Category: MH370

When news broke in 2014 that a Malaysia Airlines 777 had gone missing, no one imagined that, nine years later, we still wouldn’t know what became of flight MH370.

It once looked like closure was imminent. Soon after the plane vanished from radar screens, scientists at the UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat announced they had found recorded signals automatically transmitted from the plane. By using some complicated mathematics, they were able to work out where the plane must have gone into the remote southern Indian Ocean.

They turned over their findings to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which was entrusted with the search because the flight’s presumed end point was within Australia’s marine jurisdiction.

All that remained was for ships to scan the seabed and collect the wreckage. Yet when the seabed was scanned in the area the scientists had calculated, the plane wasn’t there. Still optimistic, officials expanded the search area. But it wasn’t there either. Finally, they threw in the towel.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, a previously unknown private company came along and continued the search on their own dime. Still no plane. In the end, an area the size of Great Britain was scanned but the plane was nowhere to be found.

In the years that followed, the world mostly forgot about MH370. But not everyone. For the family members of the disappeared, the nightmare has never ended. They remain stuck in a shadowland, unable to grieve or to hope, as several of them compellingly describe in the recent Netflix documentary MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, which I was a part of.

But it’s not just the family members for whom we need to solve this jumbo-sized mystery. The flying public need to know they can get on a plane and not vanish. We can’t close the books on MH370. We must begin again, from square one, and persevere until we find the answer. If science can find a Higgs boson, it can find a 70m-long airplane.

The question is where to start, and the answer comes down to the issue of why the search has failed so far. Did the official investigation just get unlucky? Or did they make a big mistake?

Continue reading Sydney Morning Herald: Everyone will sound like a conspiracy theorist unless we find MH370

Nine years ago, a Malaysian airliner carrying 239 passengers and crew vanished from air traffic control screens over the South China Sea. Search officials were never able to locate the plane or those aboard. For the family members of the disappeared, it was a tragedy all the more painful for remaining unexplained; for investigators, it was a riddle unlike any they had ever encountered.

But the disappearance of MH370 is just the start of the story. Because in the years that have followed, another dimension of the mystery has opened up. It’s become evident that the scant clues available in the case have somehow led investigators astray. It isn’t just that we don’t know where the plane is. We don’t know why we don’t know. Continue reading Tudum: Nearly a Decade Later, Why Looking for MH370 Still Matters

William Langewiesche is a titan among aviation journalists. He has covered, in depth, some of the most important air disasters of our time for outlets such as the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He also has extensive experience as a professional pilot. His credibility on the subject of aviation is, in a word, unmatched. So when he turned his hand to the greatest aviation mystery of our time — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — there was every reason to hope that he would bring some clarity, at last, to a story fogbound in confusion.

The 10,000 word Atlantic cover story posted on June 17, however, did not accomplish that. Langewiesche writes evocatively, and he wrangles a mountain of information, but he falls victim to a siren temptress: the yearning for a concise and reasonable solution to a deep mystery.

“The simple story is usually the right one,” Langewiesche told me, during one of the many conversations we had while he researched the project. Having immersed myself in the technical arcana of this story for more than five years — first as a CNN contributor, then as a freelancer for New York, Popular Mechanics, and other outlets — I tried to show him that no simple answer can be made to fit the thicket of contradictory evidence that has grown since MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. As the saying goes, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” In the case of MH370, Langewiesche arrives at a solution that requires ignoring or dismissing whole categories of evidence.

It’s not a new solution. Langewiesche hitches his wagon to what has become the default, commonsense explanation, the one which the international authorities responsible for the search have implicitly held — the captain did it. This is a reasonable first pass at a theory of MH370. Since the plane was clearly taken by someone who knew what they were doing, and the only other person locked in the cockpit was the inexperienced first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, then it must have been Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah who purposefully turned the plane around and flew it off into the darkness until it ran out of fuel and crashed in the remote ocean. Case closed.

