Jeff Wise – Page 4 – science journalism

Deep Dive MH370 Episode 18: The Flaperon

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.

At 8.30am on July 29, 2015, on the northeastern shore of Réunion Island, a cleanup crew was working its way along a stretch of pebbly beach when a worker named Johnny Begue spotted an unfamiliar-looking object at the edge of the surf. Roughly rectangular and about six feet long, it somewhat resembled a stubby airplane wing encrusted with marine life.

Soon gendarmes were on the scene, along with local news photographers. The officers put the piece into the back of a Land Rover. Within days it had been packed up, loaded onto an airplane, and flown to France.

The piece was quickly identified as a flaperon, a part of the wing’s trailing edge. The flaperon’s function combines those of a flap, which droop down to allow a plane to fly more slowly on descent to landing, with those of an aileron, which are raised or lowered to cause a plane to turn.

Specifically, this flaperon was identified as coming from the right wing of a Boeing 777. Since the only 777 ever lost at sea was MH370, investigators now had physical evidence to back up what the math had been telling them: the plane had gone into the southern Indian Ocean.

This seemed to be case closed. I wrote a follow-up piece for New York magazine:

“Back in February, I explained in New York how sophisticated hijackers might have infiltrated the plane’s electronic bay in order to spoof the satellite signals and take the plane north to Kazakhstan. MH370 wreckage on the shores of Réunion makes such explanations unnecessary.”

New York: Who Will Rid Us of This Cursed Plane?

When the fuselage of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 ripped open on January 5 as it flew from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California — exposing passengers to howling wind, an up-close-and-personal look at the starry heavens, and an intimate brush with their own mortality — it occasioned a familiar ritual. There was the discovery of even more disturbing flaws in the model, the Boeing 737 Max 9, in the form of loose bolts in multiple other planes. There were professions of remorse from Boeing and not entirely convincing assertions of its commitment to the well-being of its passengers (“Safety is our top priority”). And there were promises of an investigation by regulators: “This incident should have never happened and it cannot happen again,” the Federal Aviation Administration said.

This cycle — shock, regret, vows to do better — has happened before. After the deadly Lion Air crash in 2018, which killed 189 people, Boeing proclaimed, “Safety remains our top priority” — only for another equally deadly 737 Max crash in Ethiopia, which killed 157 people, to prompt the worldwide grounding of all Max planes in 2019. A criminal inquiry resulted in a fine of over $2.5 billion, and while it remains to be seen what will come of a class-action lawsuit filed by the traumatized passengers of Flight 1282, it is clear that even hefty penalties aren’t enough to keep flawed planes from the skies. Although more issues were recorded since the 2019 grounding, including the discovery of hundreds of holes that were drilled incorrectly on the Max’s aft pressure bulkhead, the Max was patched up and cleared to return to service.

As a burgeoning genre of books and documentaries has made clear, Boeing’s problem is not fundamentally a matter of engineering but of culture. For all its claims of putting safety first, the company’s actual priority is to maximize profit and shareholder value. Instead of investing in hiring and nurturing the best employees, or designing and building a new generation of aircraft, Boeing has spent its billions on share buybacks. Like piloting a faulty plane, this kind of strategy works until it doesn’t.

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 17: Strangeness

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.

For this episode, we’re trying something different. Until now we’ve spent each episode diving into a particular aspect of the mystery. This time, we’re pulling back to look at the mystery from a global perspective in order to address the question: What is this case like?

Just as every person has a unique character, a mystery can have a personality of its own, and MH370 certainly does. The dominant feature of that personality is strangeness. Time and again, a piece of evidence emerges which changes what we understand about the case – but then it turns out the evidence itself contains mysteries that themselves need to be elucidated.

In today’s episode, we look at five of the most striking examples of this phenomena. Together, they raise the question: why is the MH370 like this? Is it just a matter of coincidence, or is there some underlying aspect of the case that keeps pulling it toward the unexpected?

New York: Alaska Airlines Inflight Blowout Raises New Doubts About 737 MAX

The boom came just five minutes into the flight, as Alaska Airlines flight 1282 was climbing out from Portland, Oregon en route to Ontario, California. At 5:13 p.m. local time, as the 737 MAX was ascending through 16,000 feet, part of the wall on the left side of the passenger cabin suddenly blew out, taking with it the padding of an unoccupied window seat and ripping the shirt off a young man sitting in the adjacent middle seat. As the pressure in the cabin dropped, air masks dropped. The roar of the slipstream was so deafening that passengers could not hear what flight attendants were saying over the intercom; the stars in the night sky and lights on the ground below could clearly be seen through the gaping hole. “The first thing I thought was, ‘I’m going to die,’”one passenger told the New York Times. The flight crew declared an emergency and returned immediately to Portland International Airport, where it touched down 14 minutes later. A flight attendant reported minor injuries, and the teenager who lost his shirt had red, irritated skin, but otherwise no one was hurt during the incident, and Alaska Airlines was able to book the passengers onward to their destinations on other flights.

While there is still much to learn about the details of the incident, what we know so far is enough to cast another troubling light on the 737 MAX, an aircraft that has already garnered what is inarguably the worst reputation that any new plane has earned in decades, and is likely to raise new questions about the safety culture at Boeing and the competence of its leadership.

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 16: Debris

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.

In our last episode, we talked about the search of the seabed, which started in October 2014. By that time the plane had been missing for 8 months. And while the seabed search was everyone’s best hope for finding the black box and solving the mystery, people hadn’t forgotten about floating debris.

