Jeff Wise – science journalism

Deep Dive MH370 #31: Season 1 Finale

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.

We’ve been making this weekly podcast for eight months now, and it feels like we could literally go on forever. But having come this far, we’ve come to feel that the most productive way forward will be to take a pause, collect our breath, and consider how best to press forward. So we’ve decided to use this episode to mark an end of Season One. We’re going to rest and regroup for a spell before coming back with a freshly conceived Season Two.

[A practical note: while we’re on hiatus, I’m going to pause paid subscriptions, so that people on monthly plans won’t get charged until we return, and people with yearly plans will have their subscription period extended.]

At heart, our core motivating belief is that this is a profoundly important case and we want to do everything in our power to help the public understand it. So today we’re going to talk about six major advancements that we think we’ve made towards that goal over the last 30 episodes.

Before I do that, though, a quick sidenote: Over the past week, I was delighted to be invited onto “avgeek” podcast Next Trip Network. Hosts Doug and Drew invited me on to talk about both MH370 and the latest crisis at Boeing so I encourage anyone interested in these topics to check that out.

And now, onward to the six big things from Season 1:

DW News: Boeing denies allegations over production faults

On Wednesday, April 10, 2024 I went on DW News to talk about the latest whistleblower claims concerning Boeing production flaws.

Deep Dive MH370 #30: A 777 Pilot Weighs In

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?

Sherwood: Can China profit from Boeing’s woes?

There was nothing particularly special-looking about the twin-engine airliner parked on the tarmac at the Singapore Airshow in February. It was white, with the usual rows of rounded windows on either side and a red-and-blue airline logo emblazoned on the tail. But though its appearance was nondescript, the aircraft represented something potentially game-changing for aviation: a long-planned, well-funded, and extremely determined attempt by China to break into the tightly sealed $400B commercial-aircraft marketplace. “They’re serious about this,” said Shukor Yusof, an aviation analyst at Endau Analytics in Singapore.

The plane on display at the airshow was the C919, a narrowbody airliner built by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, or Comac, a state-owned manufacturer headquartered in Shanghai. Though five of the machines are now flying domestically within China, the C919’s appearance in Singapore was the first time the plane had appeared abroad and marked an important step in what is widely regarded as a long-shot bid to take on the industry’s twin Goliaths, Boeing and Airbus.

Until recently, many would have pegged the chance of success at practically zero. But with Boeing reeling from a series of blunders over the past six years, Comac’s chances right now are looking brighter. The flying public is newly wary of Boeing’s planes, and airlines have been stymied by the company’s production bottlenecks. “The Chinese are exploiting the shortage of aircraft in the marketplace,” Yusof said.

Deep Dive MH370 #29: Motive

Why would Russia hijack a Malaysian airliner and lead the world on a wild goose chase?

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.”

Under communism, all wealth belonged to the state, including Russia’s vast oil, timber, and mineral reserves. In the brave new world of capitalism, all that was up for grabs. Tremendous fortunes were amassed overnight by people connected enough and ruthless enough to grab them. Entrepreneurs with shady connections grew obscenely wealthy while the majority slid into poverty. Birth rates plunged and the life expectancy of the average Russian male fell from 64 in 1990 to 58 in 1994. The nation was literally dying.

New York: Boeing Nosedive

The phone in Room 511, in a Holiday Inn off the highway in Charleston, South Carolina, rang and rang with no response. John Barnett’s attorneys were calling after their client failed to show up for his third day of deposition against his former employer, Boeing. It was Saturday, March 9, and the lawyers, Rob Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, were looking forward to getting his story on the record. Barnett had worked in the company’s South Carolina plant building 787 airliners from 2011 to 2017, during which time he’d witnessed numerous safety violations. After he took his complaints public, Barnett alleged, Boeing had punished him by denying him promotions and forcing him to retire early. By suing, he sought not only to redress his own mistreatment but also to push Boeing to revamp its safety culture. The need was urgent: Boeing’s reputation had been in free fall since the start of the year, starting with the blowout of a door plug on a brand-new 737 Max-9 over Oregon and continuing with a series of well-publicized mishaps, including an incident just the day before when a wheel fell off a 777 leaving San Francisco.

When Barnett failed to answer the phone, Turkewitz and Knowles called the hotel and asked the staff to look for his orange Dodge Ram pickup. It was sitting in the parking lot with Barnett inside, dead. His finger was still on the trigger of a silver pistol. Conspiracy theories exploded, intensifying further after a relative claimed to a local TV station that Barnett had told her that “if anything happens, it’s not suicide.” There were two ways to interpret the story: Either Boeing’s communications strategy had been expanded to include assassination, or its reputation had become so toxic that the public found it possible to believe the worst.

New York: Have We Already Found Alien Life?

Exciting rumors have been swirling in the halls of astrobiology. The James Webb Space Telescope, which has been scrutinizing the cosmos in unprecedented detail since its deployment in 2022, has been on a tear lately, and folks in the know say it might finally have detected life beyond Earth. That’s the buzz, anyway. Says astrophysicist Rebecca Smethurst, as reported by The Spectator, “I think we are going to get a paper that has strong evidence for a biosignature on an exoplanet very, very soon.”

In other words: Awesome! But also: Calm down. “Strong evidence for a biosignature” is a long way from proof of life on other planets. A biosignature is basically a signal that’s consistent with life but that may also be produced by something else. It’s intriguing but not incontrovertible evidence. And given the many uncertainties surrounding a discipline still in its infancy, the public should not get its hopes up. “So many people want this to be the year. There will definitely be claims,” says Sara Seager, an MIT professor of astrophysics. “There won’t be any robust findings.”

