Selects: The Disappearance of Flight MH370, Part II

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1:09The disappearance of MH370 is one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history. In the second part, we talk about the investigation into the disappearance and the theories of what might have happened. Hope you enjoy.

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1:36Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is part two of two about MH370, the most mysterious disappearance of any airliner in the history of modern aviation. That's right. We won't do a full recap, but where we're picking up now is... No, no, wait. You want to do a full recap? 20 minutes easy. We are at the point where the plane has crashed, and we're going to pick up with post-crash investigations, which, like many airline crash investigations, was bungled in a lot of ways. Oh, yeah. So Ed points out that like kind of oddly that there are a lot of crash investigations you can point to that kind of deferred toward the airline manufacturer when they were at fault or tried to do some cover-up or was not great.

2:34None of them, from what I can tell, compared to this one. No, agreed. This was very, very not good. And there seems to be the roundly accepted reason for the whole thing being bungled was that Malaysia at the time was a dictatorship. And you could disappear if you weren't doing your job very well or if you offended the people in charge. And a crash of a Malaysian's airline flight in particular was kind of a dicey thing to talk about because Malaysian Airlines was the pride of Malaysia. and it was a, at the time, a government, largely government-owned and controlled airline, a state-owned airline.

3:15Yeah. It was the, Malaysia was the majority owner of stock and it was publicly traded, Malaysia Airlines was, but they owned the majority of it. They called the shots. Yeah. And after 2014, which proved to be a terrible year by any airline standards, because not only was MH370 vanished, MH17 was shot down over Ukraine. Yeah. The same year, just less than six months later, the Malaysian government set about buying back all of the shares that were outstanding of Malaysian Airlines and took it off of public listing, made it a fully stay-known company. Yeah, so they certainly didn't want the bad press that was sure to follow.

3:55No. So there's a lot of people who say the Malaysian government covered this up, not because they did anything nefarious, but because they were worried that something embarrassing was going to come out. And this is not a government that could handle embarrassment very well. And so they literally obfuscated the investigation into what happened to MH370. Yeah. So the first problem here is we know now that this plane crashed in the South Indian Ocean. And it took a week before they were looking in the South Indian Ocean. Yeah. So the first 24 hours was in the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam.

4:34they ended up hooking up and creating a joint agency coordination center, or actually Australia is who created that. And they led the search efforts because it was close to them. And they found no trace even after they did all this ocean floor mapping, searching, you know, they had that seventh arc pegged, searched all along there. 120 ,000 square miles. Yeah, which is, you know, even if you find that seventh arc and you know it's somewhere in here, that's still a vast, vast area. And this thing is on the bottom of the ocean at this point. And we should say it, by this time, Australia has stepped up and been like, well, this happened not too far from us, I guess.

5:16We're the closest major country. Yeah. Certainly Western democracy in this area. We'll head this up. Malaysia will help you out. And they footed a lot of the bill, which was pretty cool for Australia. $160 million? Yeah, from what I understand. That's what Australia spent. Yeah, and I think it was the most, and still is, the most expensive search in aviation history. Yeah. Which is kind of surprising. You'd think that more would have been spent, but I think they usually find them sooner than this. This was not found. Yeah. And they searched for two solid years for this thing. And just on that seventh arc.

5:51Yeah. There's a lot of people who at the time were like, no, you know how it forms a circle? Well, there's a northern arc and a southern arc. And some people said, no, northern arc, somewhere it's in Kazakhstan. on. The Southern Ark was in the Indian Ocean. Most people said it's probably the Southern Ark. Right. So that's where they searched and they still didn't find it. Yeah. And it took so long to even get there. By that point, there were a lot of things. If you had that first 24 hours, it's sort of like a murder investigation. That first day is so key. The first 48? Yeah. Is it 48? I'm there and down to 24, buddy.

6:26Yeah. Okay. So Malaysia then heads up what's called a joint investigation team. The U.S. was involved, China, Britain, and France. This was the one that was meant to follow the protocols of just the internationally agreed upon accident investigation to make air travel safer for everybody. And Malaysia did not help out very well. No. So they issued, the Malaysian Ministry of Transport issued a preliminary and a final report. The preliminary report, Ed describes as more or less a reprint of the Boeing 777 manual. Just like, well, here was the plane. Which I think is kind of standard to have technical information.

