The Disappearance of Flight MH370, Part I

my neck. I would welcome that as well. Well, that's what I was setting you up for when I said what else. I appreciate that. We'll see you guys. You can get all the info and tickets you need on s Y s K Live dot com or s F sketch Fest dot com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. 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 uh, it's gonna 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 Langwish. He wrote something he writes in the Atlantic, but he's not just an Atlantic writer. Um. 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 wolf book or article or whatever, he has a really great knack for making you feel like you're there in the action. 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 Languish is the same way, and I will 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, because he puts you in that plane when it's going down or whatever. Um, he's really really good at it. So I recommend basically anything lang

Watch has written go read. It's worth it for sure. Yeah, and I think this coupled with um 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. And for airline forensics, it's all ri just super super interesting. It is. So you talked about airline forensics and and that kind of stuff. This is

lousy with it. But the reason I was saying why it's tough to overstate, like what a mystery image three seventies, it's the only airliner that has 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 will 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. You can't say where, and you can't say why. Um, yeah, and that then the y is and the where we're both really confounding. Yeah. And the reason why air travel in the twenty one century is way safer than auto travel is because anytime an airliner goes down, everyone in the international community comes

together investigates it. They do so openly. The airline um that the airplane manufacturer, the um, 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 air travel safer for everybody. They couldn't do this for all sorts of reasons m Age three seventy and so it's a huge failing um among the the international community, not not 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 I used to hear about airline crashes enough to where it gave you pause. Uh, And you just don't hear about it much anymore. It's true. It's still out there for sure. Yeah, but there they seem much more rare than they used to be, kind of like sky jackings. So we'll do our best to uh put you in

the in the plane, in the passenger seat. Yeah, can we at least be in business class? Buckle sure? Okay sure, We're about to say a buckle up. Yeah, okay, buckle up, because we're going to take off on March eighth, two thou fourteen in Kuala Lumpur. It's the very beginning of March eighth. UM. The takeoff schedule for Malaysian Airlines Flight three seven and DY 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 er and there are two hundred and twenty seven fellow passengers aboard twelve flight crew. 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, we're from

China and um 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 gonna fly over the South China Sea, UM, over the Gulf of Thailand, through Laos, Vietnam, and then uh into China to arrive at Beijing. Um, it didn't actually take off at twelve thirty five. They took off at twelve forty two. Not too shabby, seven minutes. I'm not like sitting there rocking in my seat like let's go. Yeah, yeah, that might not have even noticed.

And UM they take off and it flies up to eighteen thousand feet and the air traffic control center at Kuala Lumpur says, hey, you guys are cleared for UM to to go up to thirty five thousand feet, which is cruising altitude for this flight. I think that's right. And at this point, at eighteen thousand, they switched from the airport's air traffic to Kuala Lampur Area Control Center. And you know, the way, the reason we're mentioning all these details is because it turns out they're very important,

very important. 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. Uh, And it's here where Captain Zahari and there were two people on board

flying this plane. Captain Zahari and uh, what was the other gentleman's name, First Officer Farik abdual Humid and Upton Zahari Ahmad Shaw is piloting the plane, UM, first Officer Hamid. This is his last training flight. After this he will be fully certified to fly Boeing seven seventy seven, 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. Uh. The other one is a brand new kind of greenhorn, and that's going to factor in for sure. So uh, like I said, it took about fifteen minutes to get to thirty five thousand feet. And this is when UM, the lead pilot radios that Kuala Lampoor Control Center says we're at thirty five thou feet. Then seven minutes later he radios again says, by the way, we're sta in. This is not me doing him. I don't know what

he sounded like. There you go, this is Captain Zohari. Yeah, everybody sounds like Chuck Yeager. Yeah, I guess so. So he confirmed again that they were at thirty five thousand feet, and this is where Ed points out that this wasn't 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 thou 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 it was nothing compared to the weirdness that was about to take place um shortly after that, I think at one

am qual Umpoor Area Control Center. It's like eleven minutes later, YEP said, Hey, MH three seventy, you're about to leave our jurisdiction and enter ho Chi Min's um jurisdiction. Go ahead and contract contact ho chie Man 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 you're you're handed off, like, don't just stick with one air traffic control when you fly around the world, 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 um, 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 UM, that in and of itself was kind of an odd transmission because typically any airline captain would have replied with the frequency we said the frequency back to confirmed that that

