MH370: Suicide or Spoof? Part 2 — Motive

53rd
Symbol of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade

In the previous installment of this series, I looked at the psychological context for a hypothetical suicide run into the southern ocean. Today, I’d like to consider an equivalent issue with regard to a hijacking scenario. Presuming one occurred, what could be the motive for such an act?

As has often been observed, nobody claimed credit for the disappearance of MH370, and nobody visibly benefited from it. No benefit would seem to imply no motive.

Motive, however, can be a tricky thing to impute to another person’s actions. How can we be confident that we understand enough about a person’s position in the world—or more importantly, how they perceive their position in the world—to judge whether a given act would or would not be rational from their perspective?

A question more likely to yield results, I would argue, is: are there any potential perpetrators who might feel motivated to take such an action, however opaque their motive might be to us?

Here the answer is a resounding “yes.”

As it happens, the UK-based group Bellingcat today released the latest in a series of reports about the shootdown of MH17. For anyone who is not familiar with its work, Bellingcat is a very highly regarded group of amateur analysts who have pioneered the crowd-sourced investigation of open-source data. Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins first attracted attention after using social media to locate evidence that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons; later the group used similar techniques to identify the specific Buk missile launcher used to shoot down MH17 and has grappled with many other pressing topics of the day. If you haven’t visited their website, I heartily recommend it, as their coverage is fascinating and offers an excellent model for transparency and balance. Not for nothing the Columbia Journalism Review described Bellingcat’s work as “rigorous, evidence-based examinations of extremely specific questions… extremely valuable in helping us understand complex subjects.”

What has emerged from these reports is a strikingly concrete and layered depiction of events surrounding the destruction of MH17. And it is radically different from the picture that most journalists and analysts hold.

According to Bellingcat’s research, the Buk missile launcher that destroyed MH17 was not some trophy of war that a bunch of untrained militiamen got their hands on and fired off willy-nilly. Rather, it belonged to a specific regular Russian army unit, the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, which was sent from its base near Kursk to the Ukrainian border. From there, this specific launcher was brought across the border in the middle of the night and positioned under the scheduled flight path of MH17. After it blasted the plane out of the sky it was put back on its trailer and brought back to Russia. The whole operation was a one-day mission.

Bellingcat identifies the unit’s officers, and even hones in on the individuals who likely operated the Buk in question. They stop short of speculating at who pushed the “fire” button. The report does make very clear, however, that operating a Buk requires intensive training, so whoever committed the fatal act must have had considerable experience with the system. And as might be expected with a weapon of its range and lethality, a major part of operational training is a tightly controlled firing process. Of the four man crew, only the officer in charge is authorized to make the firing decision. He, in turn, must receive the necessary order from his commanding officer. Contrary to the popular narrative, anyone who would be able to fire off a Buk blindly would know better than to do so.

That’s why, as I write in New York magazine today, Bellingcat has concluded that “responsibility for the downing of MH17 from a weapon provided and possibly operated by the Russian military lies with the Ministry of Defense and the Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces, President Vladimir Putin.”

Some will no doubt find this conclusion incomprehensible: Why in the world would Putin order, or allow, a brutal attack which triggered such harsh repercussions against his country? What possibly could be the motive?

The answer is, we don’t know Putin’s motive. Indeed the alarming upshot of MH17, and how badly the press and intelligentsia have bungled their attempts to understand it, is that we don’t understand Vladimir Putin at all. We can’t presume to guess what his cost/benefit analysis of this decision was. But based on a year’s worth of intensive reporting by Bellingcat, as well as on work released by the official Joint Investigative Team, Putin obviously felt he had reason enough.

By this point I think the relevance of this story to MH370 should be clear. Within four months, two Malaysian Airlines 777s were taken out of the sky under suspicious circumstances. Imagine if you were a farmer who’s been raising chickens for many years without incident. Then one day, for the first time ever, one of the chickens goes missing. Then the next day, you see the neighbor’s dog jumping over your fence with a second chicken in its mouth. Now would you have a theory about what happened to the first chicken?

