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Afleveringen
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In today’s episode, which aired in its original form on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of MH370, we discuss two major advances that we’ve made in the case. The first has to do with the age of the barnacles found on the pieces of debris, and hence how long they spent in the water, a topic that we laid the groundwork for in the previous episode. This is significant in understanding the fate of MH370 because this new data lends weight to the conclusion that the plane did not, in fact, crash into the southern ocean.
How could such a thing be possible? Doesn’t the Inmarsat data tell us that the plane definitely flew south into the ocean? Well, that brings us to today’s second big revelation. As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, there’s also evidence that the data could have been tampered with. This is a radical idea for many in the MH370 community, and some well-respected figures have declared it flatly impossible. But they are not experts in aviation cybersecurity. In today’s episode we’re joined by Todd Humphreys, a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the world’s experts on cybersecurity in avation. He’s been studying the spoofing of GPS signals for more than a decade. And he says that the time has come for search officials to take seriously the possibility that MH370 was hacked. “After a failed search, you have to recalibrate,” he says. “Sometimes you preclude the possibility of even looking for evidence because you have very strong priors against it. I think by this point, we’ve been pushed into a corner where we do need to revisit those priors.”
Simply put, the authorities and the conventional wisdom have proven themselves wrong. The analysis that they conducted lead them to believe that they knew where to find the plane, and they didn’t. So it’s time to grapple with the possibility that someone might have exploited the cybersecurity vulnerability that we described in Episode 22.
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Over the course of the next two episodes, we’re going to talk about how we can use fresh evidence involving gooseneck barnacles, Lepas anatifera, to gain new insight into the fate of MH370. This is an organism we’ve talked about a lot already. We first met them in Episode 18: The Flaperon, when we talked about how the first piece of debris washed ashore on La Réunion Island. A striking feature of the flaperon was that it was covered all over in fleshy-stalked creatures, which scientists realized could point the way to the plane’s wreckage.
In Episode 19: The Impossible Drift we looked at some puzzling aspects of the debris, including the fact that marine biologists were stumped as to how Lepas could have grown on a part of the flaperon that stuck high up out of the water. We went more deeply into these issues in Episode 20: Lepas Don’t Lie with renowned invertebrate researcher Jim Carlton.
A uniting concept across these episodes is that Lepas barnacles can be used as a robust and reliable way to measure how long debris has been in the water. Combined with drift modeling, they can tell you when and where something went in the water. In the case of MH370, they can tell us what happened to the plane. In the next episode, we’ll reveal the new evidence that we’ve found.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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In the months after the disappearance of MH370, Malaysian police searched for any clues that might suggest that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was the culprit. This would have been the simplest explanation for why the Boeing 777 suddenly went electronically dark and pulled a U-turn forty minutes into its flight, and scarcely a minute after Shah’s voice was heard over the radio calmly telling air traffic controllers “Good night, Malaysia 370.” But to their chagrin, the evidence was slim. Zaharie had left no note. His family and friends had noticed no sign of mental disturbance. There was no evidence of political or religious extremism or of marital discord. He was under no financial pressure. He just didn’t fit the profile of someone who would kill hundreds of innocent people and take his own life in the process.
The police did find, however, a single piece of evidence pointing at Shah. In his home they found a hard drive that contained a flight simulation program as well as data points created when he saved simulated flights. Six data points recorded on February 2, 2014, were of particular interest. It looked like they came from a single 777 flight that took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, went up the Malacca Strait, passed the tip of Sumatra, then turned south and wound up with zero fuel over the remote southern Indian Ocean. This route so uncannily resembled the flight path deduced from MH370’s radar track and then satcom symbols that it was taken by many as smoking-gun evidence that Shah had practiced absconding with the plane.
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Part of the process of figuring out the mystery of MH370 is finding explanations for the seemingly inexplicable things that happened. Part two is trying to verify whether those explanations hold water.
Today we revisit a topic that we explored in depth back in Episode 10, “The Vulnerability,” in which we talked about an idea that Victor Iannello and I have both worked on—namely, that MH370 had an unsual vulnerability that would have allowed a sophisticated attacker on board the plane alter the data in its satellite communications system so that when investigators looked at the data later they would think the plane went south when it really went north. (If you’re interested in learning the details of the theory, I’ve posted a précis here.)
I’ve been thinking about this idea for a long time. There was even a whole episode of the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” about it. But it’s taken this podcast to spur me to do something I wish I had done a long time ago, which is to seek out the opinion of cybersecurity professionals. From the perspective of someone whose job it is to assess potential hacking vulnerabilities, does it seem like MH370 had one?
