Selects: The Disappearance of Flight MH370, Part I

Hey, everybody, it's me Joshum. For this week's select I've chosen our two part episode on the disappearance of MH three P seventy from back in January twenty twenty. It 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

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and as 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 MH three seventy.

Is Malaysian Airlines Flight three seventy. Yeah, and this is it's gonna be a two parter because it's pretty robust. Yeah, 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 he 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. And this guy is an aviation expert to begin with, but he's also if you ever read a Tom wolfbook or article or whatever, he has a really great knack for

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 dB Cooper or Bermuda triangle, Like, there's something about aviation disasters and mysteries that are really intriguing to me. And for airline forensics, it's all Rick just super super interesting.

It is. So you talked about airline forensics and that kind of stuff. This is lousy with it. Yeah, But the reason I was saying why it's tough to overstate like what a mystery image three seventy is it's the only airliner that has considered disappeared. Yehanished 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 you like, you can't definitively say.

Yeah, I can't say where, and you can't say why.

Right, Yeah, and then the why is yeah, and the where are both really confounding.

Yeah, And the reason why air travel in the twenty first century is way safer than auto travel is because anytime an airliner goes down, everyone in the international community comes together, yeah, investigates it. They do so openly. The airline, the airplane manufacturer, the everyone involved is expected to like tell the truth 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.

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 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. I mean, 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 in the plane in the passenger seat. Yeah, can we at least be in business class? Buckle sure?

Okay?

Sure?

Were you about to say a buckle up?

Yeah? Okay, buckle up, because we're gonna take off on March eighth, twenty fourteen, in Kuala Lumpur. It's the very beginning of March eighth. The takeoff schedule for Malaysian Airlines Flight three seventy from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was scheduled for twelve thirty five am.

That's right.

We're in a Boeing seven seven seven DASH two hundred er yep, and there are two hundred and twenty seven fellow passengers aboard twelve flight crew YEP.

It's a lot of people.

Almost about two thirds of the passengers or Chinese nationals. I believe there's a bunch of other people from other countries, but for the bulk of the people on the plane were from China. And it's a late night flight. It's expected to arrive in Beijing at about six o'clock six thirty 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

I think that's right.

And at this point, at eighteen thousand, they switched from the airport's air traffic to Kuala Lampor Area Control Center.

Yeah.

And you know the way, the reason we're mentioning all these details is because it turns out they're very important.

Very important, yees.

So these are all key.

Keep rewinding fifteen thirty seconds to get every single detail, okay, because you're gonna need them for the big finish.

So four minutes later, like you said, they were cleared to go to thirty five thousand. Talking about fifteen minutes and it's here where Captain Zahari and there were two people on board flying this plane. Captain Sahari and what was the other gentleman.

Name, First Officer Farik Abdul Hamid, right, and Captain saw 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 seven to seventy seven's, 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 fifties. The other one is a brand new kind of greenhorn, and that's going to factor in for sure.

Yep.

So, like I said, it took.

About fifteen minutes to get to thirty five thousand feet, and this is when the lead pilot radios that Kuala Lampoor Control Center says we're at thirty five thousand feet. Then seven minutes later he radios again says, by the way, we're still.

And this is not me doing him. I don't know what he sounded like.

There you go, this is Captain Zahari. Yeah, everybody sounds like Chuck Yeager.

Yeah, I guess so.

So he confirmed to give that they were at thirty five thousand 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 an altitude, not when you arrive. And you also don't radio in seven minutes later and say, by the way, we're still at thirty five thousand feet, still here, like once you hit it, you're just sort of there that you're cruising altitude.

Right, So it's it wasn't alarming or anything, but it was weird that he made those two radio transmissions, but there was nothing compared to the weirdness that was about to take place. That's right shortly after that, I think at one twenty nineteen am. Yeah, qual Umpoor Area Control Center.

It's like eleven minutes later.

Yeap said, hey, mhe three seventy 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.

I 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 to hand off.

So Captain Zahari responded with good night Malaysian three seven zero. Those are the last words anyone heard from Captain Zahari as far as we know, And 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 I said was good night Malaysian three

It just vanished right without ever having made contact with them right 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. The guy was they had all this other air traffic to.

Deal 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

Yeah, Like, I don't know the exact process, and they're 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 eighteen minutes, they should have said, by the way, this plane that just left your airspace has disappeared, Like, do you know what's going on?

