MH370 – Jeff Wise

Why This Search for MH370 Could Be Different

If it’s not found, much of the story we’ve been told will turn out to be false.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on February 26, 2025.

The third search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has begun, 11 years after the plane practically vanished. On Sunday, a ship belonging to the American maritime-survey company Ocean Infinity arrived at a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean where the plane is believed to have crashed. It then deployed a trio of advanced robot subs three miles under the waves to scan the seabed using sonar waves. If successful, the effort will locate the wreckage of the aircraft together with the black boxes that will allow investigators to solve the mystery. If not, it will effectively disprove the analysis underlying the seabed search and suggest that officials bungled some fundamental assumptions.

The first underwater search for the missing plane was launched more than a decade ago, months after MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers’ screens on March 8, 2014, during a routine red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. Scientists at the satellite-communications company Inmarsat later found that the plane had sent seven automatic radio signals before vanishing for good. In analyzing the data, scientists were able to extract a route from Malaysia into the southern Indian Ocean and concluded that the plane’s wreckage must lie near the end point of this path. Australia, which was responsible for finding the plane due to the search-and-rescue zone, hired a Dutch marine-survey company, Fugro, which dispatched a trio of ships to drag underwater sensors over the seabed. At first, officials were highly confident that they would locate the plane in short order, with one boasting that they had a 97 percent chance of success. But the plane was not in the search area measuring 46,000 square miles. Fugro increased the size of the search zone, then increased it again, without success. In 2017, the search was abandoned.

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:

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?

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.

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.

Deep Dive MH370 #27: Landing MH370

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.

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?

In Episode 13, we talked about how scientists at an Australian government organization called the Defense Science & Technology Group used Monte Carlo modeling to generate a large number of possible routes and see which ones matched the BTO data. They wound up with a probability distribution that looked like this:

Based on the BFO data, they concluded that the plane had gone south. But we’re proposing that the data was spoofed to make it seem like the plane went south when it really went north. So we’re interested in this part:

As you can see these paths all go across the Bay of Bengal, comes ashore west of Calcutta and the Ganges Delta, crosses Nepal and the Himalayas and then across Tibet and Xinjiang.

Deep Dive MH370 #26: Restarting the Search

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.

After the Australian government mathematically analyzed the Inmarsat data to figure out where MH370 had run out of fuel in the southern Indian Ocean, they hired a Dutch maritime survey company called Fugro to search a 23,000-square-mile rectangle that encompassed most of the possible endpoints. As we described in Episode 1, the first of three ships assigned to the job began scanning the seabed in October 2014. By the following April, it was clear that the plane was not in fact in the search area, so the Australians doubled its size and asked Fugro to keep going.

But nothing was found.

In November 2016 the ATSB issued a report called “MH370 — First Principles Review” in which they tried to grapple with their failure.

As we’ve talked about before, the Inmarsat data doesn’t work like GPS; it doesn’t give you latitutude and longitude coordinates. Instead, there are a lot of possible routes the plane could have taken that would match the data; the trick to understanding where the plane went is to carry out what’s called a “Monte Carlo simulation” in which you generate a vast number of possible routes and then compare each one to the data to see how well it matches.

Each route has an endpoint; the universe of good-matching routes presents you a universe of endpoints, and these are distributed in a fried-egg pattern that will be familiar to viewers.

A corollary of this dynamic is that for every endpoint in the southern ocean, there is a route that ends there—a story of how fast it flew, how many turns it made, and so forth. What’s important to understand is that in broad terms, it’s physically possible for the plane to fly to any point on the 7th arc by the time of the final ping, but in order to get there in a probabilistially plausible manner you’re left with a much smaller universe of possible enpoints. Other end points are possible but require super unlikely combinations of turns and speed changes. We discussed this in some detail in Episode 11.

New York: The Sea Creatures That Opened a New Mystery About MH370

For the first year and a half after it vanished on March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 represented an unprecedented kind of aviation mystery, one whose only clues were a set of cryptic electronic signals suggesting the plane had crashed in the Indian Ocean west of Australia. Sixteen months later, in July 2015, a piece of its right wing called a flaperon washed ashore on the French island of Réunion, on the other side of the ocean. Here at last was physical evidence that the plane and its 239 souls really had flown into the remote southern patch of ocean and crashed.

Better still, the flaperon carried with it evidence that may help locate the plane and solve the mystery once and for all: a population of gooseneck barnacles called Lepas anatifera. Like the rings of a tree, their shells contain a record of their life. Decode that information and it may be possible to trace their path on the flaperon backward to the impact site and the mystery would be solved. “We stumbled upon something that gave much more certainty about the whereabouts of the plane than we anticipated,” says David Griffin, who led a team of Australian government scientists tasked with solving the case.

The flaperon and its Lepas spurred a decade of fruitful worldwide research into a previously obscure organism and unlocked the creature’s potential to serve as a natural data logger in all kinds of investigations, from tracking “ghost nets” that endanger wildlife to finding missing boats and even investigating mysterious deaths. But as marine biologists applied their new knowledge to the case of the missing plane, they found that instead of resolving mysteries, the barnacles revealed new ones.

As someone who has been publicly obsessed with MH370 for a decade, I have spent a long time exploring the fine points of Lepas biology, most recently on my podcast. These are fascinating creatures. In their larval stage, they swim free as plankton throughout the world’s oceans. Then once they’re ready for adulthood, they start looking for a floating object to attach themselves to. Having found one, they explore it, looking for an ideal spot — they prefer a deep, shady location far from the waterline — and glue their heads in place, using fine, sievelike appendages to sweep food particles from the water. Because they evolved to settle on biodegradable material such as logs and clumps of seaweed, they grow quickly and can reach maturity in a matter of weeks. On man-made objects that don’t decay, Lepas can grow for years, forming dense mats of long-stalked barnacles that look like medusa’s writhing hairdo of snakes.

Deep Dive MH370 #25: Breakthrough Part 2

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.

As promised, we’ve got some important new evidence to share with you. In fact it’s a double dose today.

First, we will tell you where the debris from the plane floated from.

Second, we will tell why search officials need to completely rethink their approach to the satellite data.

This episode is running on March 7, 2024. In the U.S., that’s 10 years to the day of when MH370 took off and disappeared.

We’ve got a lot to get through today, so let’s jump in.

PART I.

Let’s start with the topic that we set you up for last week, with the idea of using Lepas barnacles as a clock for timing the age of things. We learned that researchers in the Maldives had found that Lepas in the tropical Indian Ocean can grow 35 millimeters long in 105 days.

Deep Dive MH370 #24: Breakthrough Part 1

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.

Over the course of this episode and the next, we’re going to reveal a major break in the case: new data that upends the conventional understanding of MH370. It’s the first significant break since the final report in 2017, and it’s a doozy.

But before we do that, we have to set the stage. For the data to have meaning, you have to understand its context.

What we’re going to be talking about has to do with a method of dating events that occurred in the past. It’s similar in a way to carbon dating, in which scientists use the radioactive decay of an isotope of carbon to determine how long ago something died. Or dendochronology, which uses patterns in tree ring growth to allow scientists to identify the time period during which a piece of timber grew.

To set ourselves up for the big reveal, we’re going to explain how this methodology works, and why we can consider it as a robust and rigorous method to determining how long a process has lasted.

Then in our next episode, on the 10th anniversary of MH370’s disappearance, we’re going to reveal the new evidence that is going to change our understanding of the case, explain what it means, and talk about its repercussions.