To watch Deep Dive: MH370 on YouTube, click the image above. To listen to the audio version on Apple Music, Spotify, or Amazon Music, click here.
For a concise, easy-to-read overview of the material in this podcast I recommend my 2019 book The Taking of MH370, available on Amazon.
For this episode, we’re trying something different. Until now we’ve spent each episode diving into a particular aspect of the mystery. This time, 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?
Some of them we’ve covered so far, some of them we’ll be addressing in forthcoming episodes. They are:
#1: Who made the plane go dark at IGARI, and why?
Forty minutes into what was a normal red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the plane suddenly went electronically dark just six seconds after passing the last waypoint in Malaysia and did an aggressive U-turn. The timing suggests carefully planning and an expert understanding of air traffic control procedures. But what could be the motive for such an aggressive and sophisticated act? Note: we talked about this in Episode 3: The Turnback.
#2: Why did the satcom reboot at an hour after the turnback?
After turning the satcom off forty minutes into the flight, someone turned it back on again. This is really a double mystery — because not only do most airline captains not know how to do this, no one has come up with a good explanation for why anyone would want to either turn it of or turn it back on again. Yet because of this strange act, the satellite signals were produced that told investigators everything that they knew about the mystery. Note: we talked about this in Episode 4: The Reboot.
#3: Why wasn’t the plane found on the southern seabed?
Using strange signals transmitted by the plane, and a new kind of math they invented for the purpose, Australian scientists were able to mathematically deduce where the plane went in the remote southern Indian Ocean. Yet when the seabed was searched over the course of the next two years, nothing was found. Where did the scientists go wrong? Note: we talked about this in Episode 15: Seabed Search.
#4: Why is all the off the sealife on the debris way too young?
Sixteen months after MH370 disappeared, the first piece of wreckage floated ashore on the island of Réunion, thousands of miles away. A colony of barnacles was growing on it, and at first marine biologists at first thought they could use growth patterns in their shells to figure out where the piece had drifted from. Yet the barnacles growing in it were only a few months old. How to explain the discrepancy? Note: We haven’t talked about this yet but will very soon.
#5: How was one guy able to find most of the pieces of debris?
In the years after MH370 disappeared, thousands of people all around the Indian Ocean basin combed the coastline, hoping to find pieces of the missing plane. Yet a single person, an American lawyer named Blaine Alan Gibson, managed to collect most of the three-dozen pieces that were ultimately collected. Did he just work harder than the rest, or did he have a secret that others did not? Note: this is a topic we’ll be addressing in a forthcoming episode.
As Andy notes, we have a secondary purpose in approaching our topic differently today. Now that we’ve been doing the podcast for four months, we’re aware that it isn’t as easy for newcomers to jump in and get a handle on the scope of the material we’ve covered so far. So Andy came up with a plan to cut together a teaser reel that will give first-timers a sense of how our approach is different and what some of the big themes are. The bulk of the material is also covered in this podcast, so if you’ve watched or listened to the episode you’ll likely find it redundant, but if you’re enjoying the show and want to tell your friends about it the teaser would be a good thing to point them to. You can find it here.
By the way, at 21:30 Andy mentions that I’ve been working on an article for New York magazine about the accidental decompression of an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX, and we talk about how that accident contrasts with MH370. If you’re interested you can find that article on New York’s Intelligencer website.
We also discuss how I was the first person in the mainstream media to talk about Zaharie’s flight sim data. You can find that article here.
A third article for New York, about cybersecurity vulnerabilities in commercial aviation, can be found here. As I say in the podcast, the article very much springs from things I’ve learned while reseraching MH370 and I strongly suspect that it will be a topic of increasing urgency throughout the world in years to come.