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This section contains ten maps covering all the relevant areas and issues about this particular exercise of a hijack thought experiment (Lemma 3).

The map pages speak for themselves. One item of interest is the refueling stop. Flight 777 (MH370) carried just enough fuel, with some allowance, to comfortably reach Beijing on a routine flight. It would not have been able to reach Africa, so I had to pick a fictional refueling place. I chose a fascinating, horrifying, and colorful spot, simply because I could. That was Ramree Island. Remember that the hijackers might have worn O2 masks, but had some 239 dead passengers on board, a heavy weight, that must be disposed of. With all due respect to grieving relatives, forgive me for the following. The terrorists have paved a mile or more of runway on a section of marsh parallel to the western beach of Ramree Island. The plane lands there in the night on 8 March 2014 to refuel. While that is being done by some Al Qaeda type sympathizers, another group of commandos disposes of the bodies. This gets gruesome, based on a historical event from the last days of World War II.

Ramree Island Horror 1945. Readers must remember that this entire region of the oceans—including the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, and western Pacific around Australia—is home to massive numbers of the world's largest crocodilians. These are infamous, aggressive, and deadly giant salt water crocodiles that regularly kill lots of people in the region. They are abundant not only on Australian's northern coast, but in the Bay of Bengal where Flight 777 sets down to refuel during the night of 8 March 2014. Now here is the chilling true horror story told about the Ramree Island Massacre. As the Wikipedia article documents controversial reports, on 19 February 1945 many hundreds of Japanese soldiers were eaten alive by ravenous, thrashing giant crocodiles in the dark swamps on the island while it was under attack by British forces—who heard lone gunshots and screams in the pitch-dark night echoing across the swamps, but could only stand helplessly by until dawn revealed the stunning aftermath.

One Hour in 2014. By my estimate, the hypothetical hijackers might have required an hour to dump the passengers' bodies into a barge for the Ramree crocodiles to dispose of. In that same hour, the plane could have been refueled and taken back into the air.

Mission Failure. Pieces of MH370 were found washing ashore on Réunion Island on 29 July 2015, strongly indicating that the aircraft went down in the sea. Whether it was by accident, sabotage, or a bungled hijacking is not clear. None of the possibilities should be discounted. What strikes me as remarkable is that Réunion is a French possession, like Seychelles and Mauritius, where the unfortunate inhabitants of Chagos were relocated. The relocation, by U.S. and British forces in 1971, was brutal to say the least. To expedite the process, the islanders' pet dogs, cats, and other animals were rounded up and gassed to death by military personnel. The islanders were evacuated with little more than the clothes they wore, leaving behind their village, its cemetery, and their ancestors buried there. Ironically, not only have the parts of MH370 started washing up in the general area of their relocation, but their impoverished new homelands (Mauritius and Seychelles) would have been directly under the flight path of MH370 had it been taken to Africa. Evidence now suggests that, if the hijack lemma were correct, something went wrong in the Bay of Bengal. Most likely, the hijackers were not able to re-pressurize the cabin areas. That is one reason why the plane flew strangely low, and loudly, over the observers in the Maldives. They were watching a crippled aircraft in its last hour or so of flight before it slipped into the Indian Ocean. My surmise is that the fuselage remained intact, though parts of the wings sheared off, which explains why no seats or other debris have been found until now. It is certainly possible that the hijack never happened, and that some inexplicable series of events (more improbable than the hijack) propelled the craft into the southern Indian Ocean off Australia. In any case, the Indian Ocean currents, including the big gyre and its eddies, would have seen to the eventual landing of the broken but floating parts on Réunion Island some 500 days after the plane's disappearande. We must, at all costs, avert another 9/11 by taking all the possibilities into account with open, honest, imaginative, and intelligent thinking processes.

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