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.
