Category: MH370

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

William Langewiesche is a titan among aviation journalists. He has covered, in depth, some of the most important air disasters of our time for outlets such as the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He also has extensive experience as a professional pilot. His credibility on the subject of aviation is, in a word, unmatched. So when he turned his hand to the greatest aviation mystery of our time — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — there was every reason to hope that he would bring some clarity, at last, to a story fogbound in confusion.

The 10,000 word Atlantic cover story posted on June 17, however, did not accomplish that. Langewiesche writes evocatively, and he wrangles a mountain of information, but he falls victim to a siren temptress: the yearning for a concise and reasonable solution to a deep mystery.

“The simple story is usually the right one,” Langewiesche told me, during one of the many conversations we had while he researched the project. Having immersed myself in the technical arcana of this story for more than five years — first as a CNN contributor, then as a freelancer for New York, Popular Mechanics, and other outlets — I tried to show him that no simple answer can be made to fit the thicket of contradictory evidence that has grown since MH370 vanished on March 8, 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. As the saying goes, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” In the case of MH370, Langewiesche arrives at a solution that requires ignoring or dismissing whole categories of evidence.

It’s not a new solution. Langewiesche hitches his wagon to what has become the default, commonsense explanation, the one which the international authorities responsible for the search have implicitly held — the captain did it. This is a reasonable first pass at a theory of MH370. Since the plane was clearly taken by someone who knew what they were doing, and the only other person locked in the cockpit was the inexperienced first officer Fariq Abdul Hamid, then it must have been Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah who purposefully turned the plane around and flew it off into the darkness until it ran out of fuel and crashed in the remote ocean. Case closed.

Ah, but already we run into problems. Continue reading OneZero: The Mystery Behind the Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight Isn’t Solved Yet

In the immediate aftermath of the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, Western observers quickly reached a consensus. Rogue separatists in eastern Ukraine, they concluded, had gotten their hands on a stolen Buk missile launcher and had fired at what they erroneously believed to be a Ukrainian military transport. 

As the Guardian reported five days later,

A press conference was held this afternoon by the US office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), at which select reporters were briefed on US intelligence with regard to MH17, …  The briefing underlined the theory espoused by most of a senior official at the briefing, and by most analysts since plane first crashed: rebels “most likely shot down the plane by mistake”.

But as new investigative reports make clear, that narrative was false. The Buk missile launcher that downed MH17 was not in the possession of rebel militiamen but belonged to a regular Russian Army unit. The operation was overseen by Russian military intelligence, the GRU. It was not “blind,” as many assumed from the fact that it was dispatched alone to Ukraine, but was operating within the air defense umbrella of the Russian army. It was manned with a trained Russian crew. 

The Buk is a powerful weapon that is capable of singehandedly starting a war, as we’ve seen recently in the Persian Gulf. In the course of their training it is drilled into crews’ heads that above all else they are not to fire it without an order from a superior officer. Hence, the Russian mililtary heirarchy bears chain-of-command responsibility for the shootdown, and this responsibility reaches all the way to the Kremlin. The “rogue militiaman” narrative is a fiction peddled by the Russian military, and its near-universal uptake by Western pundits is a case study of Russian skill in controlling the world media narrative.

There were two main reasons why experts believed that rogue militiamen had made a mistake. The first is that the rebel commander, Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, had made a statement on social media to the effect that “we” had shot down a military transport—and once it became widely understood that what had been shot down had in fact been a commercial airliner, the post looked hastily removed. It looked very much like Girkin had removed the post because it was embarrassed. The idea that someone would deliberately post something incriminating, for the sake of obscuring an even more incriminating reality, implied a level of cunning that few at that time were willing to credit—never mind that Strelkov was not really a rebel commander but a GRU officer.

The second reason that people were bamboozled by the “rogue militiamen” story was that truth did not match their conception of how the world was supposed to work. Surely, they imagined, a major nuclear power would not simply blow up a jet carrying hundreds of foreign civilians. What would the motive be? What benefit accrued to them? The fact is, sometimes people do things that are hard to understand. To this day, we don’t really know why Russia would deliberately destroy MH17, or what possible connection it might have to the hijacking of MH370.

But thanks to the work of the JIT and Bellingcat, we now know in great detail exactly how they pulled of the former act, and the circumstantial evidence for the former will only continue to grow.

The upshot for me isn’t that the West is facing an adversary who is willing to kill large numbers of civilians in the pursuit of unknown ends. It is that this adversary has shown itself capable of utterly baffling the Western intelligentsia who under normal circumstances would be responsible for organizing the societal response to this threat.

