Show Notes
Today’s episode is something of a double-header, as we address two different but related topics: the scientific method, and how we the co-hosts came to be involved in the case. 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. Bayes theorem has crept into the public discourse in recent years; you’ll often hear about people “updating their priors” and the like, meaning that they’ve changed their mind based on new information. In this episode Jeff refers to it as an inverse probability estimate, in the sense that rather than using one’s knowledge of a current system state to calculate a future state, you use knowledge of the current state to assess what previous conditions might have given rise to it. There’s a neat example of this idea in The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie. Imagine that you have a 10-foot-long billiards table. If you fling a cue ball so that it vigorously bounces off multiple sides and effectively winds up in a random location, what is the probability that it will wind up within 1 foot of the far-left hand edge? It’s easy to see that the probability is 10 percent. Now imagine that you have a billiards table of unknown length and the cue ball is one foot from the left-hand edge. How long is the table? The answer you give depends on your knowledge of possible prior states. For instance, it may be the case that all billiard tables are either 10 or 14 feet long. Or maybe they can be arbitrarily long. The searchers for MH370 found themselves in an analagous situation when it came to defining a search area using the Inmarsat data. They had to ask themselves, “What is the universe of possible flights that could have given rise to this data, and what is the relative probability of each?” This would then allow them to calculate a probability heat map on the seabed of the southern ocean of where the plane’s wreckage might be located. We know a lot about how they carried out this work because the Australian scientists who carried it out wrote a very detailed and lucid account which they published in 2015 as Bayesian Methods in the Search for MH370.
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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.