Was Malaysian plane accidentally shot down by US-Thai fighter jets?

That’s the latest claim 71 days after the plane went missing. Find the UK Daily Mail report below..

The grieving family of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 have criticised the timing of a new book that claims the plane may have been accidentally shot down and the search for survivors covered up.

The family of missing Brisbane man Rod Burrows say they are at pains to understand how still, after 71 days of ongoing global search efforts, no one knows what happened to the missing plane which vanished on March 8 and how a book could be released so soon after.

Flight MH370: The Mystery makes the incredible claim that the airline was shot down by US-Thai joint strike fighters accidentally as part of a training drill gone horribly wrong. The book goes on to claim the search party was purposely sent in the wrong direction as part of a cover up. Continue….

Irene Burrows, Rod’s mother, told the Sun Herald that the book had been released too soon, and that despite the speculation, it offers no concrete answers.
‘There’s absolutely no answers,’ she said. ‘It’s devastating for the families, it’s been 10 weeks tomorrow and there’s nothing.’

She said both her and husband George are still trying to comprehend what happened, and that a book full of conspiracies released just 71 days after its disappearance, does nothing to alleviate the pain of losing their son.

But according to the book’s author, Nigel Cawthorne, there may never be a clear answer.
He writes in the book how the Burrows, and hundreds more in their situation, will ‘almost certainly’ never know the real story behind how the ill-fated plane vanished on March 8.

He writes: ‘Did they die painlessly, unaware of their fate? Or did they die in terror in a flaming wreck, crashing from the sky in the hands of a madman?’

It is then that Cawthorne makes the incredible assertion that the plane was shot down accidentally over the South China Sea by a joint US-Thai joint strike fighter team, and the searchers sent in the wrong direction as part of a cover up.

He describes how a man, while working on an oil rig in the ocean at about the same time the plane’s transponder went off, saw a burning plane and how this was right near the military exercise being conducted with personnel from various other countries.

He claims that these countries may have then sent searchers in the wrong direction in order to cover their tracks.
‘After all, no wreckage has been found in the South Indian Ocean, which in itself is suspicious.’
He said with the amount of disinformation regarding MH370, it is best to be skeptical.

Cawthorne also raises more doubt into toe plane’s disappearance, claiming it could have been located if its tracking software had been upgraded – something that costs just £6 ($10) per flight.

According to Cawthorne the Boeing 777-200ER had a ‘data package’ that only transmitted the most basic flight information, so authorities weren’t able to get a GPS fix on it.

For just $10, however, this package could have been improved, the book says, resulting in far more detailed information about the 777’s movements being pinged.

‘For US$10, you could have told within half an hour’s flying time where the plane would have gone,’ a source told the paper.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, meanwhile, has called for real-time tracking of planes and improvements to their communication systems to prevent a repeat of the 370 tragedy.

In an opinion piece published on Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, Najib called for changes that would ‘make it harder for an aircraft to simply disappear, and easier to find any aircraft that did.’

‘One of the most astonishing things about this tragedy is the revelation that an airliner the size of a Boeing 777 can vanish, almost without a trace. In an age of smartphones and mobile Internet, real-time tracking of commercial airplanes is long overdue,’ he said.