Could flight MH370 have been shot down by the US military?

This is the most credible hypothesis in the eyes of journalist Florence de Changy, a correspondent for "Le Monde" and RFI in Asia, who has been investigating the subject for several years.

It details the elements that indicate it at the microphone of Frédéric Taddeï.

INTERVIEW

The disappearance of the MH370 remains to this day one of the biggest mysteries in aviation.

On March 8, 2014, the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 sailing between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing went missing with 239 people on board, most of them Chinese nationals.

Seven years later, despite several years of official investigation, the plane has never been found and the circumstances of this event are still unknown.

Since then, Florence de Changy has also been investigating this disappearance.

Journalist and correspondent for "Le Monde" in Asia, she first published a book "Flight MH370 has not disappeared", in 2016, and returns with a new investigation, "Flight MH370: The disappearance".

At the microphone of Frédéric Taddeï, on Europe 1, she shares her main discoveries and hypotheses on this enigma.

You carried out this long investigation alone.

What sources do you rely on?

The peculiarity of this investigation is that it relies on many different small sources, including official documents both public and confidential, but also very small witnesses.

And sometimes little sentences.

Someone who says to me, "You know, the White House was calling the Malaysian government every day."

A senior official at the Ministry of Defense who said to the pilot's nephew: "I'm sorry about the MH370. These are

 collateral damages

".

Or the Chinese ambassador who spoke to families the day after the tragedy: "It's very complicated. We can't explain that to you."

These are just little clues, they don't have proof value, but they make you progress. 

You think the most plausible scenario is that the plane crashed at sea on its way, why? 

I started by dissecting the official version and realized that there was nothing in it.

I had very good sources who had mentioned, from the start, the presence of two American Awacs (planes that function as flying radar stations) in the area and that the Americans know what happened.

This source also first spoke to Ghyslain Wattrelos, a Frenchman who has lost part of his family.

In 2016, I already had this information, but I didn't know what to do with it. 

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I also met an American military man who told me that the Awac's jamming capacity was "phenomenal".

And I hypothesized that these two Awacs had simply scrambled the MH370 by sandwiching it.

I found several other things, including the fact that the MH370's signal is gradually disappearing from radar screens in Ho Chi Minh and Kuala Lumpur, which is totally inconsistent with the idea that he would have turned off his transponder.

Another element, the system called FlightRadar24, where we see all the planes flying around the world live, shows that when the MH370 disappears, several small planes around it also momentarily disappear, but they reappear. 

There is another element that is consistent with that, which is that at 2:25 am, the plane's Satcom turns on again.

It is in all the official reports but we have overlooked this element.

Why the plane could communicate again?

It means that the Awacs have freed themselves.

At this point, the plane arrives very close to Chinese airspace.

And it seems pretty consistent that for two American Awacs it is out of the question to enter it.   

In your opinion, the disappearance of flight MH370 is due to a reason of State, potentially linked to a very specific cargo.

2.5 tonnes of a shipment was not scanned.

It never happens that you can put on a civilian plane a cargo that has not been scanned.

We are told that these are walkie talkies and battery chargers.

Except that the explanation in the official report why we could not get this freight through the scanning machines, is that it was too large.

That does not make any sense.

It is also written in the official report that this freighter was brought from Penang by escorted truck.

So you come to a cargo confiscation type scenario or something like that.

But this is the hypothetical part of my book.

What could explain the decision to shoot down the plane? 

A plan A is never to shoot at a civilian plane.

So if this device was indeed destroyed by one or two missiles, it was the consequence of a plan that had gone wrong.

Logically, an attempted hijacking that would not have worked, potentially because the pilot, whose personality I have studied a lot, could have refused to comply. 

A Vietnam Airlines pilot claimed to have picked up a distress message from the MH370.

How reliable is this testimony? 

It is a message that was published the day after the disappearance.

He said the pilot picked up the MH370 saying his cabin was disintegrating.

This is what we say when we have been hit by a missile and we request an emergency landing, which is extraordinary.

If this message is correct, we have the end of the story.

Except that almost everything related to this post is gone, including all the tweets that mentioned it.

But the pilot said it on Vietnamese television and I have the extracts.

To me, that means it's true. 

In this context, it is difficult to imagine that China and Vietnam are not in the know.

Why don't they say anything? 

If it happened there, under control, and you know exactly where the plane fell, a cleanup is a little easier, even if there is debris.

But the people there are soldiers and possibly a few Vietnamese fishermen, so the information is very well controlled.

If the Americans have made this huge blunder, they must buy the silence of Vietnam, China and Malaysia.

And when we look at how diplomatic relations and exchanges between these different countries have evolved, what we discover is far from being inconsistent with this idea.