MH370 wreckage ‘find’ might ‘just’ be missing Flying Tiger Connie
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Another Flying Tiger Super Connie at London Gatwick in 1964
Until MH370 vanished last year the largest missing passenger airliner was the Flying Tiger Line Lockheed Super Constellation that was carrying 107 people on a US military charter when it vanished in the western Pacific on 16 March, 1962.
It is just possible, remotely possible, that it has been found on a Philippine island near the NW tip of Sabah, a part of Malaysia, and mistaken for the lost Malaysia Airlines 777-200 that disappeared on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board.
However the reports of wreckage including ‘many’ skeletons being found in jungle on Sugbay Island are unconfirmed, and burdened with confusion, contradiction and at this stage a seriously puzzling lack of real evidence.
One of the current reports about this find can be read here. Those who have been watching the story unfold have seen the discovery of plane wreckage and skeletons being variously credited to small boys looking for birds eggs, or to their grandmother, with the recovery of an apparently little damaged Malaysia flag as a souvenir.
A pilot is said to be seated upright in the cockpit, wearing communications gear on his head.
This is a frustrating story at this stage, putting aside the location of the wreckage, far from MH370’s claimed location somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, even though it isn’t geographically far from where the Malaysia Airlines jet was last observed as a transponder identified object over the Gulf of Thailand, at the point where the crew had signed out of Malaysia controlled airspace and were presumed to be about to sign on with Vietnam’s ATC system as they followed their flight plan to Beijing.
There are three obvious possibilities at this stage.
The first is that the story is a hoax. The second is that it is MH370, and the third is that it an older lost airliner.
It is not impossible that Tiger Airways 739 came down on Sugbay Island, although it is further west than sightings of fireballs widely believed to have been caused by an explosion on the Super Constellation before it crashed into the ocean. It is also somewhat to the west of the intended track of a DC-3 freighter with only four people on board that vanished on an internal flight in the Philippines in 1982, which would not fit with ‘many’ skeletons.
There is a factual account of Tiger Airways 739 on the Wikipedia site.
There is supposed to be some resolution of the truth or otherwise of the wreckage find on Sugbay island in the Tawi-Tawi archipelago within a day. This should have been possible in a much shorter interval, given that a television crew has already interviewed the grandmother, and an island location that was claimed to be accessible to youngsters bird nesting could not have been too far away.
Therefore, this story may have a disappointing ending, but there might still be alive, friends and family of those who died on Flying Tiger 739 all those years ago, who might find comfort from knowing where their loved ones came to rest, as would those who grieve for the victims of MH370.
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But why would Flying Tiger 739 be carrying a Malaysian flag? If we can get a glimpse of the flag that they brought back, then this would give us a clue. In 1962 when Flying Tiger 739 went missing, the ‘Federation of Malaya’ flag had 11 alternating red and white stripes on it. After 1963, the Malaysian flag has 14 alternating red and white horizontal stripes.
In a private email I’ve learned that the photo shows the 14 stripe flag, meaning it could not have been on the flight which vanished in 1962.
I’ve also seen the photo, and it looks far too fresh to have even been on MH370. Which means that if the wreckage exists, the flag has been added for dishonest or mischievous purposes. I’ve never seen a flag waved around before on a flight, and I have seen some odd things ‘flagged’ so to speak on some unruly flights many years ago.
It’s one of those matters that makes me think our time is being wasted on this particular discovery, although I’d be very happy if it was a real aircraft and that closure can be made possible to real people.
I remember the Flying Tiger Line.
Occasionally, one of their Flying Tigers 747 freighters would come into Sydney, until their demise in 1988.
But this organisation should have been shut down long before. It had a shocking history of accidents and incidents, sometimes multiple fatal incidents in the same year.
I’d give it no chance of being MH370.
But it could be the DC-3. With ‘many skeletons’.
The word ‘many’ is ambiguous, meaning ‘a large number of’. It could mean anything, especially after being translated from local dialect.
If I pulled away the vines from the window of an old aircraft wreckage and peered inside to see four skeletons sitting in their seats, I might think there were many.
A flight that crashed in 1962 would not contain corpses with putrifying flesh on their faces, as reported.
The flag might be “fresh” looking because the grandmother washed it to get the stink of rotting corpses, as reported. (She said it still stank even after washing.)
On the other hand, I’m still waiting to read a report from Philippines investigators saying that plane wreckage with bodies has been verified. Does anyone have a link to such verification?
So far the denials consist of the Philippines navy or shore patrol cruising by and saying they saw nothing. Its reportedly in a jungle in an uninhabited portion of a tiny island. If it was obvious from shore it would have been reported long ago.
The grandmother also reportedly said that islanders were woken up last year by a very loud noise in the middle of the night but that they didn’t connect it with a missing plane and never found out what it was. So the fact that no recent reports of a plane crash wete made, means nothing.