was the right one. But instead all he said was good night Malaysian three seven zero, And very shortly after that, two minutes later, um MH three seventy disappeared from the radar. The moment it showed up on ho Chi Min air Traffic Controls radar screens, it just vanished, right without everyone 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. The guy was they had all this other air traffic to deal and they were out of their zone at this point, 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. UM. So the Kuala Lumpur's I don't know about blameless in this,

but certainly less blameful than um. Ho Chi Minh and Ho Chi min noticed that they just disappeared from the screen, but it took them a full eighteen minutes before they called Kuala Lumpur and said, hey, do you know anything about where MH three seventy is because they kind of vanished from our radar. Yeah. Like, I don't know the exact process. Um. In their defense, they were trying to get in touch. It's not like they just said, well,

we'll see what happens. Uh. They got in touch with another pilot who was nearby in that airspace to contact them, and this 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 who 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 so much beyond when they should have called that the controller and qual Umpoor actually said on the record, like, why didn't you call me sooner? How

are you just calling me about this? That may have MISSI have been yesterday, right, it's missing for eighteen minutes, which, as we'll get to later on the stuff that came up in the investigation, that was just the first step in a series of missteps that led to the reason why MH three seventy may never be found. Uh So, uh should we take a little break and talk about radar radar Oriley. We'll be back right after this. Radar Oriley, not radar o Riley radar used by air traffic control

so different. It is different um than radar oriley. Uh. This is called secondary radar, and it sends out a little beam that um, it's very narrow and it sweeps the area. And on board the aircraft they have a transponder that to Texas beam and sends their own signal back that says this, how fast we're going, is where we're headed in a code that says that, and this is who I am? Yeah, maybe even m H 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 d L two or whatever at this speed. Right, Um, they have all this information and it's it's called secondary radar. Primary radar is what you think where it's like, um, you know, it's a blip on a screen that this big um, this big radar ray is 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 why 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 Chiman's airspace, the transponder stopped sending information. That 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 by a little bit by Kuala lamp Or not noticing, and definitely by ho chi Man not doing anything immediately in response to Kuala lamp Or so. UM. Primary radar the radar that you typically think of when you think of radar. That's 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. UM. 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 there you can disappear from radar. Right. There's this I 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 seven s vanish where

people don't know where it is. And that's a really I think hallmark point or trade to this. This mystery that kind of like gets people a little unnerved. Is wait a minute, like this is the century, this happened in two four. 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 um Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur starting to scramble to try to figure out, you know, where this is.

Apparently they called Malaysian Airlines and said, hey, do you know anything about MH three seventy. Malaysian Airlines said, oh yeah, they're flying over Cambodia right now, and they're like where, what do you 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 what's

going on? Yeah? But because of that primary radar, uh, 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 UM 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 um Air Force. But

they 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 there 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 UM, about an hour and a half after the takeoff and an hour after the thing disappeared from transponders, the Malaysian Air Force was tracking MH three seventy and it saw that it seemed to have taken a turn. 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 Sea, and then at two a M vanished from radar, from that primary

right radar as well. Right, so the Malaysian Air Force saw this happen on this radar, didn't tell anybody for a while. The flight plan had it leaving Malaysia, crossing over the Straight of Malacca um into the Um 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 um M H three seventy and that's thanks to a satellite network that's run by an outfit called in MARSAT. Yeah, so in mar SAT. If you've ever been on a plane and you've enjoyed the benefits of watching movies, streaming or connected to your computer via WiFi, that is because of satellite communication.

Um these airplane. 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 there letting you watch movies and doing all that, but it's sending this automatic data on a regular on the rag basically from that satellite to these ground stations. Right. So, um, they think

by this time, Um, actually I believe they know. By this time MH three seventies navigational systems, entertainment systems, UH, A bunch of its systems have been turned off. The only thing that was still operating was this satellite link. Um, I guess beacon. It's called a satellite data unit. Okay, So the satellite data unit which was capable of of

contacting and receiving contact from the m mar SAT 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 m mar Sette realized they were sitting on a bunch of data. Um But during different points over the next six seven hours, the satellite and the satellite data unit talked to each

other under a few different circumstances. And because of this, this company M Marsett, 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, um they were originally um founded to to do is to to enable maritime communications, like you know,

satellite phone you're calling through in Marsett, right, Um. So they've got this whole constellation of satellites and when in Marsett heard about MH three seventy, they were like, we're all bet our satellites were tracking this thing in some way, ship or form. And it turns out that they were right. Yeah,

