How to Steal an Airplane: From 9/11 to MH370

by James Corbett
March 18, 2014

As the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370–the Boeing 777 bound for Beijing that vanished seemingly without a trace–approaches the two week mark, the talking heads of the corporate news networks are becoming increasingly desperate to fill the 24/7 news cycle with meaningless speculation and blather. In their desperation, they have even turned to speculation on a subject long shunned as outlandish conspiracy theory by these very same networks: the possibility of remote control hijackings of commercial passenger jets.

The speculation is prompted in part by a report in the Federal Register last November noting that several models of 777, including the 777-200 model used for Flight 370, were susceptible to outside attack.

Question mark headlines musing about the possibility of such a “cyber hijacking” serve to obscure or even deny a very important point. The first such “cyber hijackings” most likely took place over 12 years ago, on September 11th, 2001 using technology that was tested, proven and available long before that infamous date.

Although unamnned aerial vehicles, or “UAV,” like the Global Hawk, Predator and Reaper drones used in the US’ illegal extrajudicial assassination program are thought of as cutting edge military hardware, UAVs of various sorts have been used since August 22, 1849, when Austria launched 200 pilotless, bomb-filled balloons on the city of Venice. Development of UAVs continued with radio-controlled drones and pilotless torpedos developed in WWI, the creation of the US Air Force’s “Pilotless Air Craft” branch in 1946, the deployment of military UAVs in the Vietnam War, Israel’s development of the first drone with real-time surveillance capabilities in the Yom Kippur War and US use of the technology in Grenada before the birth of the modern era with the extensive deployment of Pioneer drones in the First Gulf War.

When it comes to the remote control of civilian aircraft, President Bush stated in late September 2001 that he would devote federal funds to developing new technologies for combating the threat of hijacking…including remote control technology.

But even at that time, remote control technology had been successfully demonstrated for commercial jetliners for nearly two decades. This is actual footage of a joint NASA / FAA experiment conducted in 1984 at Edwards Air Force Base in which a Boeing 720 was remote controlled through multiple takeoffs and landings before being crashed in a “controlled impact demonstration.”

In August of 2001, this technology was further demonstrated by Raytheon, which successfully took off and landed a Boeing 727 six times at Holloman AFB in New Mexico without a pilot on board. Raytheon also developed a sensor suite for the Air Force’s Global Hawk drones and Raytheon Network Centric Systems has recently won multiple contracts to help develop advanced communications systems for the E-4B, the US government’s so-called doomsday plane that was spotted above the White House shortly before the strike on the Pentagon and which has since been confirmed was one of four functioning Doomsday Planes operating in the skies on that day.

Curiously, on 9/11 itself Raytheon employees with ties to the company’s electronic warfare division, including a man described as the company’s “dean of electronic warfare” and multiple senior engineers for electronic systems, were among the listed passengers on each of the three planes that hit their targets that day. Raytheon also had an office in WTC2 on the 91st floor, and despite the fact that there were only four survivors from the Twin Towers who were above the impact zone at the time of the plane hits, no Raytheon employees died in the office that day.

Another curious connection presents itself in Dov Zakheim, the comptroller of the Bush Pentagon and, until taking over his Pentagon role in 2001, CEO of SPC International, a subsidiary of Sytstem Planning Corporation, which provides a so-called “Flight Termination System” for the US military that the company boasts provides “a fully redundant turnkey range safety and test system for remote control and flight termination of airborne test vehicles.” As comptroller of the Pentagon, Zakheim was responsible for the trillions of dollars that could not be accounted for in the Pentagon’s books at the time of 9/11 and which prompted Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to declare a “war on bureaucracy” on September 10, 2001.

Flight 77 was supposedly piloted by Hani Hanjour, a flight school dropout who could not handle a Cessna 172, but somehow managed to steer a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn at 500 mph to come exactly level with the ground. Neither experienced pilots nor aviation officials could believe that such a move could be pulled off with such precision at such high speeds by any but the most experienced pilot. Watching the flight on her radar screen, Dulles International Airport air traffic controller Danielle O’Brien later remarked: “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.”

By what we are expected to believe is a massive coincidence, the flight ended up hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where the DoD staffers overseen by Zakheim were working on the question of the missing trillions.

As 9/11 researcher Aidan Monaghan told The Corbett Report in 2011, the remote control hypothesis also makes sense of various anomalies in the flight path of United 175 that hit World Trade Center 2.

As incredible as such a narrative is to the general public, that incredibility stems largely from the media’s steadfast refusal to report on the proven technologies to accomplish such a cyber hijacking that have been available for well over a decade.

Whether or not Flight 370 was the victim of such an attack or something different altogether remains to be seen. But the many pieces of the 9/11 puzzle pointing to the use of remote control technologies to pilot the flights on that fateful day, from Raytheon’s test flights of remote-controlled passenger jets to Zakheim’s involvement with a company responsible for remote-control “flight termination systems” to the precision of United 175′s bank angle and turn start time to the presence of the E-4B doomsday planes in the skies that morning, provide a compelling counter-narrative to the tabloid press’ claim that Flight 370 may be the first example of cyber hijacking.

One other piece of that puzzle provides yet further credence to the claim of remote control planes on 9/11. In a story so bizarre that it simply cannot be shoehorned into the official 9/11 story, police officers stopped a strange van near their temporary command post next to the still-smouldering twin towers while the chaos unfolded on the morning of 9/11. According to the official report of the Mineta Transportation Institute:


No explanation of who these men were or why they had a picture of a “remote controlled jet flying into the World Trade Center” painted on their “delivery” van on the morning of 9/11 have ever been provided, much less even asked for by the complacent, complicit mainstream media. If and when more details of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight do eventually surface, don’t expect the media to do any better job answering questions about it, or connecting any of the 9/11 dots in what may very well have been the world’s first “cyber hijacking” nearly 13 years ago.