigations.
In the early stage of my investigation in 2014, I was drawn into the conspiracy of MH370 being taken to Diego Garcia (DG). Upon further research, I discarded this theory. Since then, DG remained no more than a hoax in my mind set, and I’d disregard any theories relating to DG. It was not until years later that I reconsidered the DG connection when I had discovered new evidence, and even a possible ‘conspiracy covered by conspiracists’. For instance, why were all flights suspended at DG airport for 72 hours from the day of plane disappearance (figure 23)?
There are so many conspiracy theories behind the disappearance that it’s impossible to have a thorough survey here. I shall just list out a few below which captured my attention and have some relevance to the Double Destiny theory to be discussed in the upcoming section. I’ll leave it to intelligent readers to solve the jigsaw puzzle and come to their own conclusion.
Shadow flight
In the early days following the disappearance, there was a theory that a flight route interception took place. There are multiple airways in Malacca Strait. The N571 airway is the typical route from Singapore/Kula Lumpur to the Middle East, while the P628 airway is the typical route towards Europe. On the website of Keith Ledgerwood (now removed), there was the conjecture that MH370, originally on N571 airway being followed by Emirates flight EK343 from Singapore to Dubai, diverted to P628 airway where it flew in the shadow of Singapore Airlines flight SQ68 from Singapore to Barcelona. The waypoints MH370 passing would then be VAMPI➡️GIVAL➡️IGREX, before flying towards the Andaman Islands. Performing a shadow flight is technically possible given a highly skilled pilot. The purpose of shadow flight might be to obscure detection by civilian radar, as the ATC would only see one ‘blip’ on the radar screen.
Suspicious passengers
There were 20 passengers (12 Malaysians + 8 Chinese) who were employees of the Freescale Semiconductor company. The company was a huge U.S. multinational electronics corporation in the semiconductor industry, and was the world’s leading manufacturer of microprocessors for several industrial sectors including aerospace and defense. The company’s products were designed for military applications including electronic warfare and missile guidance systems, etc. The Freescale company was bought out in 2006 for nearly US$18 billion by a financial consortium led by the Blackstone Group and Carlyle Group. One can imagine how closely it is related to the notoriously powerful American military-industrial complex (MIC). The Freescale employees on board MH370 were very experienced staff with high technical expertise. It also happened that the company filed a patent for a new technology just a few days after the plane’s disappearance, though it remains quite a stretch to relate the plane’s fate to the patent.
It was mentioned in the previous section that MH370 might have been hijacked by passenger(s) who stealthily descended to the E/E bay. This theory was promoted by Jeff Wise (JW), in support of his BFO spoofing and Kazakhstan landing hypothesis. JW has conducted deep investigations into the personal lives of certain passengers (See The Taking of MH370, Ch. 30). The Russian aboard MH370 was a businessman named Nikolai Brodsky. On business class seat 3K, Brodsky was not far from the E/E bay hatch. When interviewed by the local media, Brodsky’s wife Elena indicated that her husband was still alive, “He’ll be back…and will tell all,” she told the Komsomolskaya Pravda, as if she knew something. JW even hired a freelance researcher to investigate Brodsky’s personal life. He suspected that in the run-up to his disappearance Brodsky had deliberately wound up all of his business dealings and shifted his assets to Elena. Meanwhile, two Ukrainians of Russian ethnicity, Sergei Deineka and Oleg Chustrak were sitting together in row 27 of economy class, almost directly underneath the SDU. JW found that Deineka worked in an Odessa furniture company, and that the two Ukrainian had boarded MH370 to travel from one furniture trade show in Kuala Lumpur (KL) to a another one in Guangzhou (GZ), China. The flight route by itself was unusual (it’s like flying from Los Angeles to Kansas City via New York!), as there could be much shorter flights to GZ from KL, say via Hong Kong. JW quoted FdC’s book: “…if you had to pick out two hijackers, the Ukrainians would be the only ones to fit the stereotype: age, physical condition, appearance, attitude…”. Intriguingly, JW found that two years after Chustrak and Deineka were declared legally dead in Malaysia, they were still listed as their company’s owners. In particular, Deineka remained the legal owner of his family’s apartment. In short, the two Ukrainian’s affairs continued to be conducted in their names long after their ‘deaths’. JW consulted a Ukrainian business lawyer who expressed that it is odd, as partnerships of this type should be dissolved when the owners die. JW also investigated the posts that Deineka’s daughter, Liza, made on social media. He was astonished that Liza had alluded to her father as being ‘alive’ in more than one social media platform, and even ‘celebrated’ her father’s birthday. JW further learned that it is not unknown in Ukraine for intelligence and organized crime figures to fake their deaths. Is it possible that Brodsky, Chustrak and Deineka (possibly more other passengers) were not really dead?