7:08But not just the whole report. Right. And then the second one, the final report, basically pointed out where air traffic control failed along the way. Yeah, and I saw in that Langweish article that they were, politically speaking, the easiest targets. They were not going to – there wasn't going to be any backlash by kind of taking them to task, especially taking the Ho Chi Minh air traffic controllers to task too. Yeah. They should have been taking the task. Eighteen minutes is a very long time to let an airliner in your jurisdiction just be disappeared. Right. So that was a big problem, but the Malaysian Air Force also should have been criticized for covering up the fact that they hadn't done anything for an hour that they were tracking this unidentified airplane in their airspace.

7:59Right. And let an entire search, multinational search, be mounted in the South China Sea. Yeah, in the wrong place. For like a couple of days before they were like, actually, we think they went this way. Yeah. Because it takes a long time to even assemble that kind of search squad. So I think if they search for two days and didn't get started until a week later, that's like four days just to move. Right. And so in that time, an oil slick, a debris field, all that stuff can just vanish. And an airliner really can in an area the size of the Indian Ocean, especially even when you know where to look, can just disappear.

8:38And that is why a lot of people say we will probably never find MH370. There's another couple of reasons why, too. Are we going to get to those? Sure. Okay. The police in Malaysia, and this bore a little bit of fruit, they conducted some background checks on everyone on the plane, and they did find two passengers who were Iranians that had stolen passports. Apparently they were just seeking political asylum, though, although that does factor into some of the conspiracy theories that pop up later on. Yeah, anytime you have two Iranian nationals traveling under fake passports on a plane that disappeared, some people are going to say, I don't know about that one.

9:18Yeah, exactly. And then here was the one thing about their final report from the police, is they described Captain Zahari basically saying, like, this guy was great, nothing wrong. He was a great pilot. Nothing to alarm anybody here about Captain Sahari. Nothing to see here. And that's in the final report. And we'll get to him, but that does not appear to be true. No. So after the search, after two years and$160 million and 120 ,000, sorry, 120 ,000 square kilometers, I think it said square miles, still a lot of square miles. searched. The Australians, the Malaysians, and the Chinese that made up the tripartite commission that were kind of running the show in this search said officially, we don't know what happened.

10:17All we can say is that we believe MH370 ended somewhere in the Southern Indian Ocean. That's the official stance on what happened to a vanished airliner, that they said, we don't know, and that's as far as we're going to go. Yeah, and I do want to point out quickly, there was one private agency called in, or I think volunteered, called Ocean Infinity. From Texas. Yeah, they performed a search, basically pro bono. If they find the plane, they get paid. But just as a sort of a nerd in this way, I looked into that company. They are awesome. Yeah, they are. It's really cool, man. They call it Seabed Intelligence, and it's like James Cameron style stuff.

11:00Right. The resources and the toys that these dudes play with, it's pretty cool. Yeah, they'll have a mothership. Well, at least this is what they did for the MH370 search. They have a mothership. Yeah. And I think the mothership goes through and maps the underwater terrain in 3D first. And then that forms their search area. They release some autonomous drones. Yeah, they look like torpedoes. Yep. But they're drones that can be controlled from this mothership, and they go through and scan using sonar in detail the seabed. It's so cool. Virus photography. It's like really cool stuff. It works really well.

11:37Ocean Infinity has a great track record in finding stuff. They're who I would call. They found like a missing submarine from Argentina. They found a bunch of other things. I would call them too, by the way. We should get them on the – we should hire them out for the Tybee Island nuke. We totally should. I'm surprised they haven't just done that for fun. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I think they should. Solve a mystery. Yeah, the broken arrow or the empty quiver. And they're like, we spent how many multi-millions of dollars just to say we solved that mystery? Right. Wait, is someone going to pay us for this?

12:07No, no. They're from Texas, so anytime they find something, they don't think about that. Instead, they just shoot their six shooters into the air. That's right. I forgot about that. Right. So that's fine. That's good enough for them. That's pay enough. But Ocean Infinity, yeah, they know what they're doing, and they still couldn't find MH37. Yeah, they couldn't find it either. There were some things that were found in the search. Number one, this was uncharted territory, and now huge swaths of it are now mapped. They found an underwater volcano, an enormous one that they had no idea existed before.

