Selects: The Disappearance of Flight MH370, Part I

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

0:31on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. A man with Down syndrome tries the impossible, the grand slam in turkey hunting. Four 53 hits, we're legal shooting right. And he gives us this one last just, and he pitches off. And when he pitches off, he flies right into the gun barrel. I said to the cameraman, do you have him? He said, shoot him. I said, Justin, shoot. You can download this episode and others from Lines and Tines with Spencer Graves on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our two-part episode on the disappearance of MH370 from back in January 2020.

1:16It is the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation history since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and poor Fred Noonan, which is really saying something. It's astounding that with a decade of exhaustive time and attention, the plane still hasn't been found. Maybe someday when we're mapping the entire seafloor of the Indian Ocean, we'll stumble across it. Who knows? But until then, enjoy this harrowing mystery episode of Stuff You Should Know.

1:48Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:57Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know about one of the most interesting mysteries in modern times. Yeah. Like, it's really tough to get across what a mystery the missing airliner MH370 is. Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. Yeah, and this is going to be a two-parter because it's pretty robust. And boy, hats off to the Grabster. He really put together a lot of great research for this one. He did. I also want to give a huge shout out to one of my journalistic heroes, William Langwash. He wrote something.

2:38He writes in The Atlantic, but he's not just an Atlantic writer. He wrote What Really Happened to Malaysia's Missing Airplane. Big old long article on it. Those are great. And this guy is an aviation expert to begin with. But he's also, if you ever read a Tom Wolfe book or article or whatever, he has a really great knack for making you feel like you're there in the action. Yeah. But then he also has a knack for making you step back and think, how does Tom Wolfe know all this? Was he there? William Langwash is the same way. Yeah. And I will go ahead and recommend that you not, unless you are a very courageous person, read any of his work, especially the stuff about airline disasters, any time around when you're flying.

3:22because he puts you in that plane when it's going down or whatever. He's really, really good at it. So I recommend basically anything Langweiss has written, go read. It's worth it for sure. Yeah, and I think this coupled with the brief times that we've touched on this kind of thing in the past, whether it was D.B. Cooper or Bermuda Triangle, like there's something about aviation disasters and mysteries that are really intriguing to me. Right, yeah. And airline forensics, it's all just super, super interesting. It is. So you talked about airline forensics and that kind of stuff. This is lousy with it.

3:56Yeah. But the reason I was saying why it's tough to overstate like what a mystery MH370 is, it's the only airliner that is considered disappeared, vanished. They know where all the other ones are. They know what happened to all the other ones. It's the only major one that is just where the official investigation said, we don't know. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, in part two, we'll get to a pretty good, well, actually, I think the leading theory comes in this episode, but we kind of think we know, but it's that thing where, like, you can't definitively say. Yeah, you can't say where, and you can't say why.

4:34Right. Yeah, then the why and the where are both really confounding. Yeah. And the reason why air travel in the 21st century is way safer than auto travel is because any time an airliner goes down, everyone in the international community comes together, investigates it. They do so openly. The airline, the airplane manufacturer, everyone involved is expected to tell the truth. Right. And you get it out there and you figure out what went wrong and then you make things safer. And then that makes air travel safer for everybody. They couldn't do this for all sorts of reasons with MH370. And so it's a huge failing among the international community.

5:16Not for lack of trying, but because it's just an asterisk out there. It's the only one. Yeah, and that's why airplanes don't crash as much anymore. I mean, growing up, it's not like it was every other week or anything, but you used to hear about airline crashes enough to where it gave you pause. Right. And you just don't hear about it much anymore. It's true. Thankfully. It's still out there for sure. Yeah, but they seem much more rare than they used to be, kind of like skyjackings. So we'll do our best to put you in the plane. In the passenger seat? Yeah. Can we at least be in business class?

5:53Buckle, sure. Okay. Sure. Were you about to say buckle up? Yeah. Okay. Buckle up, because we're going to take off on March 8th, 2014 in Kuala Lumpur. It's the very beginning of March 8th. The takeoff scheduled for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was scheduled for 1235 a.m. That's right. We're in a Boeing 777-200ER. Yep. And there are 227 fellow passengers aboard, 12th flight crew. Yep. That's a lot of people. Almost about two-thirds of the passengers are Chinese nationals, I believe. There's a bunch of other people from other countries, but the bulk of the people on the plane were from China.