Mysterious cargo
One notable fact that warrants suspicion was the unusually secretive cargo manifest of MH370, which took MAS nearly two months to disclose to the public. Even in the disclosure, the documents were disorderly and incomplete. The most staggering point was the enormous quantity (>4500 kg) of mangosteens listed on the cargo manifest. Further investigation identified the export of mangosteens from Malaysia in March as clearly ‘off-season’. The place of origin of the mangosteens was also obscure. That leaves one to suspect that there might be a rather heavy mysterious cargo being transported to China disguised as mangosteens. Let’s suppose the mysterious cargo is some kind of secret military technology, might one suspect that it was in some way connected with the Freescale Semiconductor employees, or was it just a coincidence?
Apart from suspicious passengers and cargo, there was the suspicious death of key persons too. For instance, there was the sudden death of the Inmarsat data controller in the second week after the plane’s disappearance. Honorary Consul of Malaysia Zahid Raza was assassinated in the centre of the Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo on August 24, 2017 — eight days after the MH-hunter Blaine Gibson (himself receiving death threats – report) handed over two suspected pieces of debris to local police via an associate. Raza had been tasked with the job of escorting the wreckage to Kuala Lumpur for analysis but was murdered before he could do so.
Enigmatic NOK
In the few months after the plane’s disappearance, the ‘Reward MH370’ crowdfunding project was quickly set up by the MH370 next-of-kin (NOK) committee to raise money for funding a private investigation of the case and rewarding anyone who provides information enabling the investigation to advance. Deeply involved in this project was an enigmatic figure, the American Sarah Bajc, who seemed to have monopolized the media on the subject of MH370. The high-profile woman quickly became the voice and face of the MH370 families and friends on all the major international TV networks.
The Frenchman Wattrelos lost three of his family members on MH370 and was battling to uncover the truth. Through connection with Wattrelos, FdC was able to probe into the hidden aspects of Sarah Bajc. In her book The Disappearing act, FdC wrote, “…For two years she had been the partner, indeed fiancé of the American Philip Wood, whose mobile phone reportedly sent what seemed to be a fake distress message from Diego Garcia…” (P.123). According to Wattrelos, Bajc was ‘ubiquitous, running and controlling everything: interviews, Facebook pages, crowdsourcing and the private investigation.’ FdC delved into great details of Bajc’s brilliant career background, notably having worked for an Israeli software company Tescom, and in Beijing she was Business Director of the Strategic Partnership Group of Microsoft China Research and Development. Then FdC found it unusual that Bajc suddenly moved from Beijing to Kula Lumpur to become a school teacher. Bajc also told the CBS News that her apartment in Beijing had twice been broken into, hinting on the Chinese secret service, and even received ‘death threats’ after the plane’s disappearance. In July 2016, Bajc suddenly moved to Panama City and thereafter sparsely uttered a word on the MH370 case (I’ve followed her Twitter/X for years). As Wattrelos had always suspected her of playing a two-faced role in the MH370 NOK drama, FdC went further to speculate that Bajc might be a ‘sleeper agent’ held in reserve by the CIA/Mossad (‘Sleeper agent’ and ‘Fake death’ will be the subject of a future piece).
As for Philip Wood, Wattrelos found that he was employed by IBM in 2011. Contrary with Bajc, his LinkedIn profile was very brief, and his contacts remained tacit. As reported by FdC, “…There was almost nothing about him on the internet. No participation in a conference, in a sports event, in an organised trip…” (P.127). It was as if this guy suddenly popped up from nowhere in 2011, with zero personal history before then. His ‘family members’ never contacted other families nor they themselves could be contacted. Furthermore, like some photos we occasionally find on Facebook/Instagram where couples look pretentiously intimate with meticulously designed background and ostentatious settings, FdC opined that the photos of Bajc and Wood on the Internet just looked ‘too good to be true’! If Bajc were an intelligence agent, could Wood also be? Note that he was on the first row of economy class seat 11C (figure 24). This gave him a positional advantage over Chustrak and Deineka, if not Brodsky, for a potential hijacker. If his DG hoax proved to be part of the conspiracy, the red flag flies high.
