Uncategorized – Jeff Wise

“Deep Dive: MH370” is Back!

And it has a new name. For Season 2, I’ll be flying solo, the show is rebranded as “Finding MH370,” and I have a new YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/@Jeff_Wise. For a complete rundown of the all the episodes, and to sign up for a free weekly newsletter, visit us at the show page at FindingMH370.com.

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: F35 Fighters Are Supposed to Disappear — Just Not Like This

The U.S. Marine Corps suffered a major embarrassment yesterday when one of the $75 million top-of-the-line fighters, designed to be virtually undetectable to enemy radar, kept flying after its pilot punched out during a “mishap” Sunday afternoon. Evidently whatever had gone wrong wasn’t as bad as the pilot had feared, because the plane kept on flying on autopilot for several more hours — but to where, exactly, the Marines didn’t know, the F-35’s stealth capabilities in this context being a positive hindrance. Search planes flew grid patterns over South Carolina Monday as Joint Base Charleston put out an appeal to the public asking for “any information that may help our recovery teams.” Eventually, the wreckage was located Monday evening in a wooded area about 80 miles north of the base.

This was not the first time an F35 has been lost, in either sense of the word. In 2019, a Japanese F-35 vanished off the coast of Honshu during a training flight; pieces of debris and the pilot’s body were located, but the plane itself was never found. Last January, a U.S. Navy F-35 slid off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson after a botched landing and sank to the bottom. A month later it was successfully recovered from a depth of 12,400 feet. In 2018, the U.S. grounded the entire fleet after an earlier crash in South Carolina. All told, at least half a dozen F-35s have been destroyed in various mishaps, with others severely damaged but repairable.

[Here’s video of a pilot ejecting from an F35 at low altitude shortly before it crashed in Forth Worth, Texas last December]

New York: The Airstocracy: Six things to know about flying with the superrich

It was all quite serene, at first. Out on a gated-off section of taxiway at Geneva Airport in May, a row of private jets (PJs, to fans) gleamed under the warm spring sun: Bombardier Challengers, Dassault Falcons, and Gulfstreams stood in a line beneath the distant verdure of the Alps. The display was part of the European Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition, a yearly confab that brings together manufacturers and service providers with their ultrarich customers in a politically neutral safe space. Velvet ropes and red carpets separated the curious onlookers from the VIPs being escorted aboard to tour the cabins and cockpits with swiveling leather club chairs, walnut veneer, and, in at least one case, a stateroom with an extra-long seat belt stretching across a full-size bed. The vibe was discreet, calm, befitting an environment designed to cosset the fortunate as they wafted through the upper reaches of the stratosphere.

Then, a hubbub of shouting and a rumble of footsteps. A hundred young climate protesters wearing orange vests like airport workers had broken through the fences and were racing toward the aircraft, juking past the employees who were trying to fend them off. Not all the manufacturers’ employees fought with equal vigor. “You really found out where people’s loyalties lay,” one told me later. “Some ran forward, and some cowered.” Amid the confusion, a few protesters managed to handcuff themselves to some of the planes’ landing gear, where they chanted and held signs reading “Private Jets Burn Our Future” and “Fuel Inequality.” In the end, police hauled off the protesters, and the trade show went on, albeit with a slightly shaky, post-traumatic skittishness.

The skirmish encapsulated the tensions that have begun to grip private aviation. At a time when income inequality has reached dizzying extremes, there has never been so much money pouring into an industry that’s become a byword for extreme luxury, nor has flying private enjoyed so much cultural resonance: stealing scenes in Succession and BlackBerry, infiltrating news headlines about Supreme Court justices, inspiring rap lyrics, and obsessing thirsty TikTokers. At the same time, it’s come under withering attack as a proxy for the self-destructive obliviousness of the megarich and become a symbol of how unfair and unsustainable their privilege is. With regulations tightening in several European countries and pressure building for more, it’s entirely possible that private flying’s sudden cultural ascendancy could help pave the way for its ultimate demise.

New York: The Titanic Sub Passengers Probably Died Days Ago

The Coast Guard announced at a press conference on Thursday that debris from the submersible Titan was found on the seafloor near the Titanic, confirming the deaths of the five crew members onboard.

While searching an area of flat seabed approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, a remotely operated vehicle discovered “five major pieces of debris that told us it was the remains of the Titan,” said undersea expert Paul Hanken, including the front end of the pressure hull. “That was the first indication that it was a catastrophic event.”