12:37They found a couple of shipwrecks from the 19th century that had just been totally lost. Yeah. But they still found no trace whatsoever of MH370 despite two major searches and an official final report from Australia saying, we don't know, we will probably never know. All we can say is that the flight ended almost certainly in the southern Indian Ocean. That's right. And we should shout out the Independent Group. This is an online group of enthusiasts. Internet sleuths. Yeah, who got together to try and figure this out. And Ed even pointed out, like, you know, you hear Internet sleuths and you're like, come on, get off the tinfoil hat.

13:19But it turns out that these people, a lot of them were engineers. They worked in aviation formerly or currently. And they were really interested in trying to help. And I think ended up helping in a lot of ways. Yeah, and even beyond, like, tinfoil hats, Internet sleuths, they've done things like identified John Doe's and Jane Doe's. Yeah, for sure. They've done a lot of cool stuff, but typically they're not qualified in what they're doing. They're just very interested and very dogged in their pursuits, right? With the independent group, these are actual people with PhDs in electrical engineering and secondary radar and satellites.

14:00And the stuff that they're doing, they just all happen to come together bound by their common interest in the search for this plane. And if you go and read, I will give you$1 ,000 if you can make it through one of their blog posts. It's so dense and so scientific. I looked at one of them. But they're so legitimate that the Australian government, when they wrapped up their search, or maybe at some point during it, they actually acknowledged and thanked the independent group for their work because they were relying on it to some extent. Yeah, and I'm sure, like, no one ever in this kind of thing or search and rescue, no one ever wants this to happen.

14:35but this is their chance to really get involved and try and do some good. Who, the independent group? Yeah. Sure. They also agitated for more transparency in this stuff. And I think they got their hands well. They went in a roundabout way. They made friends with some of the family of MH370 just by the families hearing about what they were doing. And from one of the families, they got the raw MRSAT data. at a time when MRSAT was saying this actually belongs to Malaysia or Malaysian Airlines. We can't release it. Malaysia was saying, well, no, MRSAT has to release it. They just went around both and got the raw data and were able to really do some much better calculations than they had before with the raw MRSAT data.

15:20All right, so let's take a break, and we'll go start up our own Internet sleuthing concern. Get that ramped up. What are we going to get to the bottom of? Puppies? Sure. Okay. Why are they so darn cute? That sounds like us. All right, we'll be right back.

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18:58Okay, Chuck, so... Are we at wreckage? Not quite yet. I want to talk about the... Yeah, we are at wreckage. I think that'll tie in nicely to what I was going to say. Yeah, I mean, because this thing disappeared, that is not to say there were no traces, because we have pieces of this plane now. Right. There are people, sort of like these internet sleuths, that are captured by a story such that they will spend a large portion of their life trying to solve it and looking for stuff. And savings. Yeah, sure, a lot of money. I think by people you really mean person. No, there are a lot of other people.

19:37There was one man called Zahid Raza who searched for years, and he was murdered in Madagascar. So his job was as the Malaysian counsel to Madagascar. He's like the ambassador to Madagascar. Yeah, and the conspiracy-minded will say, no, this guy's finding stuff, and they took him out. So there was a dude who did leave his life in, I think, Seattle and moved—well, actually just started moving around the world, which he did normally anyway. But his name was Blaine Gibson. Yeah, he's an attorney. Yeah, he factors big into that William Langweish article. He talks about him a lot. But he just became moved by this and decided that he was going to go start finding wreckage.

20:20And he has. Yeah. I think a third of the debris found from MH370 has been personally found by Blaine Gibson. Just globetrotting, basically. Amazing. But he figured out if it was the Southern Indian Ocean, then this wreckage is probably going to start to show up somewhere around the southwest coast of Africa. South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar. Right. And he was right. And the first piece turned up in 2015. It was a six-foot piece of an airplane. Yeah. Can you imagine what he felt like? No, I can't, as a matter of fact. I mean, looking for this and then finding it. It's like searching for a needle in a haystack.

