Author reveals startling theory on missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 jet

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it vanished in 2014. Pictured: The missing aircraft taking off in France in 2011

What would become the world’s most extensive and expensive ever search mission in the history of aviation was launched, which de Changy alleges was completely pointless, and was even carried out to conceal reality.

The journalist posits that when a magician does a trick, one tactic above all is required for it to be successful: Distraction. In the case of MH370, she argues, the distraction was widespread disinformation.

‘In the case of MH370, many different means were deployed at the same time,’ she writes. ‘The advance of truth has been crippled from day one.’

Analysis of the aircraft’s movements identified a 23,000 square mile (60,000 square kilometres) search area in the southern India Ocean, approximately 1,200 miles west of Perth, a city in southwest Australia.

Australia assumed charge of the search on March 17, which de Changy claims was thousands of miles away from the location the plane was actually downed.

The operation was ruinously expensive (£103 million) and an abject failure. Nothing was found, not even a seatbelt. ‘When it came to the art of bungling a search operation and providing deliberate or accidental misinformation, Australia ran Malaysia pretty close,’ writes de Changy.

But there was no U-turn, she claims.

Pictured top: A map showing the key moments of flight MH370 on March 8, 2014, as well as its intended flight path over Vietnam on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpar. Bottom: A map showing the ‘crash sit’ in the southern Indian Ocean which led to a huge search

De Changy argues that the simplest explanation – that MH370 crashed in the South China Sea shortly after it was last seen on regional signals – was ‘quashed and tampered with in record time’, despite corroborating evidence at the time.

This was not helped by 24-hour news coverage of the event, she writes, that perpetuated theories, such as that of two mysterious Iranian passengers with fake passports potentially being behind the disaster.

The Iranian passengers turned out to have bought their forged passports in Thailand. Malaysia Airlines refused, ‘for security reasons’, to explain how travellers with forged passports had been able to buy tickets.

Interpol said they were not known terrorists. Apparently Iranians do this all the time, to avoid being identified at Iranian at airports. The lead went cold, having been the focus of all the news coverage for 48 hours.

The character of the pilot – Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah – was also quickly brought into question, with suggestions that the event might have been a murder-suicide. However, De Changy argues that no pilot would know how to make a plane totally vanish in the way that MH370 did.

She also points out that for decades, militaries have been trying to make stealth aircraft that is undetectable to others. It’s not that easy, she says. In addition, she says that even if the theory Shah had purposefully crashed the airliner, the ‘mystery’ of the whereabouts of a huge plane carrying 239 people is still not solved.

Far-Eastern correspondent for Le Monde, Florence de Changy investigates the mystery in a new tome. Pictured: Catherine Gang, whose husband Li Zhi was on Flight MH370

Chunks of plane started to turn up on beaches across the region. The best hope was a flaperon (what are now called ailerons), which washed up on the shore of Reunion Island near Madagascar. The French, who were investigating as Reunion is one of their departments, said they were ‘almost certain’ it came from MH370.

The Malaysian prime minister announced his certainty that it had come from MH370.

But the flaperon had lost its ID plate, and they are so securely attached it really shouldn’t have done. De Changy found out that ID plates are routinely removed when airport parts are recycled, so the flaperon could have come from any old plane. She thinks it might even have been planted there.

After hundreds of pages of telling the story of her investigation, and debunking the numerous theories put forward as explanations, de Changy offers her hypothesis.

In the Being-777’s cargo was 2.5 tonnes of ‘poorly documented Motorola electronics equipment,’ she says. The author suggests that this belonged to the US, and that China wanted to get their hands on it. Investigating the cargo, de Changy writes that it had not undergone the proper security screening.

At the time, the US – under Barack Obama’s administration – was withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Some believe the mystery cargo to be the remains of a drone downed in Pakistan, or military equipment captured by the Taliban.

Chinese relatives of passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 take part in a prayer service at the Metro Park Hotel in Beijing, China (file photo)

De Changy says whatever it was, Beijing – under the new leadership of Xi Jinping at the time – wanted to get its hands of it, and had routed it through Kuala Lumpar to be taken to Beijing on a nigh-time passenger jet.

But when the US caught wind of the plot, de Changy suggests the rival superpower came up with a plan to intercept the cargo, and to force MH370 to land, confiscate the cargo, and send it on its way to Beijing with just a two-hour delay.

At the time, de Changy reports that the US was participating in an air defence operation in the region, and that the plan could be masked as a training operation.