Tweets by the Malaysian chief of police purporting to speak for the Philippines authorities but failing to specify sources and means of investigation, mean nothing. Denials based on mere assumptions about what is probable, mean nothing.
The only way to determine the facts is for the boys who found it to lead authorities there. That presumes the authorities are willing to be led by boys and take the story seriously enough to trek through jungle, and that local authorities haven’t been instructed by higher ups not to “waste resources”. As for TV crews they’re lazy and prefer to avoid possibly dangerous jungle treks until the authorities give them a good reason to.
Two more days have passed.
Still no confirmation or denial that some sort of plane wreckage was sighted.
Philippine authorities make a dramatic visit to the island on a gunboat. They ask a few old fishermen in a township if they know anything about a large airliner crash. Fishermen say they don’t know. Authorities then leave aboard their gunboat.
What a bizarre story.
I guess that’s all we’ll hear on this, before the story fades away.
Wikipedia says Guam had radio interference when trying to contact the Flying Tiger. Could that have been caused by the launch of Kosmos 1 a few hours earlier? Also, the northern lights got active about a week later, a possible sign of radio troubles.
The wreck is in a ‘remote part of a small island’ & some small boys know where it is.
How difficult would it really be for some grown-ups to trek through the jungle on a SMALL island,
if the small boys can manage it,
to confirm that whatever is there is of interest or if the whole story was all just a load of old B/S.
The authorities can then decide whether there is something there which warrants any kind of recovery attempt & possibly a decent ‘Christian’ burial of the human remains
as well as an aviation investigation if appropriate.?
You’d think that the Malaysian authorities would at least put a bit of pressure on the Philippines to send a group of military trainees to the spot as part of their ‘jungle’ training, or something.???
Here’s a link to the most detail I can find so far (names of the grandmother, 46 year-old nephew, grandson, with photo of the first two; detailed descriptions of what was seen, by whom, when and under what circumstances; extent of the attempt to locate; and more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3270423/He-tried-pilot-s-hat-flesh-man-s-jaw-fell-Filipinos-grisly-moment-MH370-wreckage-jungle-really-airliner-vanished-mysteriously-53-years-ago.html
The article also cites this blog. There are numerous photos and ads interrupting the body of text, so persistent scrolling is needed to read the whole article.
The island is reportedly 3.5 miles long, but there is no indication that the authorities did anything but send some blockheaded navy types there with mirrored sunglasses and machine-pistols (it’s a remote Muslim area subject to possible guerrilla activity) in a gunboat to ask the locals stupid questions (if they knew about a plane crash they presumably would already have reported it).
The article also contains the grandmother’s description of the hill-shaking noise (but no fire) that reportedly woke villagers more than a year ago in the middle of the night.
Note that recent news reports claiming to debunk the report and saying that the individual who reported it has “disappeared” are silly: the nephew lives in Borneo but the grandmother and the boy that found it live on the island and the authorities know where they live.
None of this is to discount the possibility of a complicated multi-party hoax, but merely to offer some context and perspective.
It’s an extraordinary situation that reader Emil Pulsifer sums up well.
We now have a confined location for the sighting. We have two authorities saying they have looked but not found. We have witnesses who have said they looked, found and retrieved a modern era Malaysias flag.
If this claimed wreckage is from MH370 there will be abundant confirming evidence in the form of baggage tags, passports and other personal effects.
We have none of this.
The way we are going I’d expect more media crews to visit and walk every patch of that part of the island, find nothing, and record continued insistence that there was a wreck there.
But we need to keep our minds open, even when all the evidence suggests at this stage a hoax.
Ben,
I don’t want to be the catalyst to you going off on a huge rant,
but,
It sort of reminds me of the Pel-Air shambles…..
It’s tantalisingly close & yet still remains out of reach.?
Good advice from Ben Sandilands.
One reason both the media and authorities may be reluctant to explore the jungles of Sugbai island is that the Muslim guerrilla groups are still active in the area, and kidnapping of both police and foreign media are documented. Ironically, a Dutch birdwatcher who was kidnapped three years ago by an Al Qaeda affiliated group in the same province of Tawi-Tawi where bird hunting boys supposedly found the wreckage, had yet to be released:
https://johnib.wordpress.com/tag/tawi-tawi/
I doubt if foreign or local media would be granted permission to traipse around in the jungles of Sugbai even if they were inclined to. Not sure about poisonous snakes there but the mere possibility might deter news crews. They would have to be airlifted to another island if any accident requiring hospitalization occurred.
Have you been able to discover any factual follow-up on this story, Ben.?
It might be officially declared a hoax later today. It’s been apparent that MH370 isn’t there for some time, however I had held out some hope it might have been a different crash site of considerable interest.
There has been considerable dislocation of priorities in the Philippines following the hurricane disaster.
When there is a resolution of this apparently cruel and uncaring abuse of the hopes of the next of kin I intend to report it.
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