We know from the analysis of MH370s satcom system carried out by Mike Exner, Victor Iannello, Gerry Soejatman and others, that if a spoof hijacking was perpetrated on MH370 then whoever carried it out possessed an extremely high level of technical sophistication. So high, in fact, that the attack must not only have been state sponsored, but sponsored by a state with cutting-edge technology in aircraft systems and satellite communications. That being the case, if we suppose that MH370 was hijacked by someone other than Russia, then that would mean that two Malaysian Airlines 777s—of which only 15 existed out of a worldwide commercial aircraft fleet of perhaps 18,000—happened to be targeted within the span of four months by two different major powers.

Talk about bad luck!

290 thoughts on “MH370: Suicide or Spoof? Part 2 — Motive”

  2. This article (http://www.businessinsider.com/a-fateful-thunderstorm-may-have-doomed-flight-mh17-2014-7) says MH17 diverted 300 miles to the northeast from its planned route to avoid a thunderstorm. If true, the launcher was not “positioned under the scheduled flight path of MH17” but happened to be in that position due to the diversion. The map included with the article shows the diversion started over Poland indicating it was not part of its originally scheduled flight plan.

  3. @Michael R: If Russia was responsible for the disappearance of MH370, likely it was with Chinese complicity. The path to Kazakhstan crosses China, and there would have to be assurances that the incursion would not elicit a response. Also, it would be hard to imagine that Russia would take a plane full of Chinese and risk damaging the important relationship with China.

  4. @LaurenH, That article was written at a time when a clear picture picture of what happened was still emerging. Yes, “it was roughly 300 miles off its normal course,” meaning that in previous weeks the flight had followed a flight plan that followed a more southerly course. But a scheduled route’s flight plan can change from day to day, and in the case of MH17 the plane at the time of its shoot-down was on the flight plan it had filed, presumably some time in the preceding 24 hours, though I haven’t yet been able to determine when. My working hypothesis at this point is that the Buk unit was brought down at the time the decision to shoot down MH17 was made, and then waited near the border until the flight plan was filed that brought it within firing range of the separatist-held area. Obviously I’d like to confirm the timing, as if it was made after the unit began its trip to Snizhne then the target couldn’t have been MH17 specifically.

    @Victor: The issue of Chinese air defenses in its far western and southwestern extremities is one that I plan to cover in an upcoming post, but the short version is that there doesn’t seem to be any.

  6. A few responses to ‘Part 1’ replies, if I may:

    @jia zijian_chn @IR1907

    ‘The clue is in the ATC communications’

    Is it normal to hear floor noises, seats creaking, papers shuffling in ATC recordings? (Maybe it is, I don’t know).

    Didn’t certain analysts at NBC say that it seemed as if the recording had been edited – ‘four clear breaks in the audio?’

    Listening at the recording again, at 6:53 minutes in – ‘ATC (01:01:19) Malaysian Three Seven Zero’ – there is some kind of background laughter/crying (?) but I assume this is just coming from ATC’s side.

    More importantly, what has become of the radio call by a Narita-bound pilot to MH370 after it disappeared from ATC radar. “We managed to establish contact with MH370 just after 1:30 a.m. and asked them if they had transferred into Vietnamese airspace… there was a lot of interference… static… but I heard mumbling from the other end…I’m sure it was the co-pilot.” The ‘mumbling’ might unravel the whole mystery so the pilot asked his name not to be published!

    @VictorI

    Victor, your paper on Chinese deception was extremely interesting, and your statement that it would be easier for China to steal what they wanted and ‘disappear’ the aircraft afterwards (frightfully) all adds up.

    With 152 Chinese on board, who woulda thunk it?! Its certainly a brand new angle you have provided us, one which I’ve never seen elsewhere in 2 years.

    However, if what being stolen was ‘highly classified’ in the first place, I doubt there would be any fallout even if the plane landed at Beijing airport as usual. The Chinese couldn’t be publicly accused of anything. Still, I suppose the SIO is an easier option.

