It was not, as they say in the space-launch business, nominal. Four minutes into Thursday’s launch of the giant SpaceX Starship, the unmanned rocket blew up at an altitude of 18 miles. The 390-foot-high launch vehicle, the largest and most powerful anyone has ever attempted to launch into space, has long been a lynchpin of Elon Musk’s ambitions to someday colonize Mars, and its failure interrupted what had been a remarkable string of successes for SpaceX. Yet, as the fireball ballooned across the sky the mood on the ground was anything but somber, as the crowd that had gathered to watch erupted in whoops and cheers. “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” Musk tweeted in the aftermath. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”
When news broke in 2014 that a Malaysia Airlines 777 had gone missing, no one imagined that, nine years later, we still wouldn’t know what became of flight MH370.
It once looked like closure was imminent. Soon after the plane vanished from radar screens, scientists at the UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat announced they had found recorded signals automatically transmitted from the plane. By using some complicated mathematics, they were able to work out where the plane must have gone into the remote southern Indian Ocean.
They turned over their findings to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which was entrusted with the search because the flight’s presumed end point was within Australia’s marine jurisdiction.
All that remained was for ships to scan the seabed and collect the wreckage. Yet when the seabed was scanned in the area the scientists had calculated, the plane wasn’t there. Still optimistic, officials expanded the search area. But it wasn’t there either. Finally, they threw in the towel.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, a previously unknown private company came along and continued the search on their own dime. Still no plane. In the end, an area the size of Great Britain was scanned but the plane was nowhere to be found.
In the years that followed, the world mostly forgot about MH370. But not everyone. For the family members of the disappeared, the nightmare has never ended. They remain stuck in a shadowland, unable to grieve or to hope, as several of them compellingly describe in the recent Netflix documentary MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, which I was a part of.
But it’s not just the family members for whom we need to solve this jumbo-sized mystery. The flying public need to know they can get on a plane and not vanish. We can’t close the books on MH370. We must begin again, from square one, and persevere until we find the answer. If science can find a Higgs boson, it can find a 70m-long airplane.
The question is where to start, and the answer comes down to the issue of why the search has failed so far. Did the official investigation just get unlucky? Or did they make a big mistake?
Alongside the tarmac at the Pontoise Aerodrome on the outskirts of Paris stands a sleekly modern building the size of a coffee shop with floor-to-ceiling windows. This is the Re.Invent Air Mobility test bed: Europe’s first flying-taxi airport, or vertiport. To mark its inauguration in November, a shiny white electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft with an armature of 18 whizzing rotors lifted up, flew around under the guidance of its test pilot and then touched down again. With a little luck, a network of sites like this will anchor the world’s first commercial flying-taxi service, shuttling passengers between Paris’s international airports and the venues of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
Or maybe a lot of luck. The Volocopter Volocity 2X flown at the ceremony in November is certified to fly only on an experimental basis. The entire vertiport plan relies on the aircraft achieving full certification, which would make it the first eVTOL to be certified to carry passengers anywhere in the world. “It’s on the ambitious side of what is possible,” says Duncan Walker, co-founder and chief executive officer of Skyports, the UK-based company that’s developing the project with Groupe ADP, the operator of Paris’s international airports.
A lot of people who watched the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” have written me with questions. I asked my friend Sarah Wynter, star of the hit show “24,” to discuss some of the ones that have gotten asked the most. This is a new format for me; in the past I’ve mostly explained my ideas through writing, but I thought that people who came to my work via video might prefer that medium. I’m grateful to Sarah for helping me out with her considerably more advanced televisual chops.
Nine years ago, MH370 took off into a clear, moonlit night and flew into the unknown. Somewhere over the South China Sea, 40 minutes into the red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, it disappeared from radar screens. None of the 239 passengers and crew were ever seen again. The conventional thinking is that the pilot had decided to commit mass murder-suicide by crashing into a remote corner of the southern Indian Ocean. But significant aspects of the case remained unexplained, including the plane’s ultimate resting place, and search officials have long since given up trying to determine what happened. Officially, MH370 is a cold case.
