With yet another mysterious tragedy surrounding a downed airliner making headlines on Tuesday, one MSNBC guest recognized an opportunity to break out an on-air theory.
Jay Rollins, a former commercial pilot, speculated that the passenger jet that crashed in a remote area of the French Alps on a flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf may have been victim of “hacking.”
On “The Rundown” with host Jose Diaz-Balart, Rollins began by saying that in breaking news situations, analysts often lack the necessary information to determine exactly what happened in a given crash.
With that preface in mind, he proceeded to spin out a theory.
“Something else comes to my mind that no one else has mentioned,” Rollins said. “This aircraft is highly computerized. This is the same aircraft that was involved with the Air Asia situation.”
“There’s one possibility that no one has brought up, and I wonder, could this be a hacking incident?” he said.
“This is very similar, in my mind, to what happened when the U.S. lost that drone over Iran,” Rollins said. “The same thing — suddenly the aircraft was responding to outside forces. And if something like that were going on, it would be very distracting for the pilots.”
With little information available about the circumstances of the crash, Rollins’ riff didn’t quite match CNN’s seemingly endless string of theories during the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 last March, but it was a start.
Watch the clip:
This post has been updated.
Or, ya know, it might have been aliens! Klingons shot down the plane!
Or it was food poisoning…the pilot and copilot both ate fish. Unfortunately, Ted Stryker wasn’t on board.
OR maybe it crashed because the Great Intelligence took it over and the Doctor was late trying to stop it!
Or maybe it was a mundane reason for it crashing…
The 24 hour “news” cycle strikes again.
All speculation, all the time. We throw out bullshit, you take a wild ass guess.
Which is probably why I spend more time watching The Daily Show these days than I do the cable news networks.
I’m sick and tired of people who need “evidence” before they can spin out a theory. Maybe it was hacking. Maybe it was a black hole leading into another dimension. Maybe it was a race of atomic supermen.
i had msnbc on early this a.m. and within minutes of this coming across the internets it was nonstop speculation. at this point they had absolutely no idea where (the alps), or any particular details about the aircraft/passengers/etc. but that doesn’t stop meeka and her retired pilot pals dragged out of bed at 7a to speculate about something they have even less info on…
i mean, it’s not like there were a couple of major developments re one of the more contentious diplomatic efforts currently underway – like, oh, james baker remarking how unhelpful netanyahu has been; and the israeli spying on the negotiations with iran…