Point taken, 7BOEING7, I was unaware of the tragic AF586 incident out of NAS Adak. Looking it up, I can see that this was a P-3C from VP-9, on a surveillance mission, which seems to have been classified. I note that ten of the crew were rescued by a Russian trawler, well done them.
I do not know what sabotage investigation was carried out if any - given the nature of the mission and penetration of the US armed forces by the Correa/COREA Group out of Frankfurt, sabotage should not be ruled out without careful inquiry. A lot of the history of the Cold War is yet to be written. As Chief Ironside was wont to say, 'let's stand back people and look at the big picture'. The engine/prop combination on the P-3 was very similar to that used on the L-188 Electra (there was an earlier Electra, of course) and the same manufacturer's C-130. Therefore we would expect broadly similar engine/prop issues with all three fleets, with roughly similar incidence of failure, yet the P-3 fleet, which was mission critical in the Cold War, seems to have suffered more than its fair share of failures, even allowing for its often tough operating environment.
Because good accident investigation is critical to uncovering sabotage, historically we find that accident investigation units have been targeted by the Abwehr until 1944 then the DVD. The DVD's penetration of RAE's Comet inquiry by John Argyris is classic example - he was paid 1,500,000 DM, a tidy sum in 1955, and fitted out with a nice new laboratory in Germany.
In answer to 777Jet, wreckage WAS found in the SCS. My information is that it was identified from the photographs by Boeing as a 777 passenger escape hatch, using computer enhancement and digital mapping, comparing it with the original CAD data (the 777 design team used CAD, not-old fashioned blueprints). Boeing could NOT say it was from a -200, let alone MH370. They couldn't, as there are no significant design differences between the passenger hatches in the 777 family.
They did not need to however. Floating wreckage from a 777 underneath the fight-path of a lost 777 with no other recent 777 losses in the vicinity means only one thing - it came from the lost 777, absent any innocent explanation. It was too early to have been dumped, unlike the SIO wreckage, and in any event there are no reports of freighters overhead at the material time, unlike the SIO, where we have a Chinese IL-96 staging out of an airbase in Indonesia, operating over the SIO before the more northerly set of wreckage was discovered, wreckage which did not show up on SATINT before the -96 appeared.
The oil-rig worker, in my judgment, was an honest eye-witness, i.e. in my opinion he really did see a flash in the sky. There is no reason to discount his testimony, nor has any been suggested. The eye-witness testimony (there were three eye-witnesses to the shoot-down) has not been discredited, it has been ignored, presumably because it did not fit the official, SIO, narrative.
This does NOT mean that the Kiwi witness saw MH-370 crash in flames. He is not an aviation specialist and would not have been thinking in terms of a SAM strike. It is more likely that he saw the missile exhaust, followed by detonation. I do not believe the missile actually struck the aircraft - as with AF447 we probably have a nearby detonation triggered by the proximity fuze we know the Fakour-2 is fitted with.
By the way it was me who exposed the Fakour-2, albeit not by name, privately inside in the Intelligence Community, then publicly in my weekly intelligence column on
http://www.VeteransToday.com. After I had exposed it the Iranians came clean and paraded the missile in Teheran in November 2013, which is when we in the West learnt its name. It is a developed version of the powerful, long-range Hughes AIM-54 Phoenix supplied to Iran in the 1970s, along with the F-14A Tomcat. My analysis that the AIM-54 could be modified for surface launch and used as a SAM, which was queried by some, was supported by the revelation that, unbeknown to me, Hughes Aircraft had proposed a multiple launcher to the USN as a Sea-Sparrow replacement in the early 70s.
I suspect it was an earlier version of the Fakour, logically designated Fakour-1, which brought down TWA-800. We know that was a missile strike, that the NTSB conclusions were deeply flawed and reached under pressure from the White House, that NTSB investigators have since come forward to say they were placed under pressure from higher up the payroll, that TWA800 was too high for a MANPADS, that the US Navy were NOT involved, as (1) the US Navy does not generally shoot down airliners and that in the only proven incident it was in a war-zone, with powerful mitigating factors and (2) the nearest US warship, the USS Normandie, was out of range, and that there was an intermittent surface radar contact consistent with a hull-down SSK.
