Was Malaysia 370 Shot Down By the Malaysian Air Force?

THE LOGIC IN FAVOR OF A SHOOT DOWN BY THE MALAYSIAN AIR FORCE. In the post 911 era, any threat against high visibility targets like the Menara Petronas Towers must be taken serious. In fact, the day after the World Trade Centers were destroyed in New York, there was a bomb threat that required evacuating the Petronas Towers.

        Certainly the Malaysian Government has continued to change its story. Originally the last words of the flight were by co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, who said, “All right, goodnight.” But later the speaker and words were the pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shaw who said, "Goodnight Malaysian Three Seven Zero." No further transcript of the conversation has been released. Further, the co-pilot tried to make a cell phone call when the plane descended to low altitude. The signal was picked up in Penang about 250 miles from where the transponder was turned off. As is shown on Figure 3, Penang is home to Royal Malaysian Air Force's Butterworth Air Base where F-18 and F-5 interceptor fighters are located. If they received a call from the co-pilot, perhaps with a coded word about the pilot going crazy, they would likely have decided to shoot the aircraft down. After all, that is what our Air Force was ready to do on 911, but we had no planes ready to do it that were located in the right place to get it done.

       What about the black box and pings received in the Indian Ocean? They have been up to hundreds of miles apart, or as little as 17 miles apart. The transponder can only be heard about a mile away. Some of the signals heard were close to but not at the required 37.5 kHz. If the Malaysian Government decided to cover up the shoot down because they were afraid of the financial consequences and military consequencces (see Figure 5 for information about territorial disputes between China and Malaysia) they could have seeded areas far away from the area of concern with pingers designed to mislead searchers long enough to get past the expected 30-day life expectancy of the transponder. As I write this it is 42 days since the flight went missing.