One reason it’s hard to pin down unequivocal evidence of life is that we don’t really know what life is. Here on Earth, biology involves DNA and carbohydrates and requires liquid water, but the chemistry could be different on other worlds. Maybe life could use liquid methane instead of water, or silicon instead of carbon. So, in its most fundamental formulation, what is life all about, and how do we know what to look for?

Deep Dive MH370 #28: Is WSPR Real?

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.

Interested in connecting with a growing, passionate audience? Let’s talk. Email andy@onmilwaukee.com.

It’s a special episode today: Andy is on vacation, so for the very first time I’m helming this podcast without him. It’s a pretty common thing for co-hosts of podcasts to alternate taking episodes off and I think it’s a pretty practical thing but it’s also venturing into new waters, so we’ll see how it goes.

I’m really excited for today’s episode because we’re going to be talking about two things, one that’s brand new and one that’s an old favorite. The new one has to do with a viral YouTube video by a popular aviation podcaster named Mentour Pilot about a new technology called WSPR, pronounced “whisper.” A lot of listeners and viewers have been asking about it, so we’ll be tackling that today.

But first, a topic that I’ve been fascinated by for years: the art of stage magic and what it can tell us about MH370.

A Reader Writes: A Memory of John Graybill

Note: Several years after I first posted my National Geographic Adventure story about John Graybill (see preceding post) on an earlier version of my website, a reader named Rudy Mallonee wrote a comment describing a remarkable personal encounter with Graybill in his youth. Because I had switched hosting services by this point, it was a long time before I stumbled upon his comment. Very belatedly, I’m sharing the story here:

I grew up here in Alaska and when I was a young man I worked as a heavy equipment operator. I met John in 1970 while digging trenches for the plumbing on a medical building on Lake Otis and Tudor [in Anchorage, Alaska]. John was a plumber on the job. We got to talking hunting and he invited me to go with him that coming winter hunting wolves. So for that winter and the next we flew all over from the Alaska range way out south and east of Petersville to north as far as the Tanana river and west to Tok.

On a January trip back up behind Petersville Lodge in the next valley south from a hunting cabin on Cache Creek, we needed to get out to take a leak. We spotted an old cabin in the narrow valley, and there being a barely visible set of ski tracks on what was room to land on, John says “We’ll land there.” There were maybe two feet of snow over the old tracks and as we touched down there were hard ice ridges underneath the fresh snow. We took a couple of hard bounces and then the left wing dug in and we came to a sudden halt. John had good shock cord in place but no safety cables. At 40° below the shock cord just snapped, causing the wing to drop and dig in as that side collapsed.

I looked up and all the plexigass had broken out of the roof and the tubing was bent down about six inches. We got out and looked the wing over. It didn’t look damaged but the left outer struts of the landing gear were snapped as if cut by a knife and we could move the wing fore and aft about six to eight inches.

So John says “Let’s go down to the cabin and see if we can find anything to fix this with.”

National Geographic Adventure: Last Man Flying

Note: In 2001 I published this story in the now-defunct magazine National Geographic Adventure. The subhead was “Meet John Graybill—legendary bush pilot, notorious poacher in Alaska’s Outlaw Wars, and, at 70 years old, the last of a dying breed.” In 2010, by an eerie coincidence, he died in a plane crash with his wife Dolly while engaging in a dangerous practice called scud-running on the very same day that I published an article on my blog about that very practice and mentioned him by name.

It was a blustery Sunday afternoon in early December 1973, cold and overcast, when John Graybill took off from Alaska’s Kodiak Island. He and his 16-year-old daughter, Teri, had been visiting friends for the weekend, and now they were heading home to Anchorage in Graybill’s tiny Piper Super Cub.

Once airborne, Graybill turned north and flew over the whitecaps of Shelikof Strait. With winter setting in, daylight was scarce, and soon the plane was shrouded in darkness.

The Super Cub had been in the air for less than an hour when the engine started to sputter. Graybill, a seasoned pilot, brought the plane down beneath the clouds and began searching for a place to land.

On he flew through the darkness—until, ahead in the distance, he made out a single point of light, which turned out to be a fishing trawler. Nursing the ailing engine along, Graybill took the plane in as close to the ship as he could and managed a nearly impossible feat—setting down in 20-foot [6-meter] waves without flipping over.

As seawater poured into the mangled cockpit, Graybill and his daughter struggled out into the frigid ocean. Since he rarely flew over open water, Graybill didn’t carry life preservers or survival gear. He hoisted Teri up onto the tail and treaded water, fighting for air amid the pounding waves. As a deadening chill crept through his body, Graybill called up to his daughter to ask if the trawler was turning around. “No, Dad,” she replied. “It just kept on going.”

Gradually, the plane slipped beneath the surface, and the Graybills treaded water together in the darkness. “Dad,” Teri called out to her father. “Are we going to die?”

“Yes, honey, we are,” he answered. “I sure feel awful about getting you into this mess.”

“That’s OK, Dad,” she said. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather die with than you.”

It’s not that Graybill has a morbid turn of mind. It’s just that, after nearly half a century engaged in an impossibly dangerous occupation, you tend to see a lot of untimely endings. At 70, Graybill is one of the last of a dying breed ‑‑ a legendary bush pilot from the pioneer days of Alaskan aviation. In his case, “dying breed” isn’t just a turn of phrase. Once Graybill sat down with a piece of paper and made a list of all his friends who had died flying small planes in Alaska. He managed to come up with 53.

THERE’S A LOT OF DYING in John Graybill’s stories. Usually, the deaths are fast and violent, but sometimes they are long and lingering, and tinged with bitter irony. When the protagonist doesn’t die, he usually disappears for good, or, in the best of circumstances, escapes from imminent death by the narrowest margin. More often than not, the protagonist is Graybill himself.