By All Voices
Adding to the already miles-deep mystery of the missing Malasian Air Flight MH370 are reports that residents of a tiny mid-Indian Ocean island insist that they saw the “low-flying jumbo jet’’ four hours after it disappeared from radar.
The island is part of the Maldives chain and called Kudahuvadhoo, which just happens to have an international runway. That particular runway was among five that the plane’s captain had used for practice on his home flight simulator, according to the Malaysian daily newspaper Berita Harian.
As for the people of Kudahuvadhoo, they are quoted by the paper as saying that the low-flying giant jet roared above them at approximately 6:20 a.m. March 8. They claim to have clearly seen the Malaysia Airlines’ trademark white body and red stripes emblazoned accross the jet’s fuselage.
“I’ve never seen a jet flying so low over our island before,” one witness said. “I could even make out the doors on the plane clearly.”
In what is becoming a curious pattern, Malaysian officials categorically denied the report on Wednesday.
As this mystery is poised to enter its third week (it is already the largest, longest search for a missing passenger jet in history), other developments include the following:
• Flight 370’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, used five runways for practice purposes on on his home simulator: the Male International Airport in the Maldives, the US military base Diego Garcia to its south, and three airports in India and Sri Lanka, again according to Berita Harian.
“We are not discounting the possibility that the plane landed on a runway that might not be heavily monitored, in addition to the theories that the plane landed on sea, in the hills, or in an open space,’’ an unidentified Malaysian official told the daily.
•Only 30 minutes following the jet’s communications cut-off with Malaysian air traffic controllers it was picked up on Thai military radar. Amazingly, Thai authorities did not bother to inform any authorities, searchers or investigators of this fact until this very week because….ready? Nobody asked them.
“We did not pay any attention to it,” said Thailand air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchookorn. “Anything that did not look like a threat to us, we simply look at it without taking actions.”
• It’s also being reported by the New York Post that the plane’s “black box” can ping for only about 30 days. Thus, it has already lost about one-third of its battery power.
• According to Daily Express, a Malaysain newspaper, the co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, was engaged and planned to soon marry before he disappeared along with the other 238 souls aboard that ill-fated airplane.
Malasian officials still contend that the pilot or co-pilot (or some other jet-savvy person) brought this aircraft down.
Indeed, Malaysia’s defense minister Hishammuddin Hussein said that certain files had been recently deleted from the pilot’s home flight simulator.
Hussein told a news conference Wednesday that they are trying to reconstitute those files.
Also, background checks on all foreign passengers on the plane except for those from Ukraine and Russia (three people) have been done. Hussein says that nothing suspicious has turned up in any of these inquiries.
Opinion
Okay. So now we have actual eyewitnesses – not radar screen blips, not blurry satellite photos, not computer graphs and pings, but real people who say they saw and heard this plane flying above their heads.
Note that they did not say that the plane appeared to be under any kind of duress or stress — other than its unusually low altitude. If their reports are true (and there appears to be no reason to doubt these islanders), then this plane was deliberately hijacked by members of its crew or certain passengers.
The idea and possibility that this plane and all its passengers may be being held on some “remote” (perhaps even uncharted) island is looking more and more likely, even probable. Now, for what purposes, of course, remains to be seen.
(Oh, and yes, I can tell you as an old sailor that there are still islands sprinkled throughout all of the vast oceans of the world which remain unknown, uninhabited and thus uncharted. Some even rise and fall with the tides).
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