Deep Dive: MH370

Strangeness

So far in this podcast we’ve spent each episode diving into a particular aspect of the mystery. This time, we’re taking a different approach. We’re pulling back to look at the mystery from a global perspective in order to address the question: What is this case like? Just as every person has a unique character, a mystery can have a personality of its own, and MH370 certainly does. The dominant feature of that personality is strangeness. Time and again, a piece of evidence emerges which changes what we understand about the case – but then it turns out the evidence itself contains mysteries that themselves need to be elucidated. In today’s episode, we look at five of the most striking examples of this phenomena. Together, they raise the question: why is the MH370 like this? Is it just a matter of coincidence, or is there some underlying aspect of the case that keeps pulling it toward the unexpected? For more info, visit our show page at DeepDiveMH370.com.

Debris

By mid-2015, the search for MH370 had entered a kind of limbo. The designated seabed search area had been scanned without success. So what evidence was there that the plane had really gone south? Attention turned to the topic of floating debris and where it might be found. If the plane had impacted the ocean in the way the Inmarsat data implied — namely, with catastrophic velocity — then there should be many thousands of pieces of wreckage floating on the surface. Oceanographers turned to the science of drift modeling, which can produce probabilistic models of where floating objects in any given stretch of ocean might go. It seemed like the most likely place for stuff to wash ashore was going to be the western shore of Australia, where thousands of beachcombers waited expectantly. They were disappointed. But then a stunning discovery emerged thousands of miles away. For more info and for the video version of this podcast, visit our show page at https://www.deepdivemh370.com/p/episode-16-debris

Sea Bed

Seven months after MH370 disappeared, ships leased from the Dutch maritime survey company Fugro were at last ready to begin searching the seabed that Australian scientists had defined using data mysteriously transmitted from the aircraft during its final six hours. Fugro’s ships faced a daunting task: searching a vast area, far from land, where abyssal plains and steep-walled canyons lay concealed beneath three miles of water. The search authorities were confident that success was right around the corner — at least at first. But as days turned to months turned to years without any sign of the missing plane, they began to wonder if they had made a mistake. Had one of their assumptions been wrong? Was it possible the plane wasn't in the underwater search area? And if so, where else could it have gone? More info at deepdivemh370.com.

Another One

If MH370 didn’t fly into the southern Indian Ocean but instead wound up in Kazakhstan, that implied that Russia was behind a sophisticated hijacking plot. Intrigued by the presence on the flight manifest of three Russian-speaking passengers, Jeff had already hired researchers in Russia and Ukraine to look into their background when he learned on July 17, 2014, that one of MH370’s 14 sister aircraft, a 777 operating as Flight MH17, had been shot down over eastern Ukraine. Jeff immediately suspected a possible link between the fate of the two flights, but at first, aviation experts and political pundits alike were convinced that the shoot-down had been a mistake and could not possibly have been connected to MH370’s vanishing. In time, however, powerful evidence emerged that undermined those early assumptions. More info at deepdivemh370.com. The video version of this episode can be found here: https://youtu.be/cf0lcbSNPAg

North

Careful analysis of satellite signals sent from MH370 to Inmarsat indicated that the plane had flown into a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean. But another possibility existed. The equipment that MH370 carried and the circumstances under which it operated together created a potential vulnerability that sophisticated hijackers could have exploited to make the plane appear to have flown south when it really headed north. If that occurred, then the plane would have flown instead to the northwest, over India, Nepal, China, and Kyrgyzstan before winding up in Kazakhstan. In today’s episode we discuss the details of the plane’s possible northern route, and explore whether it could have flown all that way without being detected by military radar. More info at deepdivemh370.com. Video version here: https://youtu.be/CxMdcTtLKsQ?si=stECu8s82Ght45Xl

Descent

Once the scientists at CSIRO had generated the probability distribution for the plane’s last known location on the 7th arc, the next question they had to answer was: how far did the plane travel from that point before it impacted the water? As we've discussed previously, their goal was to define a search box within which the plane was likely to be found. The plane’s location along the 7th arc defined the length of the rectangle, and the distance it could have traveled from the 7th arc would define the width of the search box. So the question of how far the plane could have flown after the last transmission depends on what the investigators thought was going on with the plane at that moment. They decided that, based on the nature of the Inmarsat signals, the plane had mostly run out of fuel and had already started its inevitable descent into the ocean. But had it plummeted steeply, or taken a long, gradual glide? More information at deepdivemh370.com.

Routes

In episode 11 of the podcast, Jeff and Andy discuss the elephant in the room: who are they to speculate on the mystery of missing Malaysia Air Flight MH370? They talk about their unique backgrounds, what brought them together for this podcast, as well as how the Bayesian Method provided authorities to look for the plane where they did. For more, visit their website at deepdivemh370.com

The Vulnerability

In what’s sure to be the most controversial episode of the series so far, Jeff and Andy delve into the question of whether MH370 might have had a previously unrecognized security backdoor. In the months after the disappearance, a series of surprising facts emerged which, taken together, raised the possibility that the Inmarsat data guiding the official search might not be as infalliably trustworthy as previously assumed. One Independent Group member even identified a specific parameter in the plane’s Satellite Data Unit which, if switched, would make the plane look like it was going south when it was really going north. Whether or not this vulnerability was exploited, its existence means that there was now a second lens through which the evidence of the case could be viewed.Do you think that this back door is a flat-out impossibility that should be discarded alongside theories of UFOs and black holes? Or a plausible hypothesis that needs to be explored further? Let us know in the comments.And as always, for more information (or to sign up for our free weekly newsletter) check out the full show notes and link to video podcast at deepdivemh370.com.

The Pilot

Within weeks after the disappearance of MH370, one theory of its disappearance had come to the fore: that one of the pilots had seized control of the plane and flown it on a prolonged and sophisticated murder-suicide mission into the southern Indian Ocean. Nothing like it had ever happened before, but there seemed no other way to easily explain the picture that had emerged from the Inmarsat data. So who were these men? In today’s episode we’ll look at what friends and family said about Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid and what traces could be found of them on social media. Based on what we’ve found, do you think one of them is a cold-blooded mass murderer? Let us know in the comments. And as always, for more information (or to sign up for our free weekly newsletter) check out the full show notes at deepdivemh370.com. For a video version of this podcast, check out https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAonCb_2GvOsYtVgh7gBGt7QYeFiBCEkL

Surface Search

From the first day MH370 went missing, it was the subject of an intense surface search. Planes, ships and satellites scoured millions of square kilometers of ocean, first in the South China Sea, then in the Andaman Sea, then in the remote southern Indian Ocean. Not a single piece was ever spotted. Today we’re going to talk about how the search went down, and what we might conclude from its failure to find any debris. We’ll also discuss a new discovery that Jeff made while researching today’s episode, and revisit a strange coda to the search, that involved an attempt to find the plane by listening for audible pings from the plane’s black boxes. For show notes and links to the video-only version of this podcast, visit deepdivemh370.com.