Today we’re going to go deeper than we’ve ever gone before on a question that I’ve called the crux of the whole MH370 mystery, and which is newly important because a bunch of viral MH370 videos have come out that spend a lot of time discussing it and, I’ll argue, they’re getting it wrong. And it matters a great deal because these videos are shaping what the public thinks is a reasonable explanation of the mystery.
To help us with this important task we have with us a very special guest today, Juan Browne, an experienced airline pilot and the host of the popular aviation channel Blancolirio on YouTube.
Juan has been flying airplanes for a very long time, and most recently he’s been working as a first officer on 777 flights over the Atlantic, so he really knows aviation and he knows this plane in particular. I reached out to Juan because I knew he could help us understand a crucial but widely misundersood aspect of the MH370 mystery. Namely: how did MH370’s satcom get turned off, and get turned back on again?
This is the central crux of the mystery because, first of all, no one’s been able to come up with a really good explanation for how and why it happened, and second, without it we don’t get the 7 ping arcs, we don’t get the BFO analysis, we don’t wind up having anywhere to look in the southern Indian Ocean.
We’ve talked about the reboot before, back in Episodes 4 and 6, so if you remember those or you want to check that out again, that will help.
Basically, we know that sometime around the turnback at IGARI, the satcom system got turned off again, and then around 18:23 power was restored and the system logged back on with the Inmarsat satellite.
It turns out that there are two ways to depower the satcom. The first is to go into the electronics bay and pull three circuit breakers. That just turns off that one piece of equipment, the satcom, or more specifically what’s called the satellite data unit.
The other way you can do from the cockpit, and that is to reach up to the overhead panel and turn off a whole chunk of the plane’s electrical circuitry. It’s like pulling the circuitbreaker for a whole floor of your house. It turns off a lot of stuff. So much stuff, in fact, you don’t even know what it’s turning off.
Then there’s an even more radical thing you could do, which is just turn everything off in the whole plane. It’s radical because, as you’ll recall, the 777 is an all-electric plane. You can’t even move the control surfaces without electricity, so if you depower everything you’re in a world of hurt. A little propellor thing called a RAT comes down and gives you just enough power to keep steering the plane, but that’s it — no lights, no AC, Autopilot, nothing. You’re basically hanging by your last thread.
Intuitively I think it makes sense that a pilot would not want to turn off huge chunks of his plane, let alone the whole thing. But I think what people don’t understand is just how very much a pilot would really balk at doing that. It’s just something they would ever do and if they did it would have to be for an extremely urgent reason, like if an emergency checklist told them to do it.
Yet this is exactly the hypothesis that two very popular MH370 videos on YouTube have proposed. One is by Green Dot Aviation, and the other is by MenTour Pilot; together they have racked up over 10 million views.
But the only people who really know how unlikely it would be for a 777 to do this are other 777 pilots. So that’s why I reached out to Juan and put it to him directly.
I think there are two main takeaways from our conversation. First, the instinct of a 777 is, you don’t mess with that electrical panel. You don’t step on superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, and you don’t start pulling circuit breakers. It goes against the grain.
Second, you just don’t know what’s going to happen. Even if the captain did enough research to figure out that he could depower the SDU by isolating the left AC bus, he wouldn’t really know what else would happen, what other systems he’d knock out by doing that.
In short, anyone proposing that the flight crew turned off all or part of MH370’s electrical system needs to be aware that they’re requiring the captain to do something really quite extraordinary. Not impossible, but extraordinary.
And this brings us to the second part of the big question: if they’re going to do this extraordinary thing, why? What is their motivation for taking this big risk?
At this point I should say that both Mentour Pilot and Green Dot, both of who made MH370 videos that got millions and millions of views, based their work at least in part on the work of two French pilots, Patrick Blelly and Jean-Luc Marchand, and this idea of turning off the entire electrical system is theirs. In their scenario, the captain wanted to escape detection by turning off all forms of communication, and he knew that if he turned off ACARS it would send a little message saying, “OK, turning off now,” instead of just going dark.
Now this seems funny to me because, as we know from AF447, there is no one sitting around an operations center somewhere in the middle of the night checking to see whether or not any given plane’s ACARS has been turned off or not and if so how it was turned off. It’s just not going to happen in real time.
So essentially the idea is that the captain did a very large, dangerous, cumbersome thing that was contrary to the nature of every 777 pilot, just for the sake of avoiding one tiny clue. And yet: He does a turnback and flies right over the top of a Malaysian Air Force base with all its primary radar. To me that doesn’t add up.
I want to make super clear, by the way, that I am not criticizing or making fun of Green Dot or MenTour Pilot. I think that they are both smart guys and talented communicators and they’ve made a good-faith effort to understand what happened to this plane.
But I do disagree with their conclusions, and I want to explain why as respectfully as possible, because I hope that they stay engaged with the project of keeping the public informed and interested in this mystery. I would like to encourage them both to keep trying to find answers.
As we know there are a lot of people who get mad at me for suggesting that the common sense theory of MH370, namely pilot suicide, might not be right. And I think that part of it is a widespread belief that the pilot suicide theory is simple, and everything else is incredibly needless complicated and arcane. But the point we’re making today, and which I think we’ve made over and over again in the course of this series, is that the pilot suicide theory is only simple if you overlook some really glaring holes.
In reality, the simple theory is really not so simple.