Show Notes
As we wait for the seabed search for MH370’s wreckage to restart, it’s worth taking the time to reflect about what we’ve learned from the search thus far, and what future scanning will tell us about the plane’s likely fate. Under the principles of Bayesian inference, the more of the seabed is searched without the plane’s wreckage being discovered, the greater the probability becomes that the plane simply isn’t there at all. But there’s an escape hatch to this logic: according to an idea called Cromwell’s Rule, the probability will not change so long as we are 100 percent confidant in the proposition that the plane is somewhere in the ocean. In today’s episode whether such confidence is merited, or whether the widespread refusal to consider an alternative is due to a mental blockage or blind spot. I also discuss my new feature article in Vanity Fair magazine about mounting concerns about cyber attacks against airliners around the world — and now, for the first time, in the United States. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe
More from Finding MH370
A newly recovered drifter buoy from Mauritius shows for the first time how barnacles like the ones found on MH370's flaperon grow during more than two years at sea. The new data suggests a new methodology for determining how long the debris floated in the sea -- and whether it's plausible that the plane really did crash land in the remote ocean.
The ocean is vast -- but the range of possible places that MH370 could be is limited, constrained by evidence and the plane's performance. Today's experiment lets us define that area, and thereby determine just how much effort it would take to solve the case once and for all.
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A Pan Am airliner lay on the seabed near Puerto Rico for more than 70 years until Russ Matthews and his team located it. He tells us how they did it.