Jeff Wise

Within weeks after the disappearance of MH370, many theories had been proposed, but one in particular had come to the fore: that one of the pilots had seized control of the plane and flown it on a prolonged and sophisticated murder-suicide mission into the southern Indian Ocean. While there have been a handful of known cases where pilots have flown their own plane into the ground, no one had ever before carried out a sophisticated, complicated, and aggressive plan to abscond with an airplane only to spend seven hours patiently waiting to die. But there seemed no other way to easily explain the sequence of events that emerged from the Inmarsat data. What would such a person be like, psychologically? What kind of traces would they leave behind in their social media, in their personal photographs and work records, and in the memories of those who knew them? In today’s episode we turn our attention to Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid and take stock of the evidence. 

From the first day MH370 went missing, it was the subject of an intense surface search. Planes, ships and satellites scoured millions of square kilometers of ocean. Not a single piece was ever spotted. In today’s episode we talk about how it went down, and what we might conclude from it. We also touch on a strange coda to the search, that involved an attempt to find the plane by listening for audible pings from the plane’s black boxes.

As we’ve previously discussed, at first everyone thought that the plane had crashed in the South China sea, under its original route to Beijing. At first this was a Search and Rescue mission, as authorities hoped that the plane might have ditched à la Miracle in the Hudson and some survivors could be rescued. But as time went by hope quickly faded.

On March 24, 2014, the Malaysian Prime minister made a shocking announcement: using a new kind of mathematical analysis, scientists at the British satellite communications company Inmarsat had determined conclusively that MH370 had flown into a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean. Because there are no islands in the area, there was no possibility that anyone on the plane could have survived. Therefore, all 239 passengers and crew must be dead. It was a stunningly sweeping conclusion to reach based entirely on a kind of mathematics that no one in the outside world knew the details of. But was it correct?

Up until that time it had seemed to me that the plane more likely went north. It seemed implausible that someone sophisticated and motivated enough to steal a plane so aggressively would do it just to die a protracted death. In fact I’d written twoarticles for Slate making that case. At the time, most people already thought the plane probably went south, so my editor had only let me write the articles after I’d promised that I would write an apology article if I turned out to be wrong. I thought it was worth it, so I said yes.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve launched a podcast to delve into the evidence underpinning the greatest (and, I’d argue, most important) aviation mystery of all time. Andy Tarnoff and I are steadily working through the disappearance, deciphering what happened step-by-step. We’re currently on our third episode, which is the first to be both a video and an audio podcast. You can find all the episodes on our show page.