Right?

Protocol, international protocol is five minutes, okay, So they waited thirteen minutes longer than protocol dictated, and it was so much beyond when they should have called that. The controller in Kuala Impour actually said on the record, like, why didn't you call me sooner? How are you just calling me about this?

Like that may still have been yesterday, right.

It's missing for eighteen 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, right, that led to the reason why MH three seventy may never be found.

Yeah, so should we take a little break and talk about radar radar O'Reilly.

We'll be back right after this.

Radar O'Reilly not.

Radar O'Reilly, radar used by air traffic control, so different. It is different than radar o'reiley. This is called secondary radar and it sends out a little beam that it's very narrow and it sweeps the area, and on board the aircraft they have a transponder that the Texas beam and their own signal back that says this how fast we're going?

Is where we're headed? And a code that says and this is who I am?

Yeah, maybe even MH three seventy, as simple as that, something like that. That's right, that's what's supposed to show up on air traffic controls radar screen. That's so they can see, oh, here's MH three seventy coming toward DL seventeen twenty two 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, 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 or into ho Chi Men's airspace, the transponder stops sending information that transponder that's supposed to say who you are, where you are, and how going just stopped. It vanished, and this is when the ball was dropped by a little bit by Kuala Lamport not noticing, and definitely by ho Chi men not doing anything immediately in response to Kuala lamp or.

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

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.

Yeah, 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, or they just knew that there was an unidentified plane flying through Malaysian airspace and the

Yeah, 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. 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 towards the Andaman c and then at two twenty two am vanished from radar, from that primary radar as well.

Right, So the Malaysian Air Force saw this happen on this radar, it 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

Yeah, so in Marsat.

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.

Right, so they think by this time, actually I believe they know by this time m H three seventies, 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 unit which was capable of contacting and receiving contact from the m MAR 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 in Marsat realized they were sitting on a bunch of data. But during different points over the next six seven hours, the satellite and the satellite data unit talk to each other under a

Yeah, And there's four 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 or 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, you

Want to make sure you're logged on. It's kind of like when you watch too much Netflix, and Netflix enter the message, yeah, have you finished all the tub of cookie dough yet?

Yeah?

And then it as the thing that says go outside, right, or actually it doesn't. It says, watch another one.

Watch some more, why not have some more cookie dough? It's the same thing. It's it's sending a message to the plane's satellite data unit saying like, just are you still logged on?

Right?

And then the final thing, and this is super key, is whenever the whenever you first log onto the satellite system, that thing on the plane, whenever it kind of checks in and links up. That is very key because what can also happen if that thing goes down and then reboots. It treats that as a new log in, so it'll make another ping basically that it's logged done to the system.

Right. So in Marsett goes back and looks at their data and says, okay, so here's a couple of things right now. This is I think within the first few days everybody is looking in the south China Sea for MH three seventy because that was what was along its flight plan. The Malaysian Air Force hasn't revealed yet that it tracked MH three seventy turn around and go the opposite direction of what its flight plan was where it

Yeah, and we should point out too, after Air France flight four four seven, which crashed in two thousand and nine, this is when in Marsette really kind of beefed up their system. They added more ground station and they added a lot more capability to add storage for this data because they know that this can really help out in situations like this.

That was a big one too. Do you remember that one?

Oh?

Yeah, So that one was the first one that really opened people's eyes where it was like, wait a minute, when we're flying over the ocean, like no one knows where we are, and they were like, no, actually not really, and they I think that's why m MARSAT was like, we've got to build more ground stations, we got to

Yeah, you've gotten so much better over the years.

But I'm sure this is going to be a setback.

No, I'm hanging in there, all right. Yeah, if it happens, it happens like that's the way I kind.

Of Well, there's certainly nothing you can do about it.

This isn't something that they are that you guys are going to play my memorial at my funeral, my last words. But if you're if if I go down in a plane crash, my number was up.

Right, and everyone else will be like, that's so weird. He always talked about it.

Yeah, right, this was worse here, such a freak there was. Actually I had a tweet once it said, if I ever go down on a plane crash, I'm going to shout I wish I would have spend more time at work.

I'm not sure I get that.

Well, you know it's like no one ever says in their deathbed they wish they'd spend more time at work.