And there's four and this is important here. There's four different ways um 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. Uh, there's something that happens every hour. If no one has made either one of these contacts for an hour, you

get a check in called a handshake. It's just like you're still here, shake hand's buddy, Yeah, just want to make sure you're logged on. It's kind of like um, when you watch too much Netflix and Netflix message, yeah, have you finished all the tub of cookie dough yet? Yeah? And then 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 planes satellite data unit saying like, just are you still logged on? And then the final thing, and this is super key, is whenever the uh, 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 onto the system, right So in mars goes back and looks their data and says, okay, so here's a couple of things right now. This is I think within the first few days, um, 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 plane was was where it was scheduled to carry it. And m Marsett is now saying, wait a minute, this thing didn't crash like an hour and a half after takeoff. This thing turned around and flew into the Indian Ocean for six or seven more hours because our satellite was talking to the to the plane at various points during

this during this time. Yeah, and we should point out to after Air France flight four four seven, which crashed in two thousand nine. This is when in Marsett really kind of beefed up their system. They added more ground stations and they added a lot more capability to add story age for this data because they know that this can really help out in situations like this that was a big one too, Um do you remember that one?

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, um, and they I think that's why m MARSAT was like, we gotta build more ground stations, we got to bulk up our data, data stores, all that stuff, we got to add more satellite capabilities, and in doing so, they made it so that you could be tracked when you're

over the ocean, even if you didn't want to be, as seems to have been the case with MH three seventy. So it was a huge difference between two thousand and four, was it two thousand four, two two nine and two thousand fourteen just five years the thing proved itself. These upgrades they made were substantial. But um Air France flight four four seven in and of itself another languish gem that just puts you in the seat of this terrifying

plane crash. Um that one in party killer. They knew where the plane was, and it still took two years to recover the black boxes and figure out what went wrong, which is terrifying. And if you know what happened to that one, it's basically the controllers got ripped away but from the pilot and it just went right into the ocean, and they're still down there. Apparently there was a big

debate over what to do with these people. When they started raising them, they were perfectly preserved because they're so deep in the pressure in the anaerobic situation, and yeah, the temperature just kept them perfectly preserved. But as they were raised up into warmer waters, the decomposition over two years just happened immediately. So they I think the French government said they have to stay there. It's now a memorial,

do not try to raise anybody. And they're still down there, strapped to their seats, which when you just do not think about that the next time you get on a plane, it's a terrible thing to think about. I can tell you firsthand, you've gotten so much better over the years. But I'm sure this isn't going to be a setback. Now. I'm hanging in there, all right. Yeah, if it happens, it happens, like that's the way I kind of view

you can do about it. This isn't something that they are that you guys are gonna 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 would be like, that's so weird. He always talked about it. Yeah, there was. Actually I had a tweet once it said, um, if I ever go down in a plane crash, I'm going to shout I wish I were to spend more time at work.

I'm not sure I get that. Well, you know it's like no one ever says that in their deathbed they wish they'd spend more time at work. Well I got it. An ironic funny on the way. Oh 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. It was quite lovely, lovely town.

That's right, it was great. Uh. Anyone ever tells you don't go to Western Australia, You tell them that's b S. Because Josh and Chuck said it's great, all right, very stupid. So b S 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. Um something called burst timing offset and burst frequency offset b t O 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, m Marsat has Oh here was a here was a ping,

here's a pin, here's a pin, here's a pink. 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're 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, uh, just kind of the nature of these pains. 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 in a very easy way. If you tell someone, hey, I'm a hundred miles from Atlanta, then you draw a circle around Atlanta. That's a hundred miles and you could be at any point along that circle. But if that phone call was from Athens, which is not a hundred miles from Atlanta,

but it's you know, too far 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 you were going, then you could. Really it doesn't become a circle, then it becomes an arc. Right, the number of points on that circle where that person could possibly be yes is smaller, yeah, much more or maybe by half, maybe by two thirds. And yet so

the circle becomes an arc. And because of that burst timing offset, UM they could establish those those arcs, and there were seven of them, I believe, no, they could establish the circles. And because of the other one, the the BFO, the burst frequency offset, those are more complicated. They involved the Doppler effect, and basically UM tell the satellite or the satellite data tells in mar set we're

going in this direction. Because the you know, the Doppler effectiveists an ambulance, SIRN is coming to you and then changes in pitch. Because of the relative distance and the direction that it's traveling. They could tell from this ping the satellite ping um, not even a data transmission, just to ping which direction thing was headed and roughly how fast it was going. And so they were able to create seven arcs. And after the seven arcs, the seventh arc was created by a pin that took place at

eight nine am. And after that there was another uh, there was a log on request, a handshake request that the SDU failed to respond to. And they think that in between eight nine am and that last log on request at nine fifteen am, the plane finally crashed, probably from running out of fuel. Yeah, And they think the eight nineteen was from one of those reboots that I was talking about when that system comes back on, which will come after power failure, right, which will come into

play pretty soon. Alright, 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 Akam's razor kind of staring you in the face. Because we'll get into some of the kind of cockamami 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 flying in the other direction back across Malaysia, then put it on autopilot until it ran out of gas and it crashed into the ocean. 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 transition from Kaua Lampoor's airspace into ho Chi