As the kids would say, we’ve been pwned.

After reading my book a journalist with the UK’s Daily Star newspaper, David Rivers, reached out to the daughter of passenger Sergei Deineka, Liza Deineka, whose social media postings I quoted. He published her response in a story today.

As you may recall, just 11 day after her father and all the other passengers aboard MH370 had effectively been declared dead by the Malaysian prime minister, Liza posted a photo of herself with her father on Instagram with the comment, “Happy Birthday, Daddy.” Several friends added comments with their own well-wishes. One wrote, “With the birthday boy! Let everything always be good for him,” followed by a string of emojis: a blushing, smiling face; a gift wrapped with a bow; a noisemaker; confetti; a toy balloon; a bow. “Thank you,” Liza responded, with a kissy-face emoji.

I found this exchange startling because signals transmitted from MH370 suggested that the plane was hijacked to Russia. Since Deineka and Chustrak were former Soviet Army veterans who happened to be sitting right under the SDU, they seemed top suspects as potential hijackers. Of course, if they took the plane and flew it to Kazakhstan, they would not be dead as commonly assumed, but alive. And Liza’s social media posts (both here and elsewhere) seemed to be saying just that.

I long ago reached out directly to Chustrak and Deineka’s families but had been told they didn’t wish to speak to me. Rivers, however, had better luck. After he contacted her and asked about my theory she responded with a statement. The translation reads:

Since March 8, 2014, I have not seen or heard (from) my dad. The evidence is that he is not dead, so all I can do is hope for the best.
I am very sorry people want to discuss and condemn the emotions of people who have a missing person missing. I don’t agree with many in this article.
Starting with answers, ending the reasons why my dad flew this way. They flew to Beijing to get a visa.
No plane wreckage was found, so I can’t be sure that they crashed. All I can do is hope that people could be saved.
Unfortunately, so far no one has given us reliable information about what happened to the plane and the people in it.”

A couple of things about this statement struck me as remarkable. Continue reading MH370 Passenger’s Daughter: “The Evidence is That He is Not Dead” UPDATED

Ed Dentzel is the host of the missing persons program, Unfound. He’s covered over 120 disappearances including Flight 370. However, before devoting his life to helping missing persons families, he was the Stage Manager for “The World’s Greatest Magic Show” at the Greek Isles in Las Vegas from 2005 to 2008. While there he worked with more than 50 magicians, helping them create and hone new tricks.

“Magicians don’t go on stage with a new trick until it’s flawless,” he told me. “Sometimes it means months and months of choreography, lighting changes, equipment changes, costume changes, all in an effort to make sure the audience can’t figure out how the trick works. I got paid lots of overtime while helping them find perfection.”

I asked him: given his experience in devising magic tricks, what does he think of the idea I laid out in The Taking of MH370 that the disappearance could best be thought of a stage magic–does the disappearance match with the way a magic trick would be crafted? This is an edited version of the reply he sent me.

I do see a lot of similarities. And I think you’ve touched upon a few of those qualities without possibly knowing it.

First, every magic trick is tailored to the environment in which it will take place. In other words, there’s a reason at a child’s birthday party you don’t see a magician cutting a woman in half. Why? Because to do that trick, the audience can’t be “on top of” the magician. If the audience is too close, then the trick is exposed. Also in other words, the simpler the trick, the more it can travel from a stage, to a convention room, to a home. Card tricks are probably the best known of this kind.

How does that relate to Flight 370? Well, if things happened the way you’ve written, the “trick” couldn’t have been performed over the USA at noon on a Wednesday. Why? Other jets would see Flight 370 leaving its path. People on the ground would see it. Military and civilian radar would see it.  Instead, these hijackers picked the correct venue for their trick: Southeast Asia, where things are a little lax, especially at night.

Second, every trick has a tell. Not because the magician wants it that way. But because there is no easy way to make things seem possible that are truly physically impossible. What do I mean? Well, a magician can’t make birds appear out of nowhere if he is naked on stage. So, her costume/his suit/those pants are not something you’d pick up at the Men’s Warehouse. Those are specially designed clothes for that bird trick. Likewise, in almost every levitation trick out there, there’s a reason the magician drapes a piece of cloth over the entire assistant before she is suspended in the air. Why? Because that’s to cover the woman sliding into the table she is lying on, and what the cloth is really covering as it goes into the air is a wire frame suspended by wires. But, to the audience–the magician’s clothes, the draping of the assistant, etc. appears to be very natural and unassociated with the trick itself, even though it is.  Maybe the best example is when David Copperfield walked through the Great Wall of China. Great trick. Yet, the tell was right in front of everyone the whole time . . . why exactly did he use the same platform and shrouding on one side of the Wall, then the other? You mean a rich guy like that couldn’t afford platforms for both sides. Well . . . it was because he was hiding in the platform and thus got carried by his assistants from one side of the Wall to the other.