21:06But it was found on Reunion Island off of Madagascar. I think it's under the control of Mauritius. And this was a really big deal for a couple of reasons. One, it showed incontrovertibly that the southern arc was correct, that it hadn't flown north into Kazakhstan, that the flight had ended into the Indian Ocean. Yeah, I mean, it showed that it crashed. That's a big one. It showed that it had broken up, like it wasn't like a fire or anything like that. It had come apart. Well, and it wasn't secretly landed somewhere, because some of those conspiracies get pretty out there. Right. But the other effect that this had was that it devastated the MH370 families who had been holding out hope.

21:51Yeah. Because it was disappeared. This airliner vanished. And people were saying, no, it actually is in the airbase Diego Garcia under U.S. control. No, it's under Russian control in Kazakhstan. It's somewhere. Our people are somewhere. Maybe, maybe there's this hope. This dashed those hopes. And it came more than a year after the plane disappeared. So they had been really holding on to this hope to a desperate degree for more than a year, and then it was dashed. So it was a big deal when it was found, and that was the first of several pieces that washed up in that area. Yeah, this was a part of the airplane called a flapperon.

22:34It's on the back edge of the wing, and it's a control surface. You know the kind that just kind of flaps up and down on it? It's a great name for it. It is. Now I'll know. And the serial numbers confirmed it, so it was definitely from MH370. And then many other pieces have, I think, what, dozens at this point of pieces of plane have been found. Yeah. What's creepy is other pieces have been found, but they're not from MH370. It's like, well, what planes are these coming from? Oh, well, yeah. That's creepy. Yeah. I think maybe every—is there any way to completely tag every square inch of an airplane?

23:14I don't know. I don't know. And not necessarily with a stamp, but I don't know. No, I know what you mean. Some kind of technology. You could probably attach some sort of marker to atoms eventually, and you would be able to tag any part of any plane down to the atom. Like you find a little four-inch piece of metal, and you know what it is. You just, like, analyze the atomic makeup and be like, oh, look, MH370. But that's the future, everyone. That's not too far off. Once we get into nanotechnology, that will be commonplace. Although we'll also probably be able to make planes that don't come apart.

23:47Right. So the other thing this suggests, too, is that the plane hit, and we talked earlier about when a plane is descending into an ocean like that, it's going super fast. Right. And this really kind of confirms that because they didn't find much wreckage. The plane, these parts probably ripped off on the way down, and most of the plane, fairly intact, hit the ocean and went south very, very fast. Yeah, right to the bottom. Right to the bottom. So this also dashed the hopes of the families even further in that. Those four electronic location transmitters, the life beacons that were supposed to go off, and all four failed.

24:28Some family members and a lot of conspiracy theorists are saying, All four of those failing, no way. Yeah. It means that the plane didn't descend quickly, didn't catch fire, didn't hit water, because some of those transmitters are supposed to go off when they hit water. Right. But if they broke up on the way down— Right. Because here's the thing is the planes, if it entered a steep decline at 600 miles an hour, which is about what they think it was cruising at, if it drops from 35 ,000 feet at 600 miles an hour within two minutes, it's going to just break up either on the way down or the moment it hits water.

25:04So much so that some of these beacons that are designed for the scenario are not going to function. And there's another, there is one beacon that is designed to go off on impact. It's designed for that kind of thing, but it needs 50 seconds above water to transmit to the satellite. So they think this thing hits so fast that that beacon might have just gone right down underwater and not been able to transmit in that 50 seconds. So it's an explanation that the plane came apart in the southern Indian Ocean. It didn't just crash in the southern Indian Ocean. It came into a million pieces in the southern Indian Ocean.

25:42Yeah, and, you know, we mentioned the black boxes in the previous episode. Obviously, we don't have these black boxes. They're down there with everything else. Haven't recovered anything like that. But they think that they probably wouldn't tell much of a story anyway. No, not unless there was some sort of final communications or something. That's what it would take. It would take whoever was in charge of the plane at that time still talking and explaining. And if you were the only person alive on this plane, who would you be talking to? Well, let's go ahead and talk about who this might be because all indications point that it was the captain of the airplane himself, Captain Shaw.