Jeff Wise – Page 3 – science journalism

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.

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.

Deep Dive MH370 #23: The Flight Simulator

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.

In the months after the disappearance of MH370, Malaysian police searched for any clues that might suggest that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was the culprit. This would have been the simplest explanation for why the Boeing 777 suddenly went electronically dark and pulled a U-turn forty minutes into its flight, and scarcely a minute after Shah’s voice was heard over the radio calmly telling air traffic controllers “Good night, Malaysia 370.” But to their chagrin, the evidence was slim. Zaharie had left no note. His family and friends had noticed no sign of mental disturbance. There was no evidence of political or religious extremism or of marital discord. He was under no financial pressure. He just didn’t fit the profile of someone who would kill hundreds of innocent people and take his own life in the process.

The police did find, however, a single piece of evidence pointing at Shah. In his home they found a hard drive that contained a flight simulation program as well as data points created when he saved simulated flights. Six data points recorded on February 2, 2014, were of particular interest. It looked like they came from a single 777 flight that took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, went up the Malacca Strait, passed the tip of Sumatra, then turned south and wound up with zero fuel over the remote southern Indian Ocean. This route so uncannily resembled the flight path deduced from MH370’s radar track and then satcom symbols that it was taken by many as smoking-gun evidence that Shah had practiced absconding with the plane. Some even believe that the flight-sim files could offer clues as to where to find the plane. (Indeed, the discovery of the flight sim files was one of the reasons that the authorities shifted the surface search area in mid-April 2014.)

The final two save points deserve special attention. They are located just 2 nautical miles apart in the far southern Indian Ocean. In both data files the plane has zero fuel and zero engine thrust. In the first, the plane is at 37,651 feet and flying at approximately 198 knots indicated airspeed, which is close to the speed recommended in the 777 Flight Crew Operating Manual in the event a plane loses both engines. In the second, the plane is flying much the same way but the altitude has manually adjusted to 4000 feet. In both cases the plane is actually in a climb. The fact that the plane is gaining altitude in both cases is consistent with a pilot who is hand-flying the airplane and so unable to prevent temporary departures from ideal speed and glideslope. In other words, as the plane gets going too fast he pulls the nose up, and if it starts going too slow he puts the nose down. It’s difficult and requires constant attention–the kind of thing that’s fun for a little while as recreation and dreadful if you have to do it for a long time as part of your job.

So, then, the heart of the matter: what was Shah trying to experience at the two final save points?

Deep Dive MH370 #22: The Hacking of 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.

Part of the process of figuring out the mystery of MH370 is finding explanations for the seemingly inexplicable things that happened. Part two is trying to verify whether those explanations hold water.

Today we revisit a topic that we explored in depth back in Episode 10, “The Vulnerability,” in which we talked about an idea that Victor Iannello and I have both worked on—namely, that MH370 had an unsual vulnerability that would have allowed a sophisticated attacker on board the plane alter the data in its satellite communications system so that when investigators looked at the data later they would think the plane went south when it really went north. (If you’re interested in learning the details of the theory, I’ve posted a précis here.)

I’ve been thinking about this idea for a long time. There was even a whole episode of the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” about it. But it’s taken this podcast to spur me to do something I wish I had done a long time ago, which is to seek out the opinion of cybersecurity professionals. From the perspective of someone whose job it is to assess potential hacking vulnerabilities, does it seem like MH370 had one?

I was able to tap the expertise of someone who really knows his stuff, Ken Munro, the founder of Pen Test Partners in the UK. As the name implies, Ken’s company specializes in penetration testing, which means that they probe a client’s computer network for vulnerabilities to see if they can get inside the system. The idea is by imagining all the ways a bad guy could hurt you, you can take steps to prevent them from happening. Though his skills are applicable in every corner of IT, Ken specializes in aviation. Recently he and his team were able to a real 747 that wasn’t being used and borrow it for a bit to test it for security vulnerabilities (and found some interesting ones).

I figured if anyone could tell whether a proposed vulnerability is plausible or not, it would be Ken.

I sent Ken my write-up of the idea and then asked him what he thought about it. We had a fascinating discussion, which you can watch in the YouTube video above. The take-home for me was his assessment of my proposed vulnerability: “Technically, it stacks up…is it possible? Yes.”