Ah, but already we run into problems. Continue reading OneZero: The Mystery Behind the Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight Isn’t Solved Yet

In the immediate aftermath of the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, Western observers quickly reached a consensus. Rogue separatists in eastern Ukraine, they concluded, had gotten their hands on a stolen Buk missile launcher and had fired at what they erroneously believed to be a Ukrainian military transport. 

As the Guardian reported five days later,

A press conference was held this afternoon by the US office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), at which select reporters were briefed on US intelligence with regard to MH17, …  The briefing underlined the theory espoused by most of a senior official at the briefing, and by most analysts since plane first crashed: rebels “most likely shot down the plane by mistake”.

But as new investigative reports make clear, that narrative was false. The Buk missile launcher that downed MH17 was not in the possession of rebel militiamen but belonged to a regular Russian Army unit. The operation was overseen by Russian military intelligence, the GRU. It was not “blind,” as many assumed from the fact that it was dispatched alone to Ukraine, but was operating within the air defense umbrella of the Russian army. It was manned with a trained Russian crew. 

The Buk is a powerful weapon that is capable of singehandedly starting a war, as we’ve seen recently in the Persian Gulf. In the course of their training it is drilled into crews’ heads that above all else they are not to fire it without an order from a superior officer. Hence, the Russian mililtary heirarchy bears chain-of-command responsibility for the shootdown, and this responsibility reaches all the way to the Kremlin. The “rogue militiaman” narrative is a fiction peddled by the Russian military, and its near-universal uptake by Western pundits is a case study of Russian skill in controlling the world media narrative.

There were two main reasons why experts believed that rogue militiamen had made a mistake. The first is that the rebel commander, Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, had made a statement on social media to the effect that “we” had shot down a military transport—and once it became widely understood that what had been shot down had in fact been a commercial airliner, the post looked hastily removed. It looked very much like Girkin had removed the post because it was embarrassed. The idea that someone would deliberately post something incriminating, for the sake of obscuring an even more incriminating reality, implied a level of cunning that few at that time were willing to credit—never mind that Strelkov was not really a rebel commander but a GRU officer.

The second reason that people were bamboozled by the “rogue militiamen” story was that truth did not match their conception of how the world was supposed to work. Surely, they imagined, a major nuclear power would not simply blow up a jet carrying hundreds of foreign civilians. What would the motive be? What benefit accrued to them? The fact is, sometimes people do things that are hard to understand. To this day, we don’t really know why Russia would deliberately destroy MH17, or what possible connection it might have to the hijacking of MH370.

But thanks to the work of the JIT and Bellingcat, we now know in great detail exactly how they pulled of the former act, and the circumstantial evidence for the former will only continue to grow.

The upshot for me isn’t that the West is facing an adversary who is willing to kill large numbers of civilians in the pursuit of unknown ends. It is that this adversary has shown itself capable of utterly baffling the Western intelligentsia who under normal circumstances would be responsible for organizing the societal response to this threat.

As the kids would say, we’ve been pwned.

After reading my book a journalist with the UK’s Daily Star newspaper, David Rivers, reached out to the daughter of passenger Sergei Deineka, Liza Deineka, whose social media postings I quoted. He published her response in a story today.

As you may recall, just 11 day after her father and all the other passengers aboard MH370 had effectively been declared dead by the Malaysian prime minister, Liza posted a photo of herself with her father on Instagram with the comment, “Happy Birthday, Daddy.” Several friends added comments with their own well-wishes. One wrote, “With the birthday boy! Let everything always be good for him,” followed by a string of emojis: a blushing, smiling face; a gift wrapped with a bow; a noisemaker; confetti; a toy balloon; a bow. “Thank you,” Liza responded, with a kissy-face emoji.

I found this exchange startling because signals transmitted from MH370 suggested that the plane was hijacked to Russia. Since Deineka and Chustrak were former Soviet Army veterans who happened to be sitting right under the SDU, they seemed top suspects as potential hijackers. Of course, if they took the plane and flew it to Kazakhstan, they would not be dead as commonly assumed, but alive. And Liza’s social media posts (both here and elsewhere) seemed to be saying just that.

