Show Notes
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 two articles 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. After the Prime Minister made his announcement, it looked like I’d lost my bet. But I wasn’t 100 percent convinced yet. What was this math that he was talking about? Until I could see for myself what the basis for his claim was, I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. But I had to wait, because the Malaysians remained secretive about the data and the process that Inmarsat had used to analyse it. Finally, they released the data, and the various independent investigators began working to figure out the mathematical process. It took some work, because the math was indeed a bit tricky, but before long they figured it out. It made sense. The Malaysian Prime Minister had been right — the Inmarsat data did indeed unequivocally indicate that MH370 flew into the remote southern Indian Ocean. I wrote an article explaining how the math worked, and then another explicitly apologizing for being wrong. It wasn’t the outcome I’d wanted — for one thing, a flight to the south removed any hope that the passengers might still be alive — but part of science is a willingness to accept new evidence. And I was happy that the mystery of MH370 now seemed very close to being solved. With the first set of metadata, investigators had been able to specficy that MH370 flew one of two quite narrow sets of possible routes, with a crash location very close to the end of them. With this second set of data, they now knew which route was correct. All they had to do was go to the end of the southern route, scan the seabed using sonar, locate the wreckage, retrieve the black box, and figure out what had happened. Voila. Case closed. The probability map of where the plane probably ended up looked like this, with the most likely resting place in red: But of course, when it comes to MH370, nothing is ever quite what it seems.
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More from Deep Dive: MH370, Remastered
Andy Tarnoff and I spent eight months making the 31 episodes that comprised the podcast series “Deep Dive: MH370.” Our goal was to break down a complicated case so that it could be understood by viewers and listeners in an entertaining and easy-to-digest format. In today’s episode, we discuss the six important conclusions about the case that the public might not understand were it not for the podcast. As a follow-up to this series I later started producing the series “Finding MH370,” currently ongoing, which builds upon the work of “Deep Dive” and extends it further with an eye to ultimately solving the case.
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.
It doesn’t seem to make much sense. Unless you understand the man who makes the decisions in Russia, and how he sees the world. Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer stationed in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Like many patriotic Russians, Putin experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union not as the blossoming of freedom, but as the humiliation of a once-great power. Territory that had once been considered the heartland of the empire split off into independent states. Putin later called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” After he came to power, he was determined to return his country to its rightful place of greatness in the world. To do that, he would need to adopt a mode of warfare suited to Russia’s diminished resources — an approach called hybrid warfare. And that involves hurting your adversary in all sorts of ways, some blunt and obvious, others quite sophisticated and unexpected.
Today’s topic is one that I’ve been fascinated by for a long time: the art of stage magic and what it can tell us about MH370. I’m joined by Ed Dentzel, the host of an excellent podcast Unfound, in which he’s examined hundreds of missing persons cases. In a previous life Ed 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. Ed wrote a guest post for my blog back in 2019 and I found what he said really fascinating and I’ve been wanting to have him on the show for a long time.
If the satcom was hacked and MH370 was taken north, the perpetrators presumably had a plan that ended with them alive, and this would have to involve landing the plane at an airport. But is there an airport they could have landed at? If there are no airports near the part of the 7th arc where MH370’s flight would have terminated, then that would be a major blow to the cyber-hijack theory. As it turns out, though, there are a number of airports where the plane could plausibly have landed, and in today’s eposide we look at some of the more intriguing ones.