Not saying it did happen. Just that with a flight simulator in his HOUSE, this guy could have practiced landing (and takeoff) that heavy at any airport of his choosing without anyone being the wiser.
The air traffic control monitoring wasn’t listening for weirdness yesterday. They were thinking the plane had crashed.
Question, is there any ways a plane can spoof something it isn’t? Like pretending to be a lear jet when it’s really a 777, for the purposes of ident to air traffic control?
As far as spoofing, he can dial in any transponder code he wants if he remains VFR 1200. The IFR codes are discrete, but a compatriot could easily steal a squawk code from an authorized flight when it gets the code from departure control. Now you'd have two squawks same code, same area. Or he could try and go legit, with a countries' help switch to 7600 (lost comm) and try and get as far as he could with that ruse. His altitude and track will tell a controller whether he is what he says he is. And what he says he is better be filed.