Finding MH370

In the previous two episodes I talked about how search officials became convinced that the plane must have gone into the southern Indian Ocean because they didn’t think that debris could be planted, and they didn’t think that Inmarsat data could be tampered with.

Today I’m going to talk about a third belief: that the plane had to have been hijacked by the captain because that’s who was in the cockpit, and the plane can only be flown from there. It was a reasonable-sounding assumption, but it turns out to be wrong. There is a relatively simple way to fly the plane from the electronics bay, and I was able to figure it out in detail by looking at publicly available documents and talking to professors at aeronautical universities and retired control system engineers.

To help me explain it, I’m honored to be joined today by John Waters, a former US Air Force fighter pilot who now flies 777s for a living, and is also the host of the excellent Afterburn Podcast.

As for this podcast, if you want to get a free newsletter that goes out with every new episode, you can sign up at the showpage, FindingMH370.com.

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Soon after MH370 vanished in 2014, investigators became convinced that there was only one possible explanation: that the plane's captain, Zaharie Ahmed Shah, had hijacked the plane and carried out an elaborate and technically sophisticated plan to commit mass murder-suicide by flying to a remote stretch of ocean and crashing there.

Underlying their sense of certainy were three core beliefs. In today's episode we explore the second of those: their belief that the data that they had received from the plane’s satellite communication system, and which scientists had analyzed to designate a search area, was 100 percent reliable and couldn’t have been tampered with.

We'll look at new research which finds that the 777 data bus is actually wide open to data tampering, and that by feeding falsified information into a program called the Doppler Precompensation Algorithm, sophisticated hiijackers could have made the plane seem to investigators like it had traveled south into the remote ocean when it had actually flown north to an airfield in Central Asia.

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In July of 2015, fifteen months after Malaysica Airlines Flight 370 disappeared into the night, a piece of its right wing washed ashore on La Réunion island in the western Indian Ocean. Investigators hoped that barnacles growing on the wing could offer a clue as to where the plane had crashed. But unfortunately, so little was known about these creatures at the time that no inferences could be drawn.

Over the last year and a half, I've been carrying out a project to collect scientific drifter buoys that have come ashore, in order to collect the barnacles growing on the and create a database to finally show in detail how these animals grow, so that we can at last understand what they're trying to tell us. Now that we've collected more than a dozen buoys from all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans, a picture is starting to emerge that is quite at odds with what investigators expected -- and indeed, even thought possible -- at the time.

Also in this episode I respond to a critique from the man who once headed up the seabed search conducted by the Australian government, and I explain why the seabed search for MH370 might be permanently over.

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With the latest round of seabed search suspended after a fairly miniscule of progress, there’s a lot of frustration right now about the search for MH370. A lot of people just can’t believe that, in this day and age, countries like the United States and Australia, which have some of the most advanced technology in the world available to them, can’t find a 200 foot long airplane with 239 people aboard.
One of the most frequent comments I get is, “I can’t believe that the government doesn’t know where the plane is,” or, put another way, “the government isn’t telling us the whole truth.” Well, over the years I’ve talked to a fair number of people inside the official investigation, and I think I have a fairly well grounded understanding of their mindset, and I will say that, while there isn’t a grand coverup going on, there are definitely things that the government — whether that be Malaysia, Australia, or the United States — isn’t telling us. In today’s episode I’m going to talk about what those are and why they matter.


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It’s Sunday, February 8, and Armada 86 05 has set sail from Gage Roads near Perth Australia, and is not heading back out to the search area, as many had hoped, but is instead sailing for the Pacific, putting the search for MH370 back on ice. Some have speculated online that Ocean Infinity stopped looking because they found the wreckage; I’ll unpack why that is probably not the case, and will look at what lies ahead in the search for MH370. I’ll also unpack the mystery of a long telephone call that Captain Zaharie Ahmed Shah took part in before taking off on the fateful flight: Who was the call with, and was it tied to the plane’s disappearance?


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