6:38That's right. And it's a late-night flight. It's expected to arrive in Beijing at about 6 o 'clock? 6.30. 6.30 in Beijing time. And it's going to fly over the South China Sea, over the Gulf of Thailand through Laos, Vietnam, and then into China to arrive at Beijing. It didn't actually take off at 1235. They took off at 1242. Not too shabby. Seven minutes, I'm not, like, sitting there rocking in my seat, like, let's go yet, you know. I might not have even noticed. And they take off, and it flies up to 18 ,000 feet. And the Air Traffic Control Center at Kuala Lumpur says, hey, you guys are cleared to go up to 35 ,000 feet, which is cruising altitude for this flight, I think.

7:28That's right. And at this point, at 18 ,000, they switch from the airport's air traffic to Kuala Lumpur Area Control Center. Yeah. And, you know, the reason we're mentioning all these details is because it turns out they're very important. Very important. Yeah, so these are all key. Keep rewinding 15, 30 seconds to get every single detail, okay? Because you're going to need them for the big finish. So four minutes later, like you said, they were cleared to go to 35 ,000. It took them about 15 minutes. And it's here where Captain Zahari, and there were two people on board flying this plane, Captain Zahari and what was the other gentleman's name?

8:07First Officer Fareek Abdul Hamid. Right. And Captain Zahari Ahmad Shah is piloting the plane. First Officer Hamid, this is his last training flight. After this, he'll be fully certified to fly Boeing 777s, which if you're a commercial airline pilot, that's pretty much the peak right there. Yeah, and that's important too because one of them is a very experienced pilot in his 50s. The other one is a brand new kind of greenhorn, and that's going to factor in for sure. Yeah. So like I said, it took about 15 minutes to get to 35 ,000 feet, and this is when the lead pilot radios that Kuala Lumpur Control Center.

8:45It says we're at 35 ,000 feet. Then seven minutes later, he radios again and says, by the way, and this is not me doing him. I don't know what he sounded like. Kuala Lumpur. There you go. This is Captain Zahari. Yeah, everybody sounds like Chuck Yeager. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. So he confirmed again that they were at 35 ,000 feet. And this is where Ed points out that this wasn't some sort of big alarming thing. But what usually happens is you radio in when you leave in altitude, not when you arrive. And you also don't radio in seven minutes later and say, by the way, we're still at 35 ,000 feet.

9:24Still here. Like once you hit it, you're just sort of there that you're cruising altitude. Right. So it wasn't alarming or anything, but it was weird that he made those two radio transmissions. But it was nothing compared to the weirdness that was about to take place. That's right. Shortly after that, I think at 1.19 a.m., Kuala Lumpur Area Control Center. It's like 11 minutes later. Yep. said, hey, MH370, you're about to leave our jurisdiction and enter Ho Chi Minh's jurisdiction. Go ahead and contact Ho Chi Minh Air Traffic Control and let them know you are on with them on this frequency. Yeah.

10:06I mean, if you remember our air traffic control podcast, you're handed off. Like you don't just stick with one air traffic control when you fly around the world. No. You're handed off all along the way whenever you enter the airspace of that whatever district. Precisely. And the way that it's set up is there's not supposed to be any time where you're just flying alone and then you move into the other one. You're going right from one to the other. You want a handoff. So Captain Zahari responded with good night, Malaysian 370. Those are the last words anyone heard from Captain Zahari as far as we know.

10:40And that in and of itself was kind of an odd transmission because typically any airline captain would have replied with the frequency, said the frequency back to confirm that that was the right one. But instead, all he said was good night, Malaysian 370. And very shortly after that, two minutes later, MH370 disappeared from the radar. The moment it showed up on Ho Chi Minh air traffic controls radar screens, it just vanished. Right, without ever having made contact with them via radio frequency. This should have, like, set off alarms with Ho Chi Minh City. And apparently they did notice. Kuala Lumpur didn't notice.