  7. The United States must logically remain on the suspect list, given

    – its deep connections to so many of the moving parts (Freescale, Pinckney, DG, Inmarsat, radar coverage, etc.)
    – its custody of the ISAT data, March 10-14, 2014 (to “make graphs”…)
    – the unprecedented number of in-person meetings Obama has had with the Malaysian PM since Mar/’14
    – its central role in engineering a VERY long, suspiciously off-target, and thus far fruitless search
    – its central role in promulgating bad info (co-pilot cell, pilot sim paths, FDR pings, LANL “study”, etc)
    – its central role in pumping bad theories

    But I dearly hope I’m wrong to suspect them. So again: let’s please just audit the ISAT data’s chain of custody, the Oz-led search, the co-pilot cell phone story, the LANL study, the FDR ping fiasco, and the pilot sim flight path story, so that we can close their many glaring logical gaps, PROVE the Mahathirs & Dugains & Cawthornes (& Clarks?) of the world wrong, and take these persistent Western-led cover-up theories off the table.

    I would expect US-favouring patriots to LEAD the charge for full transparency, given a) their presumption of innocence, b) the depth and breadth of worldwide suspicion, and c) what I can only assume would be a strong desire to demonstrate the value of open government.

  8. @Jeff
    excuse me, but this post is by my oppinion completelly wrong and against all development of relations of related countries in media I saw during whole 2 years; and bellingcat is not credible for me, the same as current ukrainian government; feel free to check their status, these days; sure I will write more later, but if you can consider motive for MH17 case, then I am pretty sure that at that time, there was huge ukrinian media offensive against Russia to call NATO into open war conflict with them, where such “incident” can serve as really emotional trigger

  9. I still don’t get why the only option that would render the ISAT data unreliable is supposed to be an extremely complex spoof hijacking. A couple of month ago I wrote here: assuming that Inmarsat stores satcom metadata in some database facility to which there is distributed access, it will in principle always be vulnerable to a certain degree, both from the outside and, even much more, from inside. I can of course not judge how secure Inmarsat’s networks are or how restrictively they handle in-house access to their data. But it is certainly a possibility that the data have been manipulated ex post.

    Skilled fellows like those who carried out the “very sophisticated attack” against computers of high-ranking officials in Malaysian agencies involved in the MH370 investigation on march 9th (see VictorI’s excellent recent compilation) might well be able to insert fake data in ISAT’s database without them even realizing it in the first place. And yes, I do know that what I’m talking about is yet a step ahead of planting a trojan in a bunch of desktop PCs via email. It requires specialist skills and background knowledge, which I assume are abundant, however.

    The very simplest and safest way of “directing” a flight post mortem to the SIO would be to insert a modified/adapted copy of parts of the data from an appropriate flight in the desired direction. Using data from a real flight guarantees the overall integrity of the data. No need for sophisticated in-flight manipulation of the SDU under delicate time constraints by super hijackers. Suddenly the SDU reappears out of nothing and the data point consistently to the SIO, without anything else corroborating that evidence.

  10. el_gato: That is a good point. The satellite data could have been altered while stored at Perth, in which case all the satellite data are totally useless and we have essentially no clues to use.

  11. @el_gato, Well, so who took the plane, then? There had to be someone on board, and if the pilot and co-pilot weren’t in on it, they’d have to go through the E/E bay anyway, so you’re talking about something super high-tech anyway.

    @Brock, I translate your comment is, “I have a theory but no evidence to match it, so let’s please all shake the tree until some falls out.” Just doesn’t seem that compelling to me. I’d rather make sense of the data we do have, and/or go out and do some reporting. Which, by the way, you’re very good at!

    @Sajid, As I recall that Narita-bound pilot story never panned out.

  12. @Dave Nettles, I’m glad you’ve found this website interesting! Thanks for the kind words. Honestly, I think the biblical prophesy part is a hurdle. Will be interesting to hear other people’s feedback.

