Jeff Wise – Page 5 – science journalism

Deep Dive MH370 #24: Breakthrough Part 1

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.

Over the course of this episode and the next, we’re going to reveal a major break in the case: new data that upends the conventional understanding of MH370. It’s the first significant break since the final report in 2017, and it’s a doozy.

But before we do that, we have to set the stage. For the data to have meaning, you have to understand its context.

What we’re going to be talking about has to do with a method of dating events that occurred in the past. It’s similar in a way to carbon dating, in which scientists use the radioactive decay of an isotope of carbon to determine how long ago something died. Or dendochronology, which uses patterns in tree ring growth to allow scientists to identify the time period during which a piece of timber grew.

To set ourselves up for the big reveal, we’re going to explain how this methodology works, and why we can consider it as a robust and rigorous method to determining how long a process has lasted.

Then in our next episode, on the 10th anniversary of MH370’s disappearance, we’re going to reveal the new evidence that is going to change our understanding of the case, explain what it means, and talk about its repercussions.

Deep Dive MH370 #23: The Flight Simulator

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.

In the months after the disappearance of MH370, Malaysian police searched for any clues that might suggest that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was the culprit. This would have been the simplest explanation for why the Boeing 777 suddenly went electronically dark and pulled a U-turn forty minutes into its flight, and scarcely a minute after Shah’s voice was heard over the radio calmly telling air traffic controllers “Good night, Malaysia 370.” But to their chagrin, the evidence was slim. Zaharie had left no note. His family and friends had noticed no sign of mental disturbance. There was no evidence of political or religious extremism or of marital discord. He was under no financial pressure. He just didn’t fit the profile of someone who would kill hundreds of innocent people and take his own life in the process.

The police did find, however, a single piece of evidence pointing at Shah. In his home they found a hard drive that contained a flight simulation program as well as data points created when he saved simulated flights. Six data points recorded on February 2, 2014, were of particular interest. It looked like they came from a single 777 flight that took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, went up the Malacca Strait, passed the tip of Sumatra, then turned south and wound up with zero fuel over the remote southern Indian Ocean. This route so uncannily resembled the flight path deduced from MH370’s radar track and then satcom symbols that it was taken by many as smoking-gun evidence that Shah had practiced absconding with the plane. Some even believe that the flight-sim files could offer clues as to where to find the plane. (Indeed, the discovery of the flight sim files was one of the reasons that the authorities shifted the surface search area in mid-April 2014.)

The final two save points deserve special attention. They are located just 2 nautical miles apart in the far southern Indian Ocean. In both data files the plane has zero fuel and zero engine thrust. In the first, the plane is at 37,651 feet and flying at approximately 198 knots indicated airspeed, which is close to the speed recommended in the 777 Flight Crew Operating Manual in the event a plane loses both engines. In the second, the plane is flying much the same way but the altitude has manually adjusted to 4000 feet. In both cases the plane is actually in a climb. The fact that the plane is gaining altitude in both cases is consistent with a pilot who is hand-flying the airplane and so unable to prevent temporary departures from ideal speed and glideslope. In other words, as the plane gets going too fast he pulls the nose up, and if it starts going too slow he puts the nose down. It’s difficult and requires constant attention–the kind of thing that’s fun for a little while as recreation and dreadful if you have to do it for a long time as part of your job.

So, then, the heart of the matter: what was Shah trying to experience at the two final save points?

Deep Dive MH370 #22: The Hacking 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.

Part of the process of figuring out the mystery of MH370 is finding explanations for the seemingly inexplicable things that happened. Part two is trying to verify whether those explanations hold water.

Today we revisit a topic that we explored in depth back in Episode 10, “The Vulnerability,” in which we talked about an idea that Victor Iannello and I have both worked on—namely, that MH370 had an unsual vulnerability that would have allowed a sophisticated attacker on board the plane alter the data in its satellite communications system so that when investigators looked at the data later they would think the plane went south when it really went north. (If you’re interested in learning the details of the theory, I’ve posted a précis here.)

I’ve been thinking about this idea for a long time. There was even a whole episode of the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” about it. But it’s taken this podcast to spur me to do something I wish I had done a long time ago, which is to seek out the opinion of cybersecurity professionals. From the perspective of someone whose job it is to assess potential hacking vulnerabilities, does it seem like MH370 had one?

I was able to tap the expertise of someone who really knows his stuff, Ken Munro, the founder of Pen Test Partners in the UK. As the name implies, Ken’s company specializes in penetration testing, which means that they probe a client’s computer network for vulnerabilities to see if they can get inside the system. The idea is by imagining all the ways a bad guy could hurt you, you can take steps to prevent them from happening. Though his skills are applicable in every corner of IT, Ken specializes in aviation. Recently he and his team were able to a real 747 that wasn’t being used and borrow it for a bit to test it for security vulnerabilities (and found some interesting ones).

I figured if anyone could tell whether a proposed vulnerability is plausible or not, it would be Ken.

I sent Ken my write-up of the idea and then asked him what he thought about it. We had a fascinating discussion, which you can watch in the YouTube video above. The take-home for me was his assessment of my proposed vulnerability: “Technically, it stacks up…is it possible? Yes.”

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?