Originally Posted by
biggy
...but I haven't seen anything anywhere addressing what I've been wondering about, which is whether it's possible for another rogue aircraft could've done a planned intercept of the flight and coerced the pilots' actions either over a direct communication or via some sort of 'sleeper' agent on the plane? Assuming that's not a completely crazy question, would a second plane be able to travel closely enough along the evasive flightpath to remain a threat without arousing further radar suspicion?
Hey Biggy, welcome to the forum. Back in the early 1990s there was a guy that got arrested in South Florida after landing his Lear jet. His method was camping out near ADIZ boundaries (now called FIRs) and "joining" up on KMIA bound airliners. Transponder off of course. He'd fly a tight formation, shadowing the scheduled flights inbound, until he got to where he wanted to be, which was inside the international water boundary (back then it was 3 miles offshore). At the last moment he'd break off and light up his transponder on a VFR code, as if he'd just been out doing some local proficiency flying, or as if he'd barely missed the airliner. Lastly, he'd proceed to one of many nearby lesser used, or executive airports and off load his cargo. If I remember correctly, I think it was predominantly cocaine. He went away for a long time.
Allegedly he'd gotten aways with this tactic for a while, but it was the supply trail that eventually gave U.S. Customs enough leads to look closer at South Florida jet operators and eventually he got nabbed. I doubt anyone in Malaysia was all that interested in anything going on at 3 a.m.