A science journalist and author who researched the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 has published a controversial theory – that the plane was hijacked on Vladimir Putin’s instruction and flown to an airport in Kazakhstan.
Jeff Wise, who became a full-time commentator on the story for CNN, detailed the evidence in a book ‘The Plane That Wasn’t There’, released last month in e-book form. He also explained the theory in a 4000-word feature for New York magazine ( HERE ) that has been shared more than 23,000 times and was picked up by the London Independent, the Huffington Post and by Crikey in Australia.
Flight MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014 and no physical trace of the plane has been discovered. Investigators believed the aircraft travelled either north or south along an arc, based on electronic “pings” between the aircraft and a satellite. An aspect of that data called the “burst frequency offset” (BFO), which measures changes in the signal’s wavelength, led them to conclude the plane took the southern arc.
But Wise argues this data could have been tampered with by hijackers. The Boeing 777’s electronics bay could be accessed through a hatch in front of the first-class cabin, he reported. And although the data could not be gamed in all circumstances, it was possible with the particular model of satellite equipment on board MH370 and the route it was flying.
For Wise, the coincidences were too much.
“Once I threw out the troublesome BFO data, all the inexplicable coincidences and mismatched data went away,” he wrote in a piece for New York magazine. “The answer became wonderfully simple. The plane must have gone north.”
Wise also claimed to have found a place where the plane could have landed – an airstrip called Yubileyniy, part of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Baikonur is leased by Russia and remains a busy space launch site, but Wise reported that the Yubileyniy strip has been largely disused for decades and was “dismantled” in the months before March 2014.
He also attempted to investigate the Russian national and two Ukrainians who were on board the flight, but found little to incriminate either, other than an unhelpful American lawyer representing the Ukrainian families in their lawsuit against the airline.
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Locally, Crikey aviation writer Ben Sandilands describes Wise as “one of the most careful dissenting voices in the MH370 mystery”. Sandilands questions the likelihood of the complex operation, which would have involved “extraordinary planning”, but argues that it could have happened.
Regardless, Sandilands says Wise’s research highlights how crucial the Inmarsat data has been to the ocean search for MH370, and therefore that any error in that data – deliberately falsified or otherwise – would have profound implications for the search location.
EARLIER … on Tasmanian Times …
