SCHEMING Vladimir Putin is plotting a cyber attack on Western aviation that will kill hundreds of people, an expert has warned.

Aviation specialist Jeff Wise previously rocked the industry with his explosive claim Russia hijacked missing flight MH370.

The jet mysteriously vanished from radar on March 2, 2014, while flying to China with 239 people on board and has never been found.

Just months later Russia shot down MH17, killing all 283 on board during a commercial flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Since the start of 2024, Putin has been accused of being behind multiple mystery explosions and cyber attacks.

Estonian military chief Martin Harem previously warned how the tyrant uses an electronic warfare system to jam GPS technology on flights and ships.

Last year, RAF pilots suspected Moscow jammed signals on former Defence Secretary Grant Shapps’ plane.

The GPS and other signals were blocked for almost 30 minutes in an act of “electronic warfare”.

In October, concerns about Russian sabotage arose when a letter bomb was placed on a plane bound for Britain, leading to a fire in a DHL warehouse in Birmingham upon detonation.

Now Wise believes tyrant Putin is concocting a fresh attack on Western aviation.

He has warned a terrifying cyber assault could cause deadly mid-air collisions or landing failures, costing even more lives than MH17.

Wise, who featured in Netflix documentary MH370: The Plane that Disappeared,  told The Sun: “If we’re talking about a passenger plane filled with people crashing, I think that’s quite plausible.

“Certainly in the context of incendiary devices but also in the context of tampering with an anti-collision system or a GPS.

“What might trigger Putin to do something like that moving forward? Well he’s been doing it for over a decade.

“Putin sees Russia as being in a state of war against the democratic West.

“In grey-zone warfare it’s hard to speak about a concrete objective, right? Part of hybrid warfare is keeping your opponent off balance and motives are often intentionally unclear.

“You don’t know why they’re attacking you. You don’t know where they’re going to attack. You don’t know what method they’re going to use to attack you.”

Wise warned a Russian cyberattack against aviation could result in a massive loss of life.

“The answer is it already has,” he said.

“I’m someone who’s been trying to say for 11 years that you need to take seriously the fact that MH370 could have been a terrorist attack or an attack by Russia against the West.

“The dots line up. They shot down MH17 in cold blood.”

Wise, a licensed pilot of gliders and light airplanes, believes a shadowy Russian agency is constantly “up to no good”.

On the threat of a cyber attack, Wise said: “How might Russia be plotting something like that?

“Well, the major agency within the Russian Federation has been carrying out most of these attacks and they range from cutting cables and assassinating dissidents to shooting down airliners.

“MH17 was a great example. We know that it was carried out by Russian military intelligence.

“This is the same organisation that hacked the 2016 election that put Donald Trump into power.

“It’s like from a James Bond movie or any spy show from the 70s, there’s always this agency that is up to no good.”

MH17 was blasted out of the sky by a Russian missile when it was travelling over Ukraine, an investigation by the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) found.

Two Russians and one Ukrainian national were convicted by a Dutch court of murder in absentia.

Russia has always denied responsibility.

Wise sensationally claims MH370, which went missing months earlier in 2014 after mysteriously vanishing on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, was hijacked by Russians on board.

He purports they flew the plane to Kazakhstan, using technology to discard its whereabouts from radar.

Wise believes the shooting down of MH17 further strengthens his claim.

He adds: “Was that an accident? At the time it was the only way that people could make sense of it, to say that it was an accident, even though three perpetrators have been tried and found guilty in absentia In the Netherlands.

“There’s no longer any doubt the Russians did it. The only fig leaf is whether they did it intentionally or not. 

“And frankly, everybody else, every pundit, including Bellingcat, is of the opinion that it was a mistake, that it was an accident, they didn’t intend to shoot down. I don’t believe that, but that’s just me. 

“I’m like the boy who cried wolf, but there are dead sheep everywhere.”

He added: “It’s worth looking at, how do hackers use AI to help them either figure out or carry out that kind of work?

“There are different ways you could conceivably use AI in that kind of context.”

The conventional theory is that MH370 was a pilot suicide mission.

But the plane has never been found, with different theories continuing to run wild.

Why is MH370 still missing a decade on?

By Rebecca Husselbee, Assistant Features Editor

When an entire plane with 239 passengers mysteriously disappeared from the sky it left the world in utter disbelief – myself included.

How could an entire jet vanish into oblivion in a modern world when every move on land, sea and air is tracked? And how could it remain lost for a decade?

Having spent the last few years exploring the many theories on what MH370’s final moments might look like, from the bizarre to the complex, there is one hypothesis that answers every question for me.

Pilot Simon Hardy has left no stone unturned in his search for answers and having been at the helm of passenger flights for over 20 years he knows every inch of a Boeing 777 cockpit.

What makes his “technique, not a theory” even more compelling is his ability to access the world’s best flight simulators and sit in Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s seat as he commandeered the Malaysia Airlines and flew into the middle of the Southern Indian Ocean.

While others believe WSPR technology holds the key to finally discovering the wreckage, it’s never been proven and many in the MH370 community have questioned its reliability.

Many experts agree that the “suicidal” MH370 pilot was behind the plane’s demise – what we’ll never know is what his mindset was on that night and what motive he had to carry out such a chilling plan.

Passenger safety onboard in the aviation industry is rigorous and the likelihood of travellers being involved in a plane crash is 1 in 11 million.

But are airlines considering a pilot’s mental state when they sit at the controls of a jet that could be turned into a 300-ton death machine?