You’ll recall that in the first month after the disappearance, there had been an extremely extensive search of the ocean surface by ships and airplanes from many nations, and they hadn’t spotted anything.

When Australia called off the surface search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on April 28, Prime Minister Tony Abbot explained that “It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk.”

But would the debris really have sunk?

New York: Everyone Could Have Died in the Tokyo Airport Crash. Here’s Why They Didn’t.

It was exactly the kind of disaster scenario that aviation-safety experts have been warning could happen. A pilot, apparently disoriented, taxis his aircraft onto an active runway right into the path of an inbound, heavily loaded airliner. Unable to react in time, the pilot of the landing plane collides head-on into the first plane. The ensuing fireball envelops both aircraft.

Accidents like this, called “runway incursions,” can be extremely dangerous. The deadliest crash in aviation remains a collision between two 747s that took place on a foggy runway in the Canary Islands in 1977, which killed 583 of the 644 people aboard the planes.

It is all the more remarkable, then, that there were no fatalities and just 11 injuries aboard the Japan Airlines A350 that crashed into a Japan Coast Guard Dash 8 at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on Tuesday. The situation aboard the Dash 8 was much worse, killing five of the six crew members aboard.

The fact that the outcome was relatively benign is a testament to the advances in engineering that have been incorporated into the latest generation of airliners, as well as to the safety culture that infuses a top-quality carrier like Japan Airlines. But the remarkable extent to which passengers’ lives were protected — this event merits the word “miracle” as much as Captain Sullenberger’s 2009 landing on the Hudson does — shouldn’t overshadow the profound problems revealed by the fact that the accident occurred at all. Unless there are major changes in protocol and technology, this kind of crash will happen again, quite likely with deadlier results.

New York: Air Travel Is Not Ready for Electronic Warfare

Airway UM688 cuts an invisible path through the air from Samsun, Turkey, on the Black Sea coast down through Basra, Iraq, on the Persian Gulf and is used heavily by airliners traveling from Europe to the Gulf States. One stretch in particular, a 280-mile-long section in northeastern Iraq, has become a hot topic in pilot forums online. Planes passing through experience all kinds of strange system malfunctions.

“What’s happening is that the plane is flying along normally, everything is very chill, very relaxed, you probably have a foot up on the pedestal and you’re doing your crossword. And then, suddenly, either the plane will start to turn or you’ll get a whole bunch of warnings: terrain failure, navigation error, position error,” says Mark Zee, the founder of OpsGroup, an online forum that collects pilots’ reports. “For the crews, the initial reaction is What the hell is going on?” In at least 15 cases, pilots became so confused that they had to ask air-traffic control to tell them which direction to take. In one incident, a business jet nearly passed into Iranian airspace.

Someone, it seems, has been confusing the planes’ navigation systems by transmitting false GPS signals, a technique called “spoofing.” “Commercial aircraft are having their GPS units captured and taken fully under the control of the spoofer,” says Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s eye-opening and unprecedented.”

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 15: Seabed Search

As the southern spring of 2014 approached the search authorities prepared to undertake a search of the seabed where their calculations indicated the plane had gone.

They hired a Dutch marine survey company called Fugro, which dispatched three ships to the area: Fugro Discovery, Fugro Equator and Fugro Supporter.

The area they were going to search had been defined by the probability density function we’ve described earlier. It stretched about 600 miles long and covered water that was about three miles deep.

The logistical and technical challenges of searching this 23,000-square-mile area were enormous. Because it lay so far from land, crews would have to stay out for a month at a time, in a clime that mariners considered to be among the most inhospitable in the world. Here in the fabled “roaring forties” the waves at times reach 50 feet high.

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 14: Another One

Last week we discussed the route the plane would likely have taken had it traveled north. Its endpoint would have been in central Kazakhstan, a client state of Russia. In that context, it’s interesting to note that three men with Russian names were aboard the plane. One was a passenger from Russia, Nikolai Brodsky. The two were two Ukrainians, Sergei Deineka and Oleg Chustrak.

A little online research turned up a fair bit of information about Brodsky. The Russian media contacted his family and interviewed his wife. He seemed like a fairly high-profile guy. He ran a timber company in Irkutsk and was active in a dive club that in the winter cut holes into the frozen surface of Lake Baikal and scuba dived under the ice. The reason that he was on the plane was that his club was on a ten-day drip to go scuba diving in Bali, and he was coming back early. There two different reasons given for why he was coming back early; one was that he’d promised his wife that he’d have dinner with her on March 8, international Women’s Day; the other was that he had to go on a business trip to Mongolia.

There was much less information available at the time about the Ukrainians, as their relatives didn’t want to talk to the media. What we did know was that they had a furniture company called Nika Mebel. Mebel is the Russian word for “Furniture,” the men were joint owners of a furniture factory in Odessa. They didn’t have a store to sell their stuff but they had an online store that had gone live a few months before. There was no explanation given as to why they were on the plane.

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 13: North

We’re back! Andy and I took a week off to catch our breath, and now we’re back on the case. This week we look at where the plane could have gone if it didn’t go into the remote southern Indian Ocean. According to the Inmarsat data, it would have flown to the northwest, but that raises another question: if it flew over mainland Asia, why wasn’t it picked up by anyone’s military radar?

As you’ll recall, when Australian scientists applied the technique of Bayesian inference to the BTO data, they found that it indicated that the plane might have taken one of two flight paths, one to the north, one to the south:

Zooming in on the northern route and rotating: