What if you hijack a plane and repaint it to make it look like someone else’s aircraft when you finally use it to do whatever you’re planning? That way someone else gets blamed for what happened.
For instance, repaint a 777 with American Airlines livery and then slam the thing into the Kaaba in Mecca. No matter what denials the US makes the entire Muslim world will be forever enraged at America because in their minds an American Airlines plane destroyed their holy site.
While this is certainly fanciful I would not put it past Putin, a KGB agent, to run a ‘maskirovka’ like this because that’s the kind of thing that the KGB excelled (excels?) at.
Why bother to hijack it? You can buy a plane and paint it however you like.
Boneyards are everywhere:
http://jalopnik.com/the-ten-most-unbelievable-airplane-junkyards-in-the-wor-1464369226
http://www.airplaneboneyards.com/commercial-aviation-airplane-boneyards-storage.htm
http://io9.com/the-worlds-most-bizarre-aircraft-graveyards-511526945
If you’ve got the cash (like if you were backed by Saudi oil) you can get a plane with varying levels of paperwork. Park in a place with bad weather and do a little insurance fraud and you can even make it so nobody knows you have a plane.
You’ll notice a bunch of those boneyards are in Russia, if Putin wants a plane Putin gots a plane.
The hijack angle just never made sense. It’s a harder way to get a plane, with a lot more complication and a lot more opportunities for it to go wrong.
It doesn’t take rocket science to convert a Boeing into a drone, what about all those crash survivability tests of decades ago?
No nukes are necessary to obliterate the Kaaba & the grand mosque in Mecca. A diving airliner full of fuel is practically overkill in that case. Saudi air defenses? Ha. Ha ha.
Only question left is who would benefit from kicking over the world’s biggest hornets nest? China? Putin? Certain Muslim sects?