Well, I got it. An ironic funny on the way.

Yeah, I'll make people laugh. Good for you give them their last laugh.

So, uh, this uh, where they're getting all this information was from a ground station in Perth, Australia, a place we have been to.

M it was quite lovely, lovely town.

That's right, it was great.

Anyone ever tells you don't go to Western Australia. You tell them that's BS. Josh and Chuck said, it's great.

Yep, right, very stupid. So BS stands for So.

They had a lot of data, like we said, because they had beefed up their storage capabilities over the past five or six years, and they have a couple of types of data, something called burst timing offset and burst frequency offset bto is it measures how long that a signal takes to reach a satellite. You know the speed of the signal, so you know exactly how far that plane is from the satellite at that exact moment. It's very easy to kind of understand.

Right, and first taken into account, Mr sat has Oh, here here was a ping. Here's a ping. Here's a ping. Here's a ping. Right now, they're digging in to analyze these pings and just the quality of them, the timing of them, all this stuff, because they are like, I'm pretty sure we can figure out where this plane was and maybe where it went if we really drill in and do some incredible math and figure out just kind of the nature of these pings.

Yeah, and what they're trying to do here is to narrow it down into an arc instead of a circle.

Well, I think that's just naturally what happened. Oh yeah, you're right, you're right.

I'm sorry because Ed explained it in a very easy way. If you tell someone, hey, I'm one hundred miles from Atlanta, then you draw a circle around Atlanta. That's one hundred miles and you could be at any point along that circle. But if that phone call was from Athens, which is not one hundred miles from Atlanta, but it's not too far sixty five or so. But if you said you're from some other city in Georgia, then you would know where you were, and if you knew how fast they

Right, the number of points on that circle where that person could possibly be smaller, yeah, much more, maybe by half, maybe by two thirds. And yet so the circle becomes an arc. And because of that burst timing offset, they could establish those those arcs, and there were seven of them, I believe, Yes, No, they could establish the circles and then the circle because of the other one, the the BFO,

Yeah, and they think that eight nineteen was from one of those reboots that I was talking about when that system comes back on, which.

Will come under power failure, right, which we'll come into play pretty soon.

All right, So let's take another break here, Okay, all right, we'll be back with the leading theory right after this.

All right, So the leading theory and this is.

Uh, the more I read this, the more it was Occam's razor kind of staring you in the face. Because we'll get into some of the kind of Kakammi theories and there are many of them, but this one is the simplest, and uh, it's probably what happened. It is that Uh, someone on board and should we should we tease this out? Yeah, okay, someone on board, Uh, took control of the plane, disabled that transponder, and then started

Yeah, about the Southern Indian Ocean, which is where the southern seventh arc was.

Right.

One of the reasons this makes a lot of sense is because that transponder going off at the exact moment when the plane transitioned from Kuala Lampur's airspace into Ho Chi Min's, it would be an incredible coincidence. If that was just an incredible coincidence.

That in and of itself says some that there was a human factor.

Involved, like someone knew what that meant.

Right exactly, so as somebody who knew how to do that, when to do it, and the timing of it was just too spectacular for it to have been an accident.

Yeah, because what they probably counted on is exactly what happened. Was there was a period of time. They might have figured five minutes, which is what you said the standard was, but what they got was eighteen minutes of confusion. Yeah, I mean they it tripled what they were counting on exactly best case scenario.

Yep. The other thing was that the turn that the MH three seventy made was so abrupt that an autopilot wouldn't have done that. Now if you put it, if you put a plane on autopilot and have it and it turns, it would make a much wider turn. This is a hard kind of backtracking turn that it made to its left to the southwest from the north. Traveling the northeast, the turn was to the southwest. So just the turn alone, which came after the transponder was turned off,

Like right, and that rules out things like mechanical failure or fire.

Everything from meteor strike ye know, a squall line to any kind of weather it was. All that was is ruled out by the fact that this turn took place clearly under human control.

Right. That also rules out hypoxia.

If you remember the very eerie crash for with golfer plane Paine Stewart on that private jet.

I don't really remember that, can you kind of refresh my memory.

That was in nineteen ninety nine, and I think the post mortem on that one was that this private plane essentially everyone on board died of hypoxia, including the pilots, and it flew for a number of hours.

