[Prof Engineer]

ping

[Blood of Tyrants]

On the day it flew away the 727 took on 953,000 litres of jet fuel

This MUST be a typo. That is 251,000 gallons or about 1.7 MILLION lbs of fuel. 9,530 liters is a more realistic number for a 727.

[sarasota]

I want to see a movie made of this--would be a great piece of publicity and perhaps could lead to the "capture" of the plane/pilot. (Though any damage could be done in the time it takes to make a film.)

[Tijeras_Slim]

It landed on the three ships sailing around inthe Indian Ocean.

[Paul Ross]

the 727 was leased to Air Angola - the country's ramshackle flag-carrier - which appears to be ultimately owned by the Angolan Army. The plane was converted to carry bulk fuel in sealed tanks to mining outposts in the country's remote interior.

Does this application for a skin-flint country sound a tad on the ludicrous side? When they can just truck fuel in overland for half the price or less, which do you think the supposed lessors would be most likely to choose...? This application, for these particular lessors, should have sounded sufficiently implausible that red alarms should have been blaring. Mr. Maury Joseph appears to have been so overly desperate to make a deal that he ignored the obvious warning signs...

But, says Lance, soon after entering the agreement Air Angola failed to keep up the payments.

Classic Al Quaeda technique of terrorism on the cheap. Get your 'enemy' to pay for the means to attack it. Air Angola's point people all need to be arrested...including whichever General in the Angolan Army was running this operation. The Lebanese characters they are associating with are, at a guess, Islamic, and radical. What a strange coincidence.

My guess is that Joseph did send in Padilla, his mealy-mouthed denials notwithstanding (probably doesn't want to pay the prospective widow anything). And got him killed, because he was too cheap to send in back-up for security.

And check the mumbo-jumbo denial from the State Dept.:

"the US State Department says it is treating Strother's report "with caution".

And:

The State Department says there is "no reason" to believe the Boeing has been taken by terrorists. "

And precisely why do they claim there is 'no reason'? Just because they say so? This is either to abet our catching the thieving plane-nappers off guard , that we are not really making this a top-priority (c'mon though, how plausible is THAT!) ...or more likely, that the Administration Nanny-Staters don't want the U.S. Sheeple to panic.

[Calvin Locke]

I saw a post a couple of months ago that the plane land in a "flag of convenience" type of country (name forgotten) for "re-registration".

For a price.

The plane was to be used as a fuel transportation tanker to isolated places. There are multiple tanks in side that were intended
to haul multiple fuels - gas, diesel, kerosene, etc.

How it ends up being used, may be a cause for concern.