Phantom phones
In the early days, there were reports that phones taken on board flight MH370 were still ringing for a number of days after the plane's disappearance. According to Chinese media, as many as 19 families have signed a joint statement confirming they made calls which connected to the missing passengers (with ringing tone) but without an answer. Moreover, some social media sites (e.g. QQ) had shown missing passengers as still being 'online'. By common sense, you don’t expect to hear a ringing tone when you make a call to a friend whose phone has been turned off, nor would you see your friend being ‘online’. You don’t expect any phone on board would still be ‘on’ after the plane has crashed into the ocean! This issue was raised again in the Netflix documentary in 2023 (report), which stirred up intense backlash from the NOK. If the phantom phone reports were true (which I believe so), there would definitely be profound implications.
Cloned plane
A less known but interesting report was that there was a ‘twin plane’ of MH370 (registered 9M-MRO) in a hanger in Tel Aviv, Israel. This was confirmed by photos posted on Planespotters.net, a website that publishes inventories of planes worldwide. The twin plane was another B777-200ER, registered as 9M-MRI, delivered to MAS in 1998. Both planes have the same Rolls-Royce Trent 892 engines, and they look identical. In a statement released on 4 Oct 2013, the aviation company GA Telesis announced that it had bought the twin B777 from MAS, and commissioned an Israel contractor to dismantle it. First, it calls into question why a normal B777 having operated for only 15 years needs to be scrapped. FdC further discovered that of the 17 Boeing 777-200s bought by MAS from 1997 to 2004, only 6 of the company’s fleet were still in active service. The remainder had either been stored, sold or dismantled. In other words, 9M-MRO had not just one twin stored in Tel Aviv, but half a dozen clones sitting idle in aircraft hangars. FdC found this as problematic as the mangosteens in the cargo manifest.
The shoot down of MH17
Tragically, another B777 of MAS was shot down over Ukraine in July of the same year. Flight MH17 (registered 9M-MRD) was basically another twin of MH370 (9M-MRO). Journalists have reported on the involvement of the Russian military officer, Sergei Dubinsky, in the downing of the plane [report].
What are the odds of losing two identical B777s by the same airline in four months? I had the chance to pose this question to FdC during her book talk in Hong Kong. She concurred that it’s improbable that the two cases were mere coincidence. She also shared my view that the two cases may be somewhat related, though it was hard to figure out how. In her book The Disappearing Act, there was a mention of certain suspicious MHists who tried to match the debris images of MH17 with the discovered debris of MH370, with the wild speculation that the MH17 debris were planted in the SIO to support the official narrative. However, the comparison just didn’t match. First of all, wouldn’t this be a too costly operation even as conspiracy? Besides, there is a deep problem in the debris planting theory. If the MH370 debris were planted in their places of discovery, they indeed counter-indicated that the plane crashed along the 7th Arc in the SIO, according to marine biology examination and ocean drift modeling discussed in Sections VIII and IX. Yet there is an interesting point made in FdC’s book. No one doubts the close relationship between President Xi of China and President Putin of Russia. Suppose the perpetrators for MH370 were the U.S. and her allies, the downing of MH17 might be interpreted as a possible massive ‘blowback’.
“If Xi and Putin had to agree on this diabolical tit-for-tat scenario before the go-ahead was given, the timing was perfect. The two leaders were together just a few hours before MH17 was shot down, on 17 July. In one picture from the BRICS summit that closed on 16 July in Brazil (UTC-5), the two leaders may be seen shaking hands warmly, and their reciprocal smiles can only be described as … beaming.” (P.378). To me, this interpretation is far more compelling than JW’s theory that the perpetrator for MH370 was Russia, which defies explanation for the seemingly retaliation act by the same nation on MH17. After all, we noted that there were suspicious Russian or Ukrainian passengers on board MH370, and that MH17 was shot down over Ukraine probably by Russia. Can anyone smell something here?
(to be continued in Part 3)
References
[7] MH370 – CAPTION (https://www.mh370-caption.net/).
[8] Oleksandr N., “TECHNICAL NOTE – ON THE FLIGHT TRAJECTORIES OF MH370 IN AUTOPILOT-CONTROLLED ATT ROLL AND V/S PITCH MODE”, 07.06.2016.
[9] Victor Iannello, “Possible Flight Path for MH370 Ending North of the Current Search Zone”, 25 June 2016.
[10] The Hunt for MH370 – kstaubin’s Blog, “How was the Inmarsat Data Spoofed?”, 02/03/2018.
Recommended Book
Jeff Wise, The Taking of MH370 (The Yellow Cabin Press, Kindle edition).