I long ago reached out directly to Chustrak and Deineka’s families but had been told they didn’t wish to speak to me. Rivers, however, had better luck. After he contacted her and asked about my theory she responded with a statement. The translation reads:

Since March 8, 2014, I have not seen or heard (from) my dad. The evidence is that he is not dead, so all I can do is hope for the best.
I am very sorry people want to discuss and condemn the emotions of people who have a missing person missing. I don’t agree with many in this article.
Starting with answers, ending the reasons why my dad flew this way. They flew to Beijing to get a visa.
No plane wreckage was found, so I can’t be sure that they crashed. All I can do is hope that people could be saved.
Unfortunately, so far no one has given us reliable information about what happened to the plane and the people in it.”

A couple of things about this statement struck me as remarkable. Continue reading MH370 Passenger’s Daughter: “The Evidence is That He is Not Dead” UPDATED

Ed Dentzel is the host of the missing persons program, Unfound. He’s covered over 120 disappearances including Flight 370. However, before devoting his life to helping missing persons families, he was the Stage Manager for “The World’s Greatest Magic Show” at the Greek Isles in Las Vegas from 2005 to 2008. While there he worked with more than 50 magicians, helping them create and hone new tricks.

“Magicians don’t go on stage with a new trick until it’s flawless,” he told me. “Sometimes it means months and months of choreography, lighting changes, equipment changes, costume changes, all in an effort to make sure the audience can’t figure out how the trick works. I got paid lots of overtime while helping them find perfection.”

I asked him: given his experience in devising magic tricks, what does he think of the idea I laid out in The Taking of MH370 that the disappearance could best be thought of a stage magic–does the disappearance match with the way a magic trick would be crafted? This is an edited version of the reply he sent me.

I do see a lot of similarities. And I think you’ve touched upon a few of those qualities without possibly knowing it.

First, every magic trick is tailored to the environment in which it will take place. In other words, there’s a reason at a child’s birthday party you don’t see a magician cutting a woman in half. Why? Because to do that trick, the audience can’t be “on top of” the magician. If the audience is too close, then the trick is exposed. Also in other words, the simpler the trick, the more it can travel from a stage, to a convention room, to a home. Card tricks are probably the best known of this kind.

How does that relate to Flight 370? Well, if things happened the way you’ve written, the “trick” couldn’t have been performed over the USA at noon on a Wednesday. Why? Other jets would see Flight 370 leaving its path. People on the ground would see it. Military and civilian radar would see it.  Instead, these hijackers picked the correct venue for their trick: Southeast Asia, where things are a little lax, especially at night.

Second, every trick has a tell. Not because the magician wants it that way. But because there is no easy way to make things seem possible that are truly physically impossible. What do I mean? Well, a magician can’t make birds appear out of nowhere if he is naked on stage. So, her costume/his suit/those pants are not something you’d pick up at the Men’s Warehouse. Those are specially designed clothes for that bird trick. Likewise, in almost every levitation trick out there, there’s a reason the magician drapes a piece of cloth over the entire assistant before she is suspended in the air. Why? Because that’s to cover the woman sliding into the table she is lying on, and what the cloth is really covering as it goes into the air is a wire frame suspended by wires. But, to the audience–the magician’s clothes, the draping of the assistant, etc. appears to be very natural and unassociated with the trick itself, even though it is.  Maybe the best example is when David Copperfield walked through the Great Wall of China. Great trick. Yet, the tell was right in front of everyone the whole time . . . why exactly did he use the same platform and shrouding on one side of the Wall, then the other? You mean a rich guy like that couldn’t afford platforms for both sides. Well . . . it was because he was hiding in the platform and thus got carried by his assistants from one side of the Wall to the other.

How does that relate to Flight 370? Well, it may be that the SDU cutting out and coming back on is that “tell.” And you’ve kind of explained it as such. To seemingly everyone else in aviation, this is just some natural thing that occurred. To you, it’s the “tell” that a “trick” was taking place. And like the magic tricks which need the special costume or the draping of the assistant, the taking of Flight 370 couldn’t have happened without the SDU going off then on again. Continue reading MH370 As Stage Magic