Furthermore, Waypoint IGARI – The ‘transfer of control’ point, when Malaysia air traffic control hands over to its Vietnamese counterparts on the route being taken by MH370 – is controlled by Singapore, a US ally.

At this point of the flight, de Changy suggests that two US Airborne Early Warning (Awacs) planes could have sandwiched MH370 – from above and below – completely blocking its magnetic field and all communications, rendering it invisible.

At this point, Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah would have been ordered by the US to land the plane at a nearby airbase, likely airbase U-Tapao in Thailand, de Changy says.

In this February 23, 2016 file photo, a waiter walks past a mural of flight MH370 in Shah Alam outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

What the planning did not account for, however, was the pilot’s refusal to follow such orders, instead perhaps saying he would maintain his course to Beijing until he was told otherwise by Malaysia Airlines.

It’s possible that the pilot and co-pilot attempted to take a shortcut to reach Chinese airspace more quickly, de Changy suggests, but their attempt to escape the clutches of the US planes failed.

‘The shooting down could have been a blunder,’ she writes, ‘but it could have also been a last resort to stop the plane and its special cargo from falling into Chinese hands.’

De Changy also says it’s a possibility that it was in fact China that struck the plane, reacting to seeing a number of unannounced planes flying into its airspace in a region that is highly volatile.

With its huge navy presence in the region, de Changy says – under the cover of disinformation being spread at the time – the US could have cleared up the crash site while the international search for the plane took place thousands of miles away.

The journalist then details how the US and China responded in the aftermath of the crash, writing how she was struck the uncharacteristic discretion from US officials throughout the crisis, a country that is known for offering support in disasters.

Grace Subathirai Nathan, daughter of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 passenger Anne Daisy, shows a piece of debris believed to be from flight MH370 during a press conference in Putrajaya in 2018

She also notes that the US never issued ‘the slightest reproach to Malaysian authorities for such a disaster,’ which involved a US-made Boeing plane and thee US nationals on board.

It is also no secret, she writes, that the US has extensive satellite coverage in the region, yet no help has been offered in the form of satellite images from the numerous positions the country has above the South China Sea.

Neither has the US been forthcoming with help and resources in the search for the missing plane, de Changy says.

Despite this, she points to records of calls between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in the aftermath, the details of which were not fully released, and suggests that the pair could have both been in-the-know about what happened to MH370.

But why would China go along with this, with the majority of the passengers being Chinese citizens? In the crisis, de Changy says that China likely saw an opportunity.

Xi Xingping was less than a year into his time as President, and she writes that the leader was faced with a choice: Either expose the US’ responsibility for the disaster, or use it to make a deal.

A Boeing 777 flaperon cut down to match the one from flight MH370 found on Reunion island off the coast of Africa in 2015, is lowered into water to discover its drift characteristics by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation researchers in Tasmania

In the months and years that followed, China begun to aggressively expand in the South China Sea, with the US largely turning a blind eye, offering little resistance.

For example. on May 2, 2014, weeks after the disappearance of MH370, National Offshore Oil Corporation moved its $1 billion oil righ – the Hai Yang Shi You 981 – to a location 17 nautical miles from Triton Island, the southwesternmost island of the disputed Paracel Islands.

‘Isn’t it ironic that while Australia was attracting the world news headlines, with its claim to be overseeing the largest (bogus) search operation in the history of mankind, China was quietly performing an incomparable more ambitious, more costly and more consequential operation?’, de Changy writes.

Other nations have also kept it quiet too, she claims. Malaysia, who bore the brunt of the majority of the criticism in the world’s press; Vietnam, whose shores are closest to where de Changy believes the plane came down; France, who own Réunion island where a piece of debris washed ashore on; the UK, whose Air Accidents Investigations Branch established the final crash site of MH370.

All were either knowingly or unknowingly complicit, de Changy claims.

Malaysian Minister of Transport Anthony Loke (centre) looks at the wing flap found on Pemba Island, Tanzania, in 2019 which has been identified a missing part of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

Why did everyone lie? Because although the Malaysians didn’t actually want the puzzle solved for reasons de Changy explains, they wanted it to be seen to have been solved, so they could forget about it.

France was trying to sell arms to Malaysia, and was happy to oil the wheels. The French report on a mysterious flaperon – that washed up on a far-away shore – was never published.

Malaysia and the US developed a surprisingly close relationship in the months that followed the disappearance, de Changy writes, and by 2016, Vietnam had become America’s fastest growing export market.