  13. @Jeff
    one more thing today; may be I can here serve as potential devil advocate, but during the whole MH370 case, according to what I fetched from quite big haystack of sources, my view on Putin completelly changed from the “surprising devil worth to kill ASAP” (original propaganda originated by western Ukraine and all the helpers media worldwide, targeting old-known coldwar enemy: Soviets/Russia) to just ordinary person like we all here are (I hope), and I realized this even few weeks before MH17 tragedy happened, when this exactly served for me as emotional trigger to completelly abandon any positive thoughts about whole Maidan outcome/warfare, although original students ideals might be quite good, despite HUGE persistent hate and neo-nazi behavior of Ukraine against “one and only selected enemy who is responsible for anything bad what is happening to Ukrainians” – obviously, extreme nonsense…

    also this can be considered as emotional trigger by someone, well, let it be; fact that somebody served in KGB/FSB doesnt mean for me anything bad a-priori; in fact, it prooves at least intelligent person, somebody who knows how wester society works and what was/is good and bad on BOTH sides; the most ugly experiences ever are wars, of course…
    https://www.rt.com/news/254445-putin-family-details-wwii/

  14. @VictorI

    Perth or even London (or wherever data run together) since there was also communication recorded from GES ID 301 which I think is Burum, Netherlands. Thus the data already seem to be geographically aggregated in some way.

    Right, the data would be useless, but much the same as with the spoof scenario.

    One interesting implication of this particular scenario is that it offers an explanation for the surprising lack of phone call attempts from Malaysian Airlines on March 7th: one cannot alter the basic structure of the communication ex post. If there was an incoming phone call at 18:39, it cannot be removed from the data, since it did affect the timing of subsequent handshakes. For the same reason, additional phone calls or other events cannot be inserted.

    In the end I don’t know how feasible such an action really is. My main point, however, is that a sophisticated in-flight spoof is by far not the only possibility.

  16. @jeffwise

    The plane may have ended at any time anywhere under anyone’s control (or not), but likely not in the SIO. It’s just that in reality the SDU would have never come back online. What we saw would merely be fake but consistent data based on those from a different flight, sincerely provided by Inmarsat, pointing us the SIO. That’s the unpleasant implication.. no clue.

  18. StevanG – (from previous) – “China would have all rights to seize it, just as any other country where the plane would land.”

    You make it sound like a narcotics bust. You wouldn’t have any right at all if it wasn’t an everyday lawful seizure, which it may not be. My main point – and we are in the hypothetical – if acting so blatantly compromises your means of gaining the info in the first place then you just don’t. You don’t do anything that indicates how and when you know anything. Intel networks take many years to build and can come apart in an hour.

    Victor – I was half in jest when I said payback. Israel being pushed towards China? I think they feel pretty well abandoned.

  19. @el_gato, I don’t want to dismiss your idea out of hand–on the contrary, if an idea has merit I think we should look at it carefully. I’d much rather do that than to give it a cursory glance and say, “If I can come up with this scenario so easily, there must be dozens! Who knows!” In fact, there are really not many options left, and I really do believe that by winnowing them down we can approach the truth. So here’s an implication of your idea: there has to be have been a team on board the plane, and another team gaining acess to the computer data. Some potential problems: you’d have to coordinate the “turning on” of the fake SDU data with the disappearance from Malaysian radar, which would be hard to do, even assuming you managed to find a way to coordinate with the hijackers on board. Also, you’d have to be very sure that none of this data was coming in and being stored somewhere else, eg. in Perth. And, if manufacturing numbers from whole cloth, you run the risk of creating some that don’t match with prior data, such as baseline errors. I could go on. So, I would say that in order to present this as a viable alternative, there’s a bit more work to do.

  20. @Jeff: my Canadian accent must be thick, today. The correct translation is:

    “Even my puny citizen’s audits – with no resources or inside access – have produced a) enough smoke to indicate a fire, and b) many obstacles thrown in my way whenever I try to get closer to the source of the smoke.”

