Deep Dive MH370 #31: Season 1 Finale

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.

We’ve been making this weekly podcast for eight months now, and it feels like we could literally go on forever. But having come this far, we’ve come to feel that the most productive way forward will be to take a pause, collect our breath, and consider how best to press forward. So we’ve decided to use this episode to mark an end of Season One. We’re going to rest and regroup for a spell before coming back with a freshly conceived Season Two.

[A practical note: while we’re on hiatus, I’m going to pause paid subscriptions, so that people on monthly plans won’t get charged until we return, and people with yearly plans will have their subscription period extended.]

At heart, our core motivating belief is that this is a profoundly important case and we want to do everything in our power to help the public understand it. So today we’re going to talk about six major advancements that we think we’ve made towards that goal over the last 30 episodes.

Before I do that, though, a quick sidenote: Over the past week, I was delighted to be invited onto “avgeek” podcast Next Trip Network. Hosts Doug and Drew invited me on to talk about both MH370 and the latest crisis at Boeing so I encourage anyone interested in these topics to check that out.

And now, onward to the six big things from Season 1:

1. The Deep Dive Approach

We started Episode 1 by outlining what we thought was correct way to try to solve the mystery of MH370: by engaging holistically with the full range of evidence and examining every aspect of it as deeply as necessary. We contrasted this approach with the way that the story had been dealt with by the media over the past decade, which had been grounded in shallow understanding of the topic and fragmentary analysis of the evidence. This led to a broad swathe of the public adopting what had come to be seen as the common-sense theory, that the flight’s captain, Zaharie Ahmed Shah, had hijacked his own plane to commit mass-murder suicide. This theory, though seemingly simple and parsimonious, actually suffers from some grave weaknesses.

The too-quick adoption of a faulty theory relates to the “local minima” problem in machine learning. If we think of solving a problem as similar to a ball rolling down a mountain, it won’t reach is optimal endpoint — a complete explanation — if it gets caught in a little valley halfway down. The problem is that human nature leads us to cling to a theory that seems reasonably good and resist any further information that might lead us to doubt it. Part of the challenge of solving MH370 is to avoid the siren lure of a good-enough explanation by maintaining an open, questioning skeptical mindset.

The “local minima” problem isn’t unique to MH370 — it’s why so much truly delusional thinking has taken root throughout the information ecosystem — but if we figure out how to overcome it here perhaps we can apply the same techniques elsewhere.

2. The Reboot

A major goal of this podcast has been to highlight the problem of the SDU reboot, which we feel is the crux of the whole MH370 mystery. Not only is it profoundly difficult to explain, but it is the source of the data that tells us everything we know about the plane’s last six hours of flight. The consensus view that Zaharie took the plane has tended to minimize or overlook this problem entirely.

In Episode 30 we pointed out that two viral MH370 videos fell into this trap and we enlisted the help of Juan Browne to understand how we should be thinking about it. In short, the reboot is deeply problematic and needs to be understood as a major flaw in the southern hypothesis.

3. The Seabed Search Failure

.Once Inmarsat scientists figured out what the BFO data was telling them, they were confident that they had figured out where the plane went. The math was complicated, but its significance could not have been plainer. They had figured out where the plane had gone, they just needed to go look there and find it.

Yet when that area indicated by that math was searched, the plane wasn’t there. Amazingly, this absence is seen as unremarkable by many who are convinced that the plane went south. We explained in Episode 26 why its significance shouldn’t be overlooked.

4. The Debris Gap

This was a big one and we spent a couple of episodes building up to it. A major boost to our understanding came from our interview with esteemed marine biologist Jim Carlton in Episode 20. The conclusion that we reached is shocking, significant, and irrefutable: there is a yearlong gap between the disappearance of the plane and the first evidence that any of these pieces was in the water. This seems flatly impossible—until you take into account our next major advancement.

5. The Vulnerability

This I think was really the crowning achievement of Season 1. I’ve talked in the past about the possibility that the Inmarsat data had been spoofed, but for the first time we had cybersecurity professionals Ken Munroe and Todd Humphries saying that yes, there really is reason to think that MH370 could have been hacked, and we need to start taking that possibility seriously.

6. Secret Russian Ties

Another discovery that you won’t learn about anywhere else is the revelation that the man who found most of the pieces of MH370 debris — Blaine Alan Gibson —not only had deep and long-standing ties to Russia, but he lied and obfuscated about those connections. 

Now, you may well disagree with the idea that the plane was hijacked by third-party attackers and taken north — the view that I have espoused — but no matter what your preferred theory may be, it has to deal with these facts of the case that we have laid out. 

LOOKING AHEAD

As we pause to collect our breath and plan out the season to come, there are a whole bunch of things that we know we want to cover, but we also want to keep an open mind about what listeners, viewers and readers would like to hear. We’ve always intended this podcast to be a conversation, not a one-way data dump, so we’re keen to get your input about what we should cover as well as to hear your insights, ideas, corrections, and technical tips. Tell us about what you thought was good about the season, any improvements you’d like to see.

Among the things people have asked for so far, and that are high on our list to cover in Season 2:

• Weighing on other theories, like the shootdown theory Florence de Changy describes in her book “The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370.”
• Looking into the backgrounds of the Russians on the flight.
• Getting into more detail on the cybersecurity vulnerability of MH370.
• Talking to relatives of the missing passengers and crew.
• Exploring how the geopolitical situation has change since MH370, and because of it.
• In general, bringing in more experts to shine a light on the key aspects of MH370 to try to gain a deep, holistic understanding of the facts of the case and what they mean.

MH370 is in so many ways a microcosm of the world we live today, and by understanding its causes and effects we can better understand how to navigate a complex and sometimes dangerous world.