Category: MH370

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.

Part of the process of figuring out the mystery of MH370 is finding explanations for the seemingly inexplicable things that happened. Part two is trying to verify whether those explanations hold water.

Today we revisit a topic that we explored in depth back in Episode 10, “The Vulnerability,” in which we talked about an idea that Victor Iannello and I have both worked on—namely, that MH370 had an unsual vulnerability that would have allowed a sophisticated attacker on board the plane alter the data in its satellite communications system so that when investigators looked at the data later they would think the plane went south when it really went north. (If you’re interested in learning the details of the theory, I’ve posted a précis here.)

I’ve been thinking about this idea for a long time. There was even a whole episode of the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” about it. But it’s taken this podcast to spur me to do something I wish I had done a long time ago, which is to seek out the opinion of cybersecurity professionals. From the perspective of someone whose job it is to assess potential hacking vulnerabilities, does it seem like MH370 had one?

I was able to tap the expertise of someone who really knows his stuff, Ken Munro, the founder of Pen Test Partners in the UK. As the name implies, Ken’s company specializes in penetration testing, which means that they probe a client’s computer network for vulnerabilities to see if they can get inside the system. The idea is by imagining all the ways a bad guy could hurt you, you can take steps to prevent them from happening. Though his skills are applicable in every corner of IT, Ken specializes in aviation. Recently he and his team were able to a real 747 that wasn’t being used and borrow it for a bit to test it for security vulnerabilities (and found some interesting ones).

I figured if anyone could tell whether a proposed vulnerability is plausible or not, it would be Ken.

I sent Ken my write-up of the idea and then asked him what he thought about it. We had a fascinating discussion, which you can watch in the YouTube video above. The take-home for me was his assessment of my proposed vulnerability: “Technically, it stacks up…is it possible? Yes.”

Continue reading Deep Dive MH370 #22: The Hacking of MH370

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.

Ever since Blaine Alan Gibson first crossed my radar screen, half a year before he found “No Step,” I’ve struggled to understand this eccentric character. In the media, he styled himself after Indiana Jones, always wearing a brown fedora. He portrayed himself as an inveterate adventurer and world traveler who before MH370 had pursued any number of quixotic international quests, including an attempt to find the lost ark of the covenant and an expedition to the site of the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. His was a wonderfully appealing persona. After I wrote about him in New York magazine, TV producers started getting in touch with me, hoping I could hook them up with him to pitch reality shows about his life.

He quickly became a central feature of the MH370 story, ubiquitous in media coverage the crash.

After receiving a whirlwind of press attention for “No Step,” his first find, Gibson traveled to Ile Ste Marie, Madagascar, in June accompanied by a crew from France 2 TV. There, accompanied by a film crew, he found yet another piece of aicraft debris.

If it’s remarkable to find a piece of MH370 with TV cameras rolling, imagine doing it twice.

Later that year Gibson was back on Ile Ste Marie, this time with a delegation of MH370 family members and a documentary crew. On the morning of December 8, the group split up and spent the day combing separate areas. The camera crew followed Blaine. Having driven along one stretch of shore on an ATV and found nothing, he turned around and was making his way back when he came upon a piece of debris at the edge of the wet sand. A wave had evidently deposited it within the few minutes since he had passed. “Appears to be Malaysia 370 interior cabin debris,” he declared.

I found it quite extraordinary that a purported piece of MH370 apparently washed up on the shore within half an hour of Blaine’s passing by the spot. The ocean is vast, the number of pieces of MH370 necessarily limited. Bear in mind that Madagascar alone has a coastline of 2300 miles. Consider mainland Africa, the other islands dotted around the region.

The odds of finding a piece of the plane on any given stretch of sand is very small; the odds of finding something that washed ashore within the last half hour must be infinitesmal.

Continue reading Deep Dive MH370 #21: The Mayor of MH370

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.

At 8.30am on July 29, 2015, on the northeastern shore of Réunion Island, a cleanup crew was working its way along a stretch of pebbly beach when a worker named Johnny Begue spotted an unfamiliar-looking object at the edge of the surf. Roughly rectangular and about six feet long, it somewhat resembled a stubby airplane wing encrusted with marine life.

Soon gendarmes were on the scene, along with local news photographers. The officers put the piece into the back of a Land Rover. Within days it had been packed up, loaded onto an airplane, and flown to France.

The piece was quickly identified as a flaperon, a part of the wing’s trailing edge. The flaperon’s function combines those of a flap, which droop down to allow a plane to fly more slowly on descent to landing, with those of an aileron, which are raised or lowered to cause a plane to turn.

Specifically, this flaperon was identified as coming from the right wing of a Boeing 777. Since the only 777 ever lost at sea was MH370, investigators now had physical evidence to back up what the math had been telling them: the plane had gone into the southern Indian Ocean.

This seemed to be case closed. I wrote a follow-up piece for New York magazine:

“Back in February, I explained in New York how sophisticated hijackers might have infiltrated the plane’s electronic bay in order to spoof the satellite signals and take the plane north to Kazakhstan. MH370 wreckage on the shores of Réunion makes such explanations unnecessary.”

Continue reading Deep Dive MH370 Episode 18: The Flaperon

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.

In our last episode, we talked about the search of the seabed, which started in October 2014. By that time the plane had been missing for 8 months. And while the seabed search was everyone’s best hope for finding the black box and solving the mystery, people hadn’t forgotten about floating debris.

You’ll recall that in the first month after the disappearance, there had been an extremely extensive search of the ocean surface by ships and airplanes from many nations, and they hadn’t spotted anything.

When Australia called off the surface search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on April 28, Prime Minister Tony Abbot explained that “It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk.”

But would the debris really have sunk?

Continue reading Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 16: Debris

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