11:24The guy was, they had all this other air traffic to deal with. Yeah, and they were out of their zone at this point. Yep, and he'd said good night. And, you know, everybody knows good night. You can't go back on that. You have to wait until tomorrow to make contact again. so the the kuala lumpur is i don't know about blameless in this but certainly less blameful than um ho chi min and ho chi min noticed that they just disappeared from the screen but it took them a full 18 minutes before they called kuala lumpur and said hey do you know anything about where mh370 is because they kind of vanished from our radar yeah like i don't know the exact process.

12:06In their defense, they were trying to get in touch. It's not like they just said, well, we'll see what happens. They got in touch with another pilot who was nearby in that airspace to contact them. And this pilot reported there was interference and static. I heard mumbling on the other end, but that's the last we heard and we lost connection. Right. We're not even sure that he was talking to the right people. Yeah. So, I mean, they were trying to get in touch, but you're right. I think like sooner than 18 minutes, they should have said, by the way, this plane that just left your airspace, disappeared, like, do you know what's going on?

12:36Right. Protocol, international protocol is five minutes. Okay. So they waited 13 minutes longer than protocol dictated. And it was so, so much beyond when they should have called that the controller in Kuala Lumpur actually said on the record, like, why didn't you call me sooner? How are you just calling me about this? Like that may as well have been yesterday. Right. It's missing for 18 minutes, which as we'll get to later on, stuff that came up in the investigation, that was just the first step in a series of missteps that led to the reason why MH370 may never be found. Yeah. So should we take a little break and talk about radar?

13:15Radar O 'Reilly? We'll be back right after this.

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16:43Radar O 'Reilly? Not Radar O 'Reilly. Radar used by air traffic control. It's different. It is different than Radar O 'Reilly. This is called secondary radar, and it sends out a little beam that is very narrow, and it sweeps the area. And on board the aircraft, they have a transponder that detects this beam and sends their own signal back that says this is how fast we're going, this is where we're headed, and a code that says, and this is who I am. Yeah, maybe even MH370, as simple as that, something like that. That's right. That's what's supposed to show up on air traffic control's radar screen.

17:21So they can see, oh, here's MH370 coming toward DL 1722 or whatever. At this speed. Right. Yeah. They have all this information. And that's called secondary radar. Primary radar is what you think, where it's like, you know, it's a blip on a screen that this big radar ray is bouncing off of and receiving information back from. But it's just, you see it's physically there. This has far more information. And that's what air traffic control around the world uses. Right. And this is very key because just a few seconds after it made that switch over into Ho Chi Minh's airspace, the transponder stopped sending information.

18:01That transponder that's supposed to say who you are, where you are and how fast you're going just stopped. Right. It vanished, and this is when the ball was dropped a little bit by Kuala Lumpur not noticing and definitely by Ho Chi Minh not doing anything immediately in response to Kuala Lumpur. Right. So primary radar, the radar that you typically think of when you think of radar, there are very few places in the world where you can't be tracked by someone on radar. It's fairly old technology. It's been around for a while. But the places where you can't be tracked can be vast. Over the ocean, in the desert, over extremely mountainous or wooded areas, there are places where you can't really put a radar tower, and you can disappear from radar, right?

18:54I think what I'm trying to say here is if you take your plane out of radar range and you turn off your transponder, you can make a modern airliner as big as a 777 vanish, where people don't know where it is. And that's a really, I think, hallmark point or trait to this mystery that kind of gets people a little unnerved is, wait a minute, this is the 21st century. This happened in 2014. What do you mean there's times and situations where an airliner can disappear and people don't know where it is? And that was the situation. And as Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur are starting to scramble to try to figure out where this is, apparently they called Malaysian Airlines and said, hey, do you know anything about MH370?

19:42Malaysian Airlines said, oh, yeah, they're flying over Cambodia right now. And they're like, where? How are you seeing this? After an hour, finally, Malaysian Airlines is like, no, we're just referring to the flight plan. They should be over Cambodia right now. What do you mean you can't find them? What's going on? Yeah, but because of that primary radar, the secondary radar wasn't functioning, like we said, because the transponder was off. But the primary radar did track them for about an hour after those communications dropped because of the Malaysian military was able to track it with the primary radar.