While the reporter acknowledges – on numerous occasions – that her hypothesis is far-fetched, she stands by her debunking of the other theories that have been put forward, and that the accepted narrative and accusations about the pilot should be widely challenged.

‘I have established that MH370 did not U-turn, did not fly over Malaysia and, to cut a long story shot, never crashed in the Southern Indian Ocean. Many more clues point to a covert interception attempt that went terribly wrong, with a fatal accident happening between 2:40 a.m. between Vietnam and China,’ she writes.

Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured) was the pilot of the doomed flight

DID THE PILOT HIJACK HIS OWN PLANE? 

Pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah planned mass murder because of personal problems, locking his co-pilot out of the cockpit, closing down all communications, depressurising the main cabin and then disabling the aircraft so that it continued flying on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.

That was the popular theory in the weeks after the plane’s disappearance.

His personal problems, rumours in Kuala Lumpur said, included a split with his wife Fizah Khan, and his fury that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year jail sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded the plane for the flight to Beijing.

But the pilot’s wife angrily denied any personal problems and other family members and his friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.

This theory was also the conclusion of the first independent study into the disaster by the New Zealand-based air accident investigator, Ewan Wilson.

Wilson, the founder of Kiwi Airlines and a commercial pilot himself, arrived at the shocking conclusion after considering ‘every conceivable alternative scenario’.

However, he has not been able to provide any conclusive evidence to support his theory.

The claims are made in the book ‘Goodnight Malaysian 370’, which Wilson co-wrote with the New Zealand broadsheet journalist, Geoff Taylor.

It’s also been rumoured that Zaharie used a flight simulator at his home to plot a path to a remote island.

However, officials in Kuala Lumpur declared that Malaysian police and the FBI’s technical experts had found nothing to suggest he was planning to hijack the flight after closely examining his flight simulator.

And there are also theories that the tragic disappearance may have been a heroic act of sacrifice by the pilot.

Australian aviation enthusiast Michael Gilbert believes the doomed plane caught fire mid-flight, forcing the pilot to plot a course away from heavily populated areas.

IF NOT THE PILOT, WAS THE CO-PILOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MYSTERY?

Co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, again for personal problems, was suspected by rumour-spreaders to have overpowered the pilot and disabled the aircraft, flying it to its doom with crew and passengers unable to get through the locked cockpit door.

Theorists have put forward the suggestion that he was having relationship problems and this was his dramatic way of taking his own life.

But he was engaged to be married to Captain Nadira Ramli, 26, a fellow pilot from another airline, and loved his job. There are no known reasons for him to have taken any fatal action.

There have been a series of outlandish theories about the disappearance of the plane

Others have suggested that because he was known to have occasionally invited young women into the cockpit during a flight, he had done so this time and something had gone wrong.

Young Jonti Roos said in March that she spent an entire flight in 2011 in the cockpit being entertained by Hamid, who was smoking.

Interest in the co-pilot was renewed when it was revealed he was the last person to communicate from the cockpit after the communication system was cut off.

DID THE RUSSIANS STEAL MH370 AND FLY THE JET TO KAZAKHSTAN

An expert has claimed the missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 was hijacked on the orders of Vladimir Putin and secretly landed in Kazakhstan.

Jeff Wise, a U.S. science writer who spearheaded CNN’s coverage of the Boeing 777-200E, has based his outlandish theory on pings that the plane gave off for seven hours after it went missing, that were recorded by British telecommunications company Inmarsat.

Wise believes that hijackers ‘spoofed’ the plane’s navigation data to make it seem like it went in another direction, but flew it to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia.

However, Wise admits in New York Magazine that he does not know why Vladimir Putin would want to steal a plane full of people and that his idea is somewhat ‘crazy’.

Wise also noted there were three Russian men onboard the flight, two of them Ukrainian passport holders.

Aviation disaster experts analysed satellite data and discovered – like the data recorded by Inmarsat – that the plane flew on for hours after losing contact.

Careful examination of the evidence has revealed that MH370 made three turns after the last radio call, first a turn to the left, then two more, taking the plane west, then south towards Antarctica.

MH370 WAS USED BY TERRORISTS FOR A SUICIDE ATTACK ON THE CHINESE NAVY

This extraordinary claim came from 41-year-old British yachtsman Katherine Tee, from Liverpool, whose initial account of seeing what she thought was a burning plane in the night sky made headlines around the world.