How does that relate to Flight 370? Well, it may be that the SDU cutting out and coming back on is that “tell.” And you’ve kind of explained it as such. To seemingly everyone else in aviation, this is just some natural thing that occurred. To you, it’s the “tell” that a “trick” was taking place. And like the magic tricks which need the special costume or the draping of the assistant, the taking of Flight 370 couldn’t have happened without the SDU going off then on again. Continue reading MH370 As Stage Magic

[Note: Today is the last in a series of excerpts I’m posting from my new ebook, “The Taking of MH370.” There’s a lot more in there, but I want to get some of the major findings out behind a paywell in order to further the public discussion.]

If the hijacking of MH370 was a Russian plot, and MH370 flew to Kazakhstan, then the pieces of debris collected in the western Indian Ocean must have been planted by the Russians in an effort to support the misleading southern narrative. Blaine Alan Gibson had demonstrated an uncanny knack for locating and publicizing this debris. Was Gibson somehow connected to Russia? 

Ever since he’d first crossed my radar screen, half a year before he found “No Step,” I’d struggled to understand this eccentric character. In the media, he consciously styled himself after Indiana Jones, with a brown fedora and a brown leather jacket. 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 (more shades of Indiana Jones) 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.

I wondered how, exactly, he was able to support such an exotic lifestyle. He described himself as a retired lawyer, based in Seattle, who inherited the money to fund his search after his mother passed away. He said that he’d started watching the MH370 coverage on CNN and gotten obsessed with the case while packing up her belongings. The inheritance must have been a tidy sum for a 60-year-old man, with decades of expenses ahead of him, to have the financial freedom to travel the world full-time. Yet his background did not suggest lavish wealth.  Continue reading Who Is Blaine Alan Gibson?

[Note: In yesterday’s exerpt we looked at possibility that a component of the Inmarsat data had been hacked. If that were the case, then the plane went north instead of south. The portion of the Inmarsat data that is much harder to hack is itself sufficient to calculate the route along which the plane traveled. The endpoint of this route is Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan lacks the technical chops to carry out an operation of this sophistication, but it is a close ally to Russia, which would have that capability. But were there any Russians on board? I address that question in today’s excerpt from “The Taking of MH370.”]

There was only one Russian aboard MH370, a 43-year-old businessman from Irkutsk named Nikolai Brodsky. Brodsky was sitting in business class seat 3K, approximately 12 feet from the E/E bay hatch. Back in economy class were two Ukrainians of Russian ethnicity, Sergei Deineka and Oleg Chustrak. The men, both 45, were sitting together in row 27, almost directly underneath the SDU. I was unable to find anything about the Ukrainians from online news reports, but Brodsky had received some coverage in the Russian press. His wife, Elena, gave several interviews to local media. In one, she calmly indicated that her husband was still alive. “He’ll be back,” she told the Komsomolskaya Pravda, “and he will tell all.” I started putting out feelers to find freelance investigators in Russia and Ukraine.

I hired a freelance investigator in Irkutsk who was able to interview one of Nikolai Brodsky’s friends and three of his relatives. From their accounts she was able to assemble a rough outline of his life.

Born in 1971 in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Brodsky moved with his family to the eastern province of Yakutia when he was eight, and then returned to Irkutsk when he was 16. He attended a local polytechnic but was a poor student. When he was 18, his girlfriend Nadia became pregnant, so they married and moved to Yakutia along with Brodsky’s parents. The marriage was unhappy, however. Nadia left and returned to Irkutsk. Brodsky followed, but the marriage ended soon after.

Brodsky subsequently moved to a small town further north where he worked for a timber-products company. For a time he attempted to continue his education via correspondence course, but the school eventually expelled him for poor performance. Then he hooked up with a future oligarch, Vitaly Mashchitsky, and his fortunes improved dramatically. While still in his 20s, Brodsky founded a wood-products company whose operations ultimately extended to three cities in Siberia and the Far East. Continue reading The Russian Passengers Aboard MH370