20:13Yeah, apparently it flew through the primary radar of five different countries. And the only one that bothered to track it was Malaysia's Air Force. Yeah. But they didn't do anything about it. They didn't follow up to see who it was. They didn't scramble any jets to go see if everybody was okay. They just knew that there was an unidentified plane flying through Malaysian airspace, and the Air Force didn't do anything about it. This is embarrassing enough that the Air Force didn't reveal this to anybody for a while, which was a really important point because during this time, about an hour, about an hour and a half after the takeoff and an hour after the thing disappeared from transponders, the Malaysian Air Force was tracking MH370 and it saw that it seemed to have taken a turn.

21:04Yeah, I mean, they know what happened at this point for a little while. It made a sharp turn. That was not part of the planned flight plan. No, not at all. This is where things definitely took a metaphorical and literal turn. Yeah. It headed southwest at that point, crossed over the Malay Peninsula, over Malaysia again, and then parts of Thailand. Then it made a right turn, this is very key, near the island of Penang. Just put a pin in that. Then headed west by northwest toward the Andaman Sea. And then at 2.22 a.m. vanished from radar, from that primary radar as well. Right. So the Malaysian Air Force saw this happen on its radar.

21:46It didn't tell anybody for a while. The flight plan had it leaving Malaysia, crossing over the Strait of Malacca into the peninsula where Thailand is located, into China, right? Just away from Malaysia. And from what the Malaysian Air Force saw, this thing doubled back on itself and then went in some totally different directions, almost the opposite direction it was supposed to be going in. And like you said, it dropped off of the radar, and that was the last time anyone saw it on radar. But that's not the last time we were able to track MH370. That's thanks to a satellite network that's run by an outfit called InMarsat.

22:30Yeah, so InMarsat, if you've ever been on a plane and you've enjoyed the benefits of watching movies, streaming, or connected to your computer via Wi-Fi, That is because of satellite communication. These airplanes are equipped with a system, and it transfers data and all their voice communications via satellite. And some of this data from the plane is automatically shared with these ground tracking stations, which is a really big deal. So not only are they letting you watch movies and doing all that, but it's sending this automatic data on the reg, basically, from that satellite to these ground stations.

23:09Right. So they think by this time, actually, I believe they know by this time, MH370's navigational systems, entertainment systems, a bunch of its systems have been turned off. The only thing that was still operating was this satellite link, I guess, beacon? Yeah, it's called a satellite data unit. Okay, so the satellite data union, which was capable of contacting and receiving contact from the MRSAT satellites. Now, at the time, no one knows that this is happening, right? Like, there's no sound being made. There's nobody tracking this. This all came out much later when MRSAT realized they were sitting on a bunch of data.

23:56But during different points over the next six, seven hours, the satellite and the satellite data unit talk to each other under a few different circumstances. And because of this, this company, Imarsat, which is located in or headquartered in Great Britain, but literally covers the globe, not just with airline stuff, but maritime thing, which I think where they were originally,

24:24founded to do is to enable maritime communications. Okay. Like, you know, satellite phone? Sure. You're calling through Inmarsat. Yeah. Right? So they've got this whole constellation of satellites. And when Inmarsat heard about MH370, they were like, I'll bet our satellites were tracking this thing in some way, shape, or form. And it turns out that they were right. Yeah. Yeah, and this is important here. There's four different ways or circumstances where that satellite data unit on the plane is communicating with the satellite in space. Whenever you're making a data transmission or a voice transmission, whenever someone on the ground tries to contact the plane, there's something that happens every hour if no one has made either one of these contacts for an hour.

25:13You get a check-in called a handshake. It's just like, you're still here. Shake hands, buddy. Yeah, just want to make sure you're logged on. It's kind of like when you watch too much Netflix and Netflix sends a message saying, Are you still here? Loser. Yeah. Have you finished all the tub of cookie dough yet? Yeah, and then it has a thing that says, Go outside. Right. Or actually it doesn't. It says, Watch another one. Right, watch some more. Why not have some more cookie dough? It's the same thing. It's sending a message to the plane's satellite data unit saying, Are you still logged on? Right.