    That, I submit, is a compelling case to expand the audit, by adding resources and inside access.

  21. @el_gato
    Just trying to get my head around your hacking suggestion…could you please clarify:

    ISAT’s database(s) could have been hacked after? the flight (say, a day or 2 after), substituting data from a real flight but the time stamps would need to remain? and phone calls (or lack of) in the log would have to remain the same? AFAIK there is no regular route in that direction to the SIO, so either a satellite engineer would have to be involved to fabricate appropriate numbers or someone would have to fly that route so that the numbers could be collected? Also, surely ISAT would back up their database(s) on a regular basis to offline storage – or maybe that is a thing of the past 🙂 ?

    In your hacking scenario then, would we at least have the duration of the flight if nothing else?
    Thanks in advance.

  22. @jeffwise
    Reading your articles, I keep thinking the Russian mafia might be a more likely candidate for MH370 than Putin, provided we are to assume that Russia played any role at all. It’s easier to envision motives (strong-arm the airline into condoning illegal trafficking, among other possibilities). It’s also easier to envision the disregard for human life. Assuming military corruption, the mafia might even be able to pull off MH17. Of course, without evidence these are just thoughts. Personally I have hope for less extreme explanations.

  24. Sometimes, things just happened. And bad luck was indeed the only thing to blame. Talk about randomness, the essence of our unpredictable universe.

    Besides, if MH370 was deliberately hijacked as you hinted, by a powerful state with careful plans, would the hijackers allow a failure? Probably not. Then how do you explain the flaperon which current status we’d like to hear so much about?

  25. @el_gato and Jeffwise – if the data was spoofed, we don’t need a hijacker anymore. We only need a wayward plane shot down accidentally at 18:28, followed by a hack. One could do the BFO/BTO values for a straight line in Excel and drop it in the database before the sun came up. There’s no reason to think that none of the major powers have found ways into ISAT’s data.

    So the duration doesn’t have to match. The only problem is the lack of debris. But hey, we have that anyway and few would argue that it rules out any particular area.

    This could have been as simple as, well, nobody’s seen it yet, let’s show that it went to the SIO and that’s the end of it.

  26. @all

    The disappearance of MH370 entered the “cold case” domain after about 100 days following the event. When one looks at the statistics relative to solving major crimes, i.e. homicides, there is very rapidly declining clearance rate (solution rate) versus time. If the probability of solving the crime were plotted versus time on a log-log plot the slope would be steeply negative. I don’t have the raw data, only a graph (see Figure 2 in the link below), so I cannot easily estimate the slope. However, there is a very long flat tail characteristic of many things that occur in the natural world. See, for example the Gutenberg-Richter law relative to earthquakes.

    Basically, the likelihood of finding the plane now is virtually nil. You cannot compare MH370 to AF447. Searchers had a very good idea where AF447 went down, and it still took two years to find the wreckage. As it now stands no one has any firm idea where MH370 even went down.

    At this point, I am going to “call it” – first responder slang for saying it is time to stop chest compressions, the victim is dead.

    http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=clsoc_crim_facpub

  27. EricB:
    My viewpoint of who Putin is and what he is capable of was forever changed by reading a book called “Red Notice” by Bill Browder. In short: Browder’s own experiences as a financial manager in Russia, that eventually led to direct conflict with Vladimir Putin himself, made it very clear that Putin and the “Russian Mafia” are one and the same. He is simply the strongest of the strongmen.

    The ruthlessness of Putin in this book gave me little doubt that he would not hesitate to order (or at least be supportive of) the downing of a jet to suit his purposes. Now that the SIO search appears likely to bear almost no fruit whatsoever, the picture of Russia becomes that much more intriguing – and potentially important.

  28. @palominodrew, Thank God for you sir.

    @DennisW, Why are you quitting just when things are getting good? Can you honestly say with a straight face that two MAS 777s went down under mysterious circumstances within four months of each other, and it was a total coincidence??

    @Haxi, the explanation is that the flaperon was planted. As the size of the barnacles seems to indicate.