Men's it would be an incredible coincidence. If that was just an incredible coincidence, that in and of itself says that some that there was a human factor involved, like someone knew what that meant, right exactly, so somebody who knew how to do that when to do it, and um, 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. I mean they it tripled what they were counting on best case scenario. Yeah. Uh. The other thing was that the turn that the MH three seventy made was so um abrupt that an autopilot wouldn't have done that 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 um shows that it was under human control. It was a person piloting the plane making it turn like right, and that rules out things like mechanical failure or fire. Everything from meteor strike to the squaw line to any kind of weather.

It was all that was ruled out by the fact that this turn took is clearly under human control. Right. That also rules out hypoxia. If you remember the very eerie crash for with Golfer plane Pain Stewart on that private jet, I don't really remember that. Can you kind of refresh my memory? That was and the 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 on autopilot.

It was a ghost plane essentially. 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 a more and 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 and they were difficult to understand to say,

but they weren't random and confused behavior. They were deliberate. That's right. So hip one of the pilots or both of the pilots suffering from hypoxia has ruled out um and the fact that they were deliberate turns also rules out the idea that both of the high, the pilots were dead. That again, it was just the plane flying itself, right. Uh.

These log on requests by that STU unit on the plane. Um, it 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 um about an hour after takeoff, just over an hour after takeoff, um, after the transponder was turned off with perfect timing between Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh, but also um before the turn that that Malaysian Air Force tracts or at about the same time, right. Um. The other thing that could have happened when these when the transponder and the STU are shut off, it could have depressurized the plane. Um. If that happens, then hypoxy

is the fear. Those oxygen masks are gonna drop down, but you only get about ten minutes of oxygen as a passenger. The cockpit is going to have a lot more oxygen than that, but we do know for a fact from that log on request that the systems will all for an hour. So even if that were the case, then the masks run out ten minutes later and the people die of hypoxy at the passengers shortly after that.

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

been totally useless to begin with. There's not enough oxygen coming through them to offset that kind of height into deep pressurized cabin that's meant for a much lower altitude, and the reason why I found it very disconcerting to learn that there's only like ten or fifteen minutes worth of oxygen coming out of those masks. 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 transition 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, Okay, I'll be like trying to take it away from the t you can't do it. Uh. Here's another thing is that that STU log on request UM at the end, it's

it suggests that it was turned back on. And the thinking here is that whoever did this UM it probably didn't care at that point because it was too late because everyone on board was dead. Right. So the idea of 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 de pressurize 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. Uh, it was like, I want to get back down to normal cruising altitude here so I can fly this plane UM 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 of there's a lock that can be

done in pressurized cabin. And then there was that final arc, the seventh one that log on ust 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 gonna 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 ram jets come on, in the auxiliary power system comes on. The thing logs back on just enough to get that going again, right exactly. So let's let's just before we stop for um this episode, Chuck, let's just kind of recap what m Marset has been able to figure out from seven pings between its satellite and

the satellite data unit seven pings. They dove into these things so deeply that they were able to figure out that the that the flight did not crash, that it um there was probably a hypoxia event among the cabin, that it was deliberate, and that the plane kept flying. UM, not that it did not crush, but that it kept flying for at least six more hours and finally did probably crash in the Southern Indian Ocean. All from seven

little pings between the plane and the satellite. That's right. Uh. And then the final little clue here from the satellite is the e l T emergency transmitter UM failed. It's emergency location transmitter, and that's linked to a different satellite system. And one person, if you're conspiracy minded, might say, well, you know what this means. It didn't actually crash into the ocean. But these e l T s apparently have

a pretty low success rate. And when you dive into the ocean with no power, it's at tremendous speed and that would have been enough probably to destroy the plane instantly. And this e l T there's UM. There's another. So there's four I think on the plane. Did you say that. I didn't say four, So 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 of satellite but isn't even it's a different satellite from m MARSAT, 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 that's that's evidence right there that this thing didn't actually crush. 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, so just strap in and I hope you can hold off from researching for a couple of days on this one. Maybe you have a bloody mary while you're waiting. 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 dieheart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios.

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