I was able to tap the expertise of someone who really knows his stuff, Ken Munro, the founder of Pen Test Partners in the UK. As the name implies, Ken’s company specializes in penetration testing, which means that they probe a client’s computer network for vulnerabilities to see if they can get inside the system. The idea is by imagining all the ways a bad guy could hurt you, you can take steps to prevent them from happening. Though his skills are applicable in every corner of IT, Ken specializes in aviation. Recently he and his team were able to a real 747 that wasn’t being used and borrow it for a bit to test it for security vulnerabilities (and found some interesting ones).
I figured if anyone could tell whether a proposed vulnerability is plausible or not, it would be Ken.
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Ever since Blaine Alan Gibson first crossed my radar screen, half a year before he found “No Step,” I’ve struggled to understand this eccentric character. In the media, he styled himself after Indiana Jones, always wearing a brown fedora. He portrayed himself as an inveterate adventurer and world traveler who before MH370 had pursued any number of quixotic international quests, including an attempt to find the lost ark of the covenant and an expedition to the site of the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. His was a wonderfully appealing persona. After I wrote about him in New York magazine, TV producers started getting in touch with me, hoping I could hook them up with him to pitch reality shows about his life.
He quickly became a central feature of the MH370 story, ubiquitous in media coverage the crash. But who, really, is this man of mystery? As with so many other aspects of this case, the more layers you peel away, the stranger things appear.
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Last episode we talked about the surge of MH370 debris that started turning up in the western Indian Ocean in early 2016, and how search officials were optimistic that all this new data would help them understand where the plane went down. We focussed on drift modeling, and how the timing and location of the finds could have helped pin down the location of the crash through a process called reverse drift modeling. Today, we’re talking about other clues that the authorities were able to derive from the collected debris, namely the marine fauna found living on them. And to help us understand, we’re bringing in Jim Carlton, the world’s leading expert in marine invertebrates.
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If there was one piece of debris, there should have been a lot more. Yet month after month went by without any further discoveries. Then in February of 2016 an independent researcher named Blaine Alan Gibson accomplished something no one ever had before: He set out to find a piece of MH370 debris, and he found one. In the months that followed, other people also found pieces of the plane. Blaine Gibson himself went on to find many more. For some, this influx of additional evidence only confirmed the conclusion that the plane had indeed crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. But in looking closer, I saw the same kinds of inconsistencies that have characterized every aspect of the case.
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At 8.30am on July 29, 2015, on the northeastern shore of Réunion Island, a cleanup crew was working its way along a stretch of pebbly beach when a worker named Johnny Begue spotted an unfamiliar-looking object at the edge of the surf. Roughly rectangular and about six feet long, it somewhat resembled a stubby airplane wing encrusted with marine life. Soon gendarmes were on the scene, along with local news photographers. The piece was quickly identified as a flaperon, a part of a 777 wing’s trailing edge. Close examination revealed that it was indisputably a piece of MH370. Here at last, was physical evidence that the missing airliner really had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
But was that conclusion inescapable? In today’s episode we discuss how, once again, the evidence in this case looks stranger the closer you examine it.
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For this episode, we’re trying something different. Until now we’ve spent each episode diving into a particular aspect of the mystery. This time, we’re pulling back to look at the mystery from a global perspective in order to address the question: What is this case like?
Just as every person has a unique character, a mystery can have a personality of its own, and MH370 certainly does. The dominant feature of that personality is strangeness. Time and again, a piece of evidence emerges which changes what we understand about the case – but then it turns out the evidence itself contains mysteries that themselves need to be elucidated.
In today’s episode, we look at five of the most striking examples of this phenomena. Together, they raise the question: why is the MH370 like this? Is it just a matter of coincidence, or is there some underlying aspect of the case that keeps pulling it toward the unexpected?
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In our last episode, we talked about the search of the seabed, which started in October 2014. By that time the plane had been missing for 8 months. And while the seabed search was everyone’s best hope for finding the black box and solving the mystery, people hadn’t forgotten about floating debris.
You’ll recall that in the first month after the disappearance, there had been an extremely extensive search of the ocean surface by ships and airplanes from many nations, and they hadn’t spotted anything.
When Australia called off the surface search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on April 28, Prime Minister Tony Abbot explained that “It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk.”
