Jeff Wise

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.

Continue reading 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.

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. 

Continue reading 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.

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.

Continue reading 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.

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?

Continue reading 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.

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.”

Continue reading 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.

Ever since Blaine Alan Gibson first crossed my radar screen, half a year before he found “No Step,” I’ve struggled to understand this eccentric character. In the media, he styled himself after Indiana Jones, always wearing a brown fedora. He portrayed himself as an inveterate adventurer and world traveler who before MH370 had pursued any number of quixotic international quests, including an attempt to find the lost ark of the covenant and an expedition to the site of the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. His was a wonderfully appealing persona. After I wrote about him in New York magazine, TV producers started getting in touch with me, hoping I could hook them up with him to pitch reality shows about his life.

He quickly became a central feature of the MH370 story, ubiquitous in media coverage the crash.

After receiving a whirlwind of press attention for “No Step,” his first find, Gibson traveled to Ile Ste Marie, Madagascar, in June accompanied by a crew from France 2 TV. There, accompanied by a film crew, he found yet another piece of aicraft debris.

If it’s remarkable to find a piece of MH370 with TV cameras rolling, imagine doing it twice.

Later that year Gibson was back on Ile Ste Marie, this time with a delegation of MH370 family members and a documentary crew. On the morning of December 8, the group split up and spent the day combing separate areas. The camera crew followed Blaine. Having driven along one stretch of shore on an ATV and found nothing, he turned around and was making his way back when he came upon a piece of debris at the edge of the wet sand. A wave had evidently deposited it within the few minutes since he had passed. “Appears to be Malaysia 370 interior cabin debris,” he declared.

I found it quite extraordinary that a purported piece of MH370 apparently washed up on the shore within half an hour of Blaine’s passing by the spot. The ocean is vast, the number of pieces of MH370 necessarily limited. Bear in mind that Madagascar alone has a coastline of 2300 miles. Consider mainland Africa, the other islands dotted around the region.

The odds of finding a piece of the plane on any given stretch of sand is very small; the odds of finding something that washed ashore within the last half hour must be infinitesmal.

Continue reading Deep Dive MH370 #21: The Mayor of MH370