The urgency of solving the mystery remains, though. It’s disturbing enough that a state-of-the-art airliner can disappear so completely off the face of the earth; it’s even more troubling that the authorities, armed with hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct a search and self-proclaimed near certainty about where it must have gone, could fail to locate the 200-foot-long aircraft.
I’ve been following the case obsessively from the beginning, appearing on CNN to talk about it and writing about it in this magazine. I dove deep into the evidence for a 2019 book, and then spent several years working with the producers of a three-part Netflix documentary series, which debuts this week. My hope is that, while the passage of time has lessened the public’s interest in the case, it has also dispelled the fog of wild claims, giving us space to consider the evidence with greater clarity. Far from being a dead end, MH370 still offers multiple leads worth investigating. It’s important that we follow them. Continue reading New York: MH370 Is a Cold Case. But It Can Still Be Solved.
Nine years ago, a Malaysian airliner carrying 239 passengers and crew vanished from air traffic control screens over the South China Sea. Search officials were never able to locate the plane or those aboard. For the family members of the disappeared, it was a tragedy all the more painful for remaining unexplained; for investigators, it was a riddle unlike any they had ever encountered.
But the disappearance of MH370 is just the start of the story. Because in the years that have followed, another dimension of the mystery has opened up. It’s become evident that the scant clues available in the case have somehow led investigators astray. It isn’t just that we don’t know where the plane is. We don’t know why we don’t know. Continue reading Tudum: Nearly a Decade Later, Why Looking for MH370 Still Matters
When Russ Van Der Werff heard about the Chinese surveillance balloon detected drifting over the US, potentially spying on sensitive installations, he was concerned, naturally. But as vice president for stratospheric solutions at Aerostar, a company that makes high-altitude balloons, he was also kind of psyched. For years Van Der Werff has been working to convince government and commercial customers that Aerostar’s products offer serious advantages as surveillance platforms. It isn’t always easy. “There’s always someone saying, ‘Oh, now the balloon kooks are here,’” he says. “Well, now it looks like other people think it’s a good idea, too.”
For all the furor caused by China’s ill-fated balloon, its turn in the spotlight has been something of a coming-out party for a technology that’s spent the past decade quietly polishing its abilities. “We don’t believe a stratospheric balloon is the be-all and end-all,” Van Der Werff says, “but there are times when it’s a better fit.”
Balloons have been used for military surveillance since 1794, when France deployed one during its war with Austria. Both sides used them during the American Civil War, and the US Navy used blimps to hunt Nazi submarines during World War II. But the development of airplanes and high-altitude spy planes made lighter-than-air craft seem quaint, and the US Navy retired its last airship in 1962.
On February 15, 2023 Netflix released the trailer for its three-part documentary series about the as-yet unsolved disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which will debut on March 8, 2023. I participated quite extensively in the years-long development project, and I think it’s the most detailed and thoughtful documentary on the topic to date.
You can read more about the production at Tudum, Netflix’s companion website.
On February 13, 2023 I went on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” to talk with Brian about my New York magazine article “Understanding the UFO War” and a few other things. It was my sixth time visiting the program.
On Sunday at 7.43 p.m. EST, as 100 million Americans were watching the Philadelphia Eagles pull ahead of the Kansas City Chiefs in the second quarter of Super Bowl LVII, Air Force general Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command, told reporters on a briefing call that he could not rule out the possibility that the object U.S. fighters had just shot down — the third in three days — had come from outer space. When asked “Have you ruled out aliens or extraterrestrials?,” VanHerck replied, “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.”
To a public long habituated to the idea that the military has for decades hidden and lied about its knowledge of alien visitors, the statement sounded close to an outright acknowledgement that the big ET cover-up is real and finally coming undone. But as much as we want to believe “the truth is out there,” what’s actually going on behind the military’s new campaign against unidentified flying objects is something quite different, though mysterious and scary in its own way. Continue reading New York: Understanding the UFO War
