Jeff Wise

As the southern spring of 2014 approached the search authorities prepared to undertake a search of the seabed where their calculations indicated the plane had gone.

They hired a Dutch marine survey company called Fugro, which dispatched three ships to the area: Fugro Discovery, Fugro Equator and Fugro Supporter.

The area they were going to search had been defined by the probability density function we’ve described earlier. It stretched about 600 miles long and covered water that was about three miles deep.

The logistical and technical challenges of searching this 23,000-square-mile area were enormous. Because it lay so far from land, crews would have to stay out for a month at a time, in a clime that mariners considered to be among the most inhospitable in the world. Here in the fabled “roaring forties” the waves at times reach 50 feet high.

Continue reading Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 15: Seabed Search

Last week we discussed the route the plane would likely have taken had it traveled north. Its endpoint would have been in central Kazakhstan, a client state of Russia. In that context, it’s interesting to note that three men with Russian names were aboard the plane. One was a passenger from Russia, Nikolai Brodsky. The two were two Ukrainians, Sergei Deineka and Oleg Chustrak.

A little online research turned up a fair bit of information about Brodsky. The Russian media contacted his family and interviewed his wife. He seemed like a fairly high-profile guy. He ran a timber company in Irkutsk and was active in a dive club that in the winter cut holes into the frozen surface of Lake Baikal and scuba dived under the ice. The reason that he was on the plane was that his club was on a ten-day drip to go scuba diving in Bali, and he was coming back early. There two different reasons given for why he was coming back early; one was that he’d promised his wife that he’d have dinner with her on March 8, international Women’s Day; the other was that he had to go on a business trip to Mongolia.

There was much less information available at the time about the Ukrainians, as their relatives didn’t want to talk to the media. What we did know was that they had a furniture company called Nika Mebel. Mebel is the Russian word for “Furniture,” the men were joint owners of a furniture factory in Odessa. They didn’t have a store to sell their stuff but they had an online store that had gone live a few months before. There was no explanation given as to why they were on the plane.

Continue reading Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 14: Another One

We’re back! Andy and I took a week off to catch our breath, and now we’re back on the case. This week we look at where the plane could have gone if it didn’t go into the remote southern Indian Ocean. According to the Inmarsat data, it would have flown to the northwest, but that raises another question: if it flew over mainland Asia, why wasn’t it picked up by anyone’s military radar?

As you’ll recall, when Australian scientists applied the technique of Bayesian inference to the BTO data, they found that it indicated that the plane might have taken one of two flight paths, one to the north, one to the south:

Zooming in on the northern route and rotating:

Continue reading Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 13: North

Once Australian government scientists 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 discussed earlier, 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. You’ll recall that the plane took off at 16:42 heading from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China.. A flight that normally takes 5 1/2 hours but it was carrying enough fuel to keep it flying until around 00:12, in case it needed to divert somewhere else and needed extra fuel.

Continue reading Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 12: Descent

Today’s episode is something of a double-header, as we address two different but related topics: the scientific method, and how Andy and Jeff’s efforts fit into it. In the first half of the show, Andy and Jeff talk about their personal histories, and how their experiences prepared them for tackling the mystery of MH370. 

In the second half, Jeff describes how working on this mystery has shaped his understanding of the scientific method, and in particular how scientist deal with uncertainties in data and in their knowledge of initial conditions. Understanding so-called Bayesian methods is crucial, because it’s the approach that search officials used in defining the the search area on the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean.

Continue reading Deep Dive MH370: Episode 11: Routes

Today we tackle our most controversial topic date: the question of whether a backdoor exist in MH370’s satcom system that would have allowed the BFO data to be tampered with. If so, it will have radical implications for what might have happened to the plane.

Back in Episode 7 we explained how the BFO data worked and how it showed conclusively that the plane must have gone south. But then some strange facts started to appear that, taken together, suggested that all might not be as it seemed.

The first was that, as we’ve discussed earlier, the Satellite Data Unit had been turned off and back on again. Officials didn’t let that slip until June 26. Up until that time, we’d all assumed that the satcom had inadvertantly been left on when everything else was turned off. The fact that it was turned on was really hard to explain. In fact to this day, people have had a hard time coming up with a convincing reason why anyone would either know how to do this or want to do this. I hasten to add that is a hugely contentious point. Some people say they have perfectly good explanations, but they all seem pretty daft to me. For instance, Victor Iannello thinks it was done in order to prevent someone in the cabin from using the satphone to call for help, but there are simpler ways to turn off the satphone.

Continue reading Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 10: The Vulnerability

Within weeks after the disappearance of MH370, many theories had been proposed, but one in particular 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. While there have been a handful of known cases where pilots have flown their own plane into the ground, no one had ever before carried out a sophisticated, complicated, and aggressive plan to abscond with an airplane only to spend seven hours patiently waiting to die. But there seemed no other way to easily explain the sequence of events that emerged from the Inmarsat data. What would such a person be like, psychologically? What kind of traces would they leave behind in their social media, in their personal photographs and work records, and in the memories of those who knew them? In today’s episode we turn our attention to Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid and take stock of the evidence. 

Continue reading Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 9: The Pilot

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. Not a single piece was ever spotted. In today’s episode we talk about how it went down, and what we might conclude from it. We also touch on 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.

As we’ve previously discussed, at first everyone thought that the plane had crashed in the South China sea, under its original route to Beijing. At first this was a Search and Rescue mission, as authorities hoped that the plane might have ditched à la Miracle in the Hudson and some survivors could be rescued. But as time went by hope quickly faded.

Continue reading Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 8: Surface Search

On March 24, 2014, the Malaysian Prime minister made a shocking announcement: using a new kind of mathematical analysis, scientists at the British satellite communications company Inmarsat had determined conclusively that MH370 had flown into a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean. Because there are no islands in the area, there was no possibility that anyone on the plane could have survived. Therefore, all 239 passengers and crew must be dead. It was a stunningly sweeping conclusion to reach based entirely on a kind of mathematics that no one in the outside world knew the details of. But was it correct?

Up until that time it had seemed to me that the plane more likely went north. It seemed implausible that someone sophisticated and motivated enough to steal a plane so aggressively would do it just to die a protracted death. In fact I’d written twoarticles for Slate making that case. At the time, most people already thought the plane probably went south, so my editor had only let me write the articles after I’d promised that I would write an apology article if I turned out to be wrong. I thought it was worth it, so I said yes.

Continue reading Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 7: Frequency