Oh really on autopilot. It was a ghost plane essentially.

Wow. Yeah, So they don't think that hypoxia affected whoever was in control of.

The plane because it made that turn.

Yeah, it was a very deliberate turn, and then it followed an even more deliberate flight pattern after that. This was not random movements of a plane where somebody who was suffering from hypoxia but still alive would make. These weren't confused decisions. They were difficult to understand decisions, but they weren't random and confused behavior. They were deliberate.

That's right.

So one of the pilots or both of the pilots suffering from hypoxia is ruled out, And the fact that they were deliberate turns also rules out the idea that both of the pilots were dead. Right that again, it was just the plane flying itself.

Right, These log on requests by that STU unit on the plane. There was another big clue there because there was a log on request made at one forty three am, and that basically says that the power on the plane's electrical system was shut off for a period of time in between that transponder disappearing and that time of that log on request. Right, So someone like purposely disabled, purposefully disabled these systems.

Right, So one forty three am would have been about an hour after take off, just over an hour after takeoff, after the transponder was turned off with perfect timing between Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh, but also before the turn that the Malaysian Air Force track. That's right, or at about the same time.

Right.

The other thing that could have happened when these when the transponder and the SDU were shut off, it could have depressurized the plane. If that happens, then hypoxya is the fear those oxygen masks are going to drop down, but you only get about ten minutes of oxygen as a passenger. The cockpit is going to have a lot

The thing is is they believe that not only is MH three seventy still at cruising altitude, it probably actually climbed to forty thousand, maybe a little over forty thousand feet. It's basically the maximum that seventy seven could stay aloft at. So the drop down masks would have been totally useless

I mean, there's the idea there that a plane crash doesn't take longer than that.

The idea is that it's used for an emergency transitioned down to a much lower altitude where you could breathe without a pressurized cabin, and that that takes less than ten or fifteen minutes. You can do that much more quickly a few minutes.

So basically you're gonna start flying with your own oxygen tank.

Basically, I'll be like, try to take it away from the tip. You can't do it.

Here's another thing is that that sdu log on re quest at the end. It suggests that it was turned back on. And the thinking here is that whoever did this, it probably didn't care at that point because it was too late because everyone on board was dead, right.

So the idea behind all this is that the power was shut off, and they know that the power was turned off because the log on request came at a certain point, right, So that means that the power had been shut off and it was coming back on. And they think that it was to depressurize the cabin. And be a very easy way to depressurize the cabin just turn off all of the power.

And then maybe whoever did this, and we'll get to that, it was like, I want to get back down to normal cruising altitude here, so I can fly this plane without wearing a mask maybe, or just in a less stressful environment, right.

Exactly, Maybe go get a bite to eat or something like that. There's a lot that can be done in a pressurized cabin.

And then there was that final arc, the seventh one that log on request was probably the plane running out of fuel. And this I thought was super interesting. So the plane runs out of fuel, those engines shut down, but there's still air pumping through those turbines, and that's going to spin the turbine and that's certainly not going to be enough to fly your plane, but it could be enough to act as a generator and power up the auxiliary power system.

That's right, super super interesting.

Yeah, So in the running out of fuel, electrical goes down, those air ramjets come on, and the auxiliary power system comes on. The thing logs back on.

Just enough to get that going again.

Right exactly. So let's just before we stop for this episode, Chuck, let's just kind of recamp what m mar said has been able to figure out from seven pings between its

That's right.

And then the final little clue here from the satellite is the ELT emergency transmitter failed, its emergency location transmitter, and that's linked to a different satellite system. And one person, if your conspiracy minded, might say, well, you know what

And this ELT, there's another. So there's four I think on the plane. Did you say that.

I didn't say four, So I believe.

There's four on the plane. One of them like they can be disabled.

It's not a black box, by the way.

No, no, no, this is just a beacon that's pings a satellite, but isn't even a different satellite from MMR SAT. So it's like an extra fail safe. And this means that they all four of them failed, which again some people think that's evidence right there that this thing didn't actually crash. We'll talk about that in the next episode about that.

All right, I think we don't do listener mails on a part one no, so just strap in and I hope you can hold off from researching for a couple of days on this.

Way, maybe you have a bloody Mary while you're waiting. Agreed, Well, anyway, in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our social links, and you can also send us an email to stuff podcast diheartradio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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