Jeff Wise – Page 4 – science journalism

Deep Dive MH370 #21: The Mayor 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.

Deep Dive MH370 #20: Lepas Don’t Lie

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.

Thanks to our Episode 20 sponsor, Finnished MKE. More information here: https://www.instagram.com/finnished_mke/

Last episode we talked about the surge of MH370 debris that started turning up in the western Indian Ocean in early 2016, and how search officials were optimistic that all this new data would help them understand where the plane went down. We focussed on drift modeling, and how the timing and location of the finds could have helped pin down the location of the crash through a process called reverse drift modeling. But to their surprise, Australian scientists couldn’t get their drift models to explain how the flaperon went all the way from the 7th arc to La Réunion Island in just 16 months. Then they obtained a real flaperon from their American counterparts, cut it down to match the damage found on the real MH370 flaperon, and put it in the ocean. They found that it floated high in the water, and the wind pushed it so effectively that when they plugged the new data into their models they found the flaperon now indeed was able to reach La Réunion on time.

Deep Dive MH370 #19: The Impossible Drift

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.

Thanks to our Episode 19 sponsor, Jacob John. His music is available for download here.

If there was one piece of debris, there should have been a lot more. Yet month after month went by without any further discoveries. Then, on February 28, 2016, I received an email from an independent researcher named Blaine Alan Gibson.

Dear Jeff

Please read my post in The Longest Journey [a members-only Facebook discussion group] about the debris my friend and I found in Mozambique. I will be attending the two year commemoration in Kuala Lumpur March 6. I still hope you and I can meet in person soon to discuss MH 370. I am increasingly doubtful about the validity of the Inmarsat data and its interpretation.

Best wishes,

Blaine Gibson

I’d first become aware of Gibson the previous June. Another MH370 researcher who went by the handle Nihonmama had posted a comment on my web page naming Gibson as a retired Seattle lawyer on a self-financed trip around the Indian Ocean region looking for clues about the missing plane. Gibson had just been on a trip to the remote island of Kudahuvadhoo in the Maldives, Nihonmama said, where villagers reportedly had seen a plane in red-and-blue livery fly low overhead the morning after MH370’s disappearance.

New York: ‘I Almost Sound Like a Crazy Person, But I Think It Is a Superconductor’

In theory, science is an entirely rational and transparent undertaking. Scientists gather data, form hypotheses, and then collect more data to find out which hypothesis is correct. That’s the idea, anyway. In practice, real-life science is messy and often opaque. Data can be ambiguous. Scientists can be bull-headed. The process of shifting consensus has always been as much about politics and intellectual fashion as about theory and data. Now throw in social media, fanboy culture, preprint archives, and virality — you have a world that breeds all kinds of oddities that can pop up, disappear, and reemerge like quantum virtual particles. All sorts of wild discoveries are bouncing around the information ecosystem before any peer-reviewed journals are able to sort out whether they’re real. And scientists aren’t even all on the same page as to whether this is a good thing or not.

An iteration of flash-mob science erupted last summer, when Twitter users began hyping the work of a South Korean team that said it had discovered a material that was superconductive at room temperature and pressure. Bolstering the claim was a video showing a chunk of material partially levitating. As we reported at the time, if the findings were replicated, it would have massive practical implications for things like levitating trains and quantum computing.

Then the story collapsed.

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.