    @JS, Nope, you’ve still got to explain the turn six seconds after IGARI and the high-speed track in Malaysian primary radar.

  29. @palominodrew

    ‘made it very clear that Putin and the “Russian Mafia” are one and the same. He is simply the strongest of the strongmen.’

    President AND mafia leader. -sigh- And what have I accomplished with MY life?

  30. @Jeff

    I’m stumped frankly. Not quitting – just clearing my head. I’ll wait anxiously for the next FI report just like everyone else here.

    We have a great group on this forum, and it is interesting just to spectate for awhile and kibitz.

    What we really need is a whistleblower.

  31. @jeffwise

    Ukraine was losing the war badly at the time, only few days before MH17 their military transport plane got shot down by a BUK (at FL200 or so, clearly not a manpad), they needed something to harm Russia internationally so they could stop their undercover invasion.

    MH17 was strayed off course by an ukrainian ATC, it was sent right on the path of ukrainian military planes that came to bomb the rebel area. Malaysian plane might be picked because of greater “marketing effect” since people would naturally connect it with MH370.

    And it worked, since Russia quickly got heavily sanctioned and it had to pull the BUK system back over the border.

  32. @AM2

    Yes, it could have happened shortly after the flight. I wouldn’t say that timestamps had to remain completely untouched. The relative timing of events cannot be altered, since the gaps between them are tightly defined by timers and recurring processes. It should however be safe to add a constant offset to all timestamps.

    The template flight must not necessarily have gone to the SIO. The data could in principle stem from any flight which would have produced the BFO that have been reported (BTO bias would be unknown), including Africa (symmetric about IOR position+velocity) or even flights in northerly directions with an appropriate (~12h) time offset. Maybe the primary intention was just to make MH370 “reappear” and let it fly for a couple of hours, and the fact that the data point to the SIO is only coincidence.

    I’m glad that database backups still exist, but I usually don’t dig them out unless there is a good reason to do so. Once Inmarsat suspected that something was fishy, backups might already have been updated. But that is just speculation, I don’t know what their particular setup is.

    In that scenario, the ISAT data past IGARI would have absolutely nothing to do with MH370.

    @jeffwise

    I agree and I also don’t consider this a well-founded scenario yet, just a possibility. Actions on the ground and in the plane must not necessarily have been coordinated. A reaction like: “now that it happened, how do we fix it?” is also conceivable.

  33. If only we could tell where the Flaperon had been.
    Only 2 possibilities:
    1) It wondered around the ocean.
    2) It was in the hands of the organisation that hijacked it and being carefully prepared for planting.
    If only we could tell for certain.

  34. If MH370 was hacked, the perps would have possibly practised on an other aircraft. Could 9M-MRD (MH17) be that aircraft? Maybe the hacking attempt failed and some traces needed to be removed. Was that the first time 9M-MRD was flying within “arm’s” reach? It would be nice to also have some ISAT data for MH17…

    If MH370 was hacked who would benefit the most?
    Would you still buy a B777? Would you still buy Boeing if you knew they were susceptible to being hacked? Who would you buy from? Airbus? What a coincidence the French are also the only ones who actually found MH370 (albeit only part of it 😉 )…

    Finally do we have any idea where 9M-MRO was supposed to go after the stop over in Beijing (I always assumed it would fly back to Kuala Lumpur, but can’t find a proof of that) ?

  35. el gato – Your idea might be a lot closer than mere speculation. I have become convinced that the ISAT data is out, but in a very systematic way. If this is the case, there are only three possible explanations:

    1. Fundamental error in BTO interpretation from the get go. Seems highly unlikely/next to impossible since we are told that DSTG have validated the technique across multiple flights.

    2. “Somebody” changed the ISAT data (or at least the version released by Malaysian DCA). This looks like a highly risky thing to do since international parties (Inmarsat, NTSB, AAIB) know what the original values were – and if this were a Malaysian initiative why would they be complicit?

    3. The BTO fidelity was altered post-disappearance in a systematic manner following disruption of SDU or its data inputs.

    I favour (3) but have not completely ruled out (2).

  37. @StevenG, What I find even more morally repulsive than a barely concealed act of mass murder is the subsequent attempt to blame the victims of another act of unprovoked aggression. I don’t know if you are a paid Russian troll or merely have fallen for Russia’s fog of half-baked lies, but I think you should check yourself.

  38. Paul Smithson – Your number three – “The BTO fidelity was altered post-disappearance in a systematic manner following disruption of SDU or its data inputs”.

    This is what I pictured from the outset. You could easily throw a spanner in just with an outage and some tinkering. Why were they so confident there was no systematic error?

  39. General question. How complete is the search that has been done? I mean, are they 100% certain the airplane is not in the area’s already searched? Is there ANY change it could have been missed?

  40. I saw a conspiracy theory once. It was at the grocery checkout line. It was examining it’s receipt angrily and biting its change of a nickel and three pennies. As it left it raised it’s fist angrily shouting that the manager was a thief and a commie. Outside, the muttering theory was hit by a large SUV and was killed. The driver was wearing dark glasses and a trenchcoat. He sped away. But all’s well because another theory was just on it’s way in to buy a gallon of milk.

  41. @Jeff Still hope that you don’t consider me paid russian troll too… Be sure that commies (Zljuganov & his melodyboys) and nazis (Zhirinovskij & his melodyboys) there have almost the same “power” as in my or your country, these days, thank God. Till now, I hoped you are for science based facts and not scientology based lies, manipulations and hate, which is happening to poor people of Ukraine, sad but true…
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDVAQI-4lto

  43. As we contemplate a conscious pilot for all or part of the cruise after the FMT, I’ll suggest we consider the possibility that the normally closed cross-feed Valves between the left and right fuel tanks were opened. That would allow both engines to flameout pretty much at the same time around 00:17 and would mean the A/C could have been flying higher and faster between the 6th and 7th arcs than previously calculated. This could explain why the plane hasn’t been found in the current search area.

    Note, opening the cross-feed Valves during operation is not normal practice but then little about this flight is normal.

  44. I don’t believe in coincidences, only the appearance of one. Forgive me if this was debunked already, but here’s a stupid question… How close was MH17 shot down to the northern part seventh arc? Or maybe it was about to cross over it and see something it wasn’t supposed to see. Here’s a possibility… maybe MH17 was shot down to protect a secret! Just a thought.

  45. @SanyGirl, Not a stupid question! MH17 wasn’t anywhere near the MH370 seventh arc, though. (AirAsia in fact was, by sheer coincidence)

  46. @jeffwise

    I am just realistic, I have also written “undercover invasion” which I wouldn’t do if I was a russian troll, would I?!

    I have no doubts it was done by russian rebels (or maybe but unlikely russian military), but Ukraine is responsible here too since they didn’t close the airspace where they knew a heavy SAM was active. And knowing their modus operandi I have to cast my doubts it was done with intention.

  47. @StevanG, Well, read the Bellingcat report and you’ll know better. The Buk missile launcher in question came over from Russia the night before and left the night after. There’s no need to speculate or guess.

  48. Besides bad luck, don’t leave out coincidences: MH17 was shot down on July 17, 2014 which was the anniversary of flight TWA 800 which crashed on July 17, 1996.

    It’s also odd that the MH370 search team spent 8 weeks investigating underwater signals that they knew could not be from a ULB. Yet you don’t consider the Western Governments as suspects, only Russia/Putin is a suspect.

    And no, I am not a “Putin troll” merely someone viewing MH370 with an unbiased prism.

  49. @jeffwise

    [redacted]

    @StevanG, I’m not really interested in hosting a “both sides are equally valid” discussion on this site. I don’t know what the news coverage is like in your country, but there is really no ambiguity about this matter. Russia has aggressively seeded misinformation in the news media, is well-known for attempting to hijack discussion forums through sock puppetry, and I will not tolerate it here. Final warning.

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