KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have been the victim of cyber-jacking, a new book suggests, the most recent in the line-up of theories on the Boeing 777’s disappearance last year.

In the book Someone is Hiding Something, authors Richard Belzer, David Wayne and George Noory said remote-control hijacking was the most likely scenario as the way in which MH370 vanished from radar “defies all logical explanation”.

“Cyber hijacking is about the only possibility that fits the above circumstances insofar as the known evidence regarding the actions of the plane,” the authors were quoted as saying in a report by The Australian.

“The notion perpetrated in the media that a plane ‘disappears’ from tracking when the transponder is turned off is patently false.

“It simply is not credible that the plane avoided radar after it flew off its route.”

The authors panned the prevailing belief that those on board MH370 had died of hypoxia, a deadly condition caused by low oxygen conditions. According to this theory, the pilots were incapacitated because of a lack of oxygen and the plane flew for hours on autopilot before running out of fuel and crashing in an unknown location.

“[There is] no evidence of this, or real motive for it,” they were quoted as saying.

However, they added that cyber-jacking, although the most likely scenario, was not necessarily the answer to the mystery surrounding MH370.

“We’re not saying that’s what happened,” they said in the report. “We are saying that the official version of ‘We lost the plane and it may never be found’ is an obvious ruse and a very weak one at that.”

US aviation safety expert Captain John Cox, when weighing in on the theory, dismissed the possibility of a remote takeover, calling it “far-fetched”.

“Airplanes are shielded to prevent such acts,” he was quoted as saying.

Flight MH370 disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Boeing 777 which was carrying 239 people last made contact with air traffic control less than an hour after take-off, at a point over the South China Sea.

The theory that it may have been hijacked via remote control comes after news of a National Geographic documentary which quoted aviation experts as saying that MH370 had made three turns after its last contact with air traffic controllers.

According to the documentary, the aircraft first made a turn to the left followed by two more turns that took it westwards before it headed south towards Antarctica.

MH370 was declared officially missing on Jan 29, and all passengers and crew members are presumed dead. No trace of the plane has been found despite the largest search operation in aviation history.

Another theory is that flight MH370 might have secretly landed in Kazakhstan, according to an American science writer.

Jeff Wise, who is also CNN’s aviation analyst, said there may have been “deliberate tampering” in the search data to make the Boeing 777 appear to have gone in another direction.

Wise earlier wrote an article for New York Magazine suggesting that its navigational data had been meddled with, to leave trails of inaccurate information which convinced officials that the plane flew south.

He also said the plane was possibly hijacked by perpetrators who could have accessed the flight controls and flown the plane to Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is leased from Kazakhstan by Russia.

Wise said his theory was established upon satellite transmissions and “pings” that the plane fed off seven hours after it was missing. Those transmissions were recorded by British company Inmarsat, whose raw data was then released by Malaysian officials in late May 2014.

In the article, however, Wise said he wasn’t sure why Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted the Malaysian passenger plane. — The Malaysian Insider

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on February 26, 2015.