Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 might have been shot down
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| A Malaysia Airlines flight prior to departure at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in May. Photo: AFP. |
Written by Nigel Cawthorne, who states he may be Britain’s “most published living author” with 150 books to his name, the book canvasses the idea that the plane carrying 239 people was shot down by mistake during a US/Thai military exercise.
A Malaysia Airlines flight prior to departure at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport i
According to the theory, the mistake may have been covered up because authorities did not want any retaliatory attacks. Data that sent the search off in other directions - first to the Straits of Malacca and then on to the Southern Indian Ocean - was a ruse to cover up the reality, Cawthorne states in the book.
Cawthorne bases some of the theory on the eyewitness account of New Zealand oil rig worker Mike McKay, who said he saw a ball of fire in the sky from the rig he was working on in the South China Sea in the early hours of March 8.
“From when I first saw the burning (plane) until the flames went out (still at high altitude) was 10-15 seconds. There was no lateral movement, so it was either coming toward our location, stationary, or going away from our location,” Mr McKay told his employers in an email shortly after the incident.
Cawthorne’s theory still does not answer what happened to the wreckage of the plane.
American aviation author Christine Negroni, who wrote Deadly Departure on TWA Flight 800, is also working on a book about the missing Malaysian flight, calledCrashed, which will be published by Penguin.
A movie about missing Flight MH370 is also in the works and could be in cinemas within months.
Rupesh Paul Productions is promoting The Vanishing Act, a film about the plane tragedy, among buyers at the Cannes Film Festival.
A poster for the movie promises to tell “the untold story” of the missing plane, but in an interview on Friday, the associate director of the movie, Sritama Dutta, said the only similarities between the thriller and the real-life disaster is that a plane is missing.
“It has got no similarities,” said Dutta, adding there have been so many developments with the actual case that it wouldn’t be practical to try to mirror it.
“We cannot keep up with the true facts, it’s changing every day.”
However the 90-second trailer for the film, posted to YouTube on the weekend, features a cast of terrified passengers aboard a turbulent MAS jetliner and recreates some of the dramatic scenarios that could have played out on board the ill-fated flight after takeoff.
Dutta said Indian director Rupesh Paul will film the movie and a multiethnic cast for it could be revealed before the Cannes Film Festival ends on May 25.
Paul presented the film idea to financiers with the teaser trailer on Saturday afternoon, according to Variety .
Paul told the magazine that he spent 20 days working on a screenplay based around a Malaysian journalist’s theory about what happened to the plane.
He said the journalist, who insists on anonymity for now, is one of the film’s investors. The film’s budget is about $3.5 million.
The trailer for the partly fictional film was shot over six days in an Aerobus parked in Mumbai, India.
Shooting the film will take 35 days and involve more than 200 actors.
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