On arrival in Thailand’s Phuket after sailing across the Indian Ocean from Cochin, southern India with her husband, she said: ‘I could see the outline of the plane – it looked longer than planes usually do.There was what appeared to be black smoke streaming from behind.’

Ms Tee’s general description of the time and place was vague and she lost all credibility when she later stated on her blog that she believed MH370 was a kamikaze plane that was aimed at a flotilla of Chinese ships and it was shot down before it could smash into the vessels.

Without solid proof of the satellite data, she wrote on her blog, Saucy Sailoress, the plane she saw was flying at low altitude towards the military convoy she and her husband had seen on recent nights. She added that internet research showed a Chinese flotilla was in the area at the time.

While the debris proved the plane went down in the Indian Ocean, the location of the main underwater wreckage — and its crucial black box data recorders — remains stubbornly elusive.

THE JET LANDED ON THE WATER AND WAS SEEN FLOATING ON THE ANDAMAN SEA  

On a flight from Jeddah to Kuala Lumpur that crossed over the Andaman Sea on March 8, Malaysian woman Raja Dalelah, 53, saw what she believed was a plane sitting on the water’s surface.

She didn’t know about the search that had been started for MH370. She alerted a stewardess who told her to go back to sleep.

‘I was shocked to see what looked like the tail and wing of an aircraft on the water,’ she said.

It was only when she told her friends on landing in Kuala Lumpur what she had seen that she learned of the missing jet. She had seen the object at about 2.30pm Malaysian time.

She said she had been able to identify several ships and islands before noticing the silver object that she said was a plane.

But her story was laughed off by pilots who said it would have been impossible to have seen part of an aircraft in the water from 35,000ft or seven miles.

Ms Raja filed an official report with police the same day and has kept to her story.

‘I know what I saw,’ she said.

THE AIRCRAFT SUFFERED A CATASTROPHIC SYSTEMS FAILURE AND CRASH-LANDED ON THE OCEAN

A catastrophic event such as a fire disabling much of the equipment resulted in the pilots turning the plane back towards the Malaysian peninsula in the hope of landing at the nearest airport.

Satellite data, believable or not, suggests the aircraft did make a turn and theorists say there would be no reason for the pilots to change course unless confronted with an emergency.

A fire in a similar Boeing 777 jet parked at Cairo airport in 2011 was found to have been caused by a problem with the first officer’s oxygen mask supply tubing.

Stewarts Law, which has litigated in a series of recent air disasters, believes the plane crashed after a fire – similar to the blaze on the Cairo airport runway – broke out in the cockpit.

After an investigation into the Cairo blaze, Egypt’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Central Directorate (EAAICD) released their final report which revealed that the fire originated near the first officer’s oxygen mask supply tubing.

The cause of the fire could not be conclusively determined, but investigators pinpointed a problem with the cockpit hose used to provide oxygen for the crew in the event of decompression.

Following the 2011 fire, US aircraft owners were instructed to replace the system – it was estimated to cost $2,596 (£1,573) per aircraft. It was not known whether Malaysia Airlines had carried out the change.

If either pilot wanted to crash the plane, why turn it around? So the turn-around suggests they were trying to land as soon as possible because of an emergency.

THE US SHOT DOWN THE AIRCRAFT FEARING A TERROR ATTACK ON DIEGO GARCIA  

The Boeing 777 was shot down by the Americans who feared the aircraft had been hijacked and was about to be used to attack the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia atoll in the Indian Ocean. So conspiracy theorists claim.

And former French airline director Marc Dugain said he had been warned by British intelligence that he was taking risks by investigating this angle.

There is no way of checking whether Dugain received such a warning or why he believes the Americans shot down the plane.

But adding to the theory that the aircraft was flown to Diego Garcia, either by the pilot Zaharie or a hijacker, was the claim that on the pilot’s home flight simulator was a ‘practice’ flight to the island.

Professor Glees said: ‘The Americans would have no interest in doing anything of the kind and not telling the world.

‘In theory, they might wish to shoot down a plane they thought was attacking them but they wouldn’t just fire missiles, they’d investigate it first with fighters and would quickly realise that even if it had to be shot down, the world would need to know.’

Mr Rosenschein said: ‘The U.S. would not have been able to hide this fact and in any event, if it were true, they would have admitted their action as it would have prevented a successful terrorist action on this occasion and acted as a deterrent for future terrorist attacks.’

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