But would the debris really have sunk? Modern aircraft are made of metal, composites, and plastic, materials that do not get waterlogged. If, as the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) believed was most likely, MH370 ran out of fuel and then crashed, it would have been moving at hundreds of miles per hour when it hit the sea. Much of the resulting debris would have settled down through the water column, but innumerable pieces would have remained afloat. After Air France Flight 447 went down in the middle of the Atlantic in 2009, searchers found some 3,000 pieces of debris scattered across the surface.
Given that no debris from MH370 had been spotted from the air, a lot of people thought that the first hard proof of the plane’s fight might well take the form of flotsam washing up on a beach somewhere.
The question was, where would it wash up?
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As the southern spring of 2014 approached the search authorities prepared to undertake a search of the seabed where their calculations indicated MH370 had gone. They hired a Dutch marine survey company called Fugro, which dispatched three ships to the area: Fugro Discovery, Fugro Equator and Fugro Supporter. The area they were going to search had been defined by the probability density function we’ve described earlier. It stretched about 600 miles long and covered water that was about three miles deep. One Australian politician declared that they were 97 percent confident that they would find the plane’s wreckage. Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way.
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On July 17 Jeff was in his kitchen when the phone rang. It was a producer from CNN asking if he could go on air to talk about the Malaysia Airlines 777 that had just gone down over Ukraine. He’d spent so much time thinking about Ukraine and MH370 that it took him a moment to realize that she was talking about a completelely different airplane.
The details were still sketchy, but it seemed that in the late afternoon, Ukraine time, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it had exploded in midair. Initial reports suggested it might have been shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying over territory held by Russia-backed rebels.
A Malaysia Airlines 777. Ukraine. Russia. The echoes seemed too overwhelming to ignore. Boeing 777s are among the most reliable airplanes in the world; none had ever been lost mid-flight before. There were 15 Malaysia Airlines 777s at the start of 2014, out of some 18,000 registered aircraft in the world, and two had come to grief under mysterious circumstances in less than five months.
But on air at CNN, all the other aviation analysts agreed that of course the destruction of MH17 so soon after the loss of MH370 could only be a freak coincidence. What connection could there possibly be?
It was soon established that the plane had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile. A 150-pound shrapnel-laced warhead had torn open the aluminum airframe, scattering passengers and crew into the 500 mph slipstream. In most airplane crashes, the question is: what happened? This time, it was: who did it, and why?
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This week we look at where the plane could have gone if it didn’t go into the remote southern Indian Ocean. According to the Inmarsat data, it would have flown to the northwest, but that raises another question: if it flew over mainland Asia, why wasn’t it picked up by anyone’s military radar?
As you’ll recall, when Australian scientists applied the technique of Bayesian inference to the BTO data, they found that it indicated that the plane might have taken one of two flight paths, one to the north, one to the south:
In today’s episode we look at where exactly this route went, and whether we would expect that military radars would have picked it up.
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Once the scientists at CSIRO had generated the probability distribution for the plane’s last known location on the 7th arc, the next question they had to answer was: how far did the plane travel from that point before it impacted the water?
As we discussed earlier, their goal was to define a search box within which the plane was likely to be found. The plane’s location along the 7th arc defined the length of the rectangle, and the distance it could have traveled from the 7th arc would define the width of the search box.
So the question of how far the plane could have flown after the last transmission depends on what the investigators thought was going on with the plane at that moment. You’ll recall that the plane took off at 16:42 heading from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China.. A flight that normally takes 5 1/2 hours but it was carrying enough fuel to keep it flying until around 00:12, in case it needed to divert somewhere else and needed extra fuel.
The inmarsat data showed the plane transmitting signals on a regular schedule — either in response to phone calls from the ground, or an hour after the last exchange. The last exchange in his sequence took place at 0:11 universal time. (That’s 8.11am Kuala Lumpur time, but to keep things simple let’s stick to Universal Time from here on out.)
Then at 0:19, the plane sent a request to Inmarsat to log in again. In many ways this request is similar to the one that was made at 18:25 — the SDU had logged itself off because it had powered down, and then tried to log on after getting turned back on again.
As you’ll recall, no one has a very good answer for why the SDU was turned off and back on again at 18:25. It’s a very unusual thing to happen in flight. But investigators had a very good idea about why the SDU might have turned on again at 0:19. They knew that by this time the plane would have been very close to running out of fuel. And once that happened, the engines would stop running, and the plane would lose electrical power. It would start to lose speed and/or altitude. And the satcom would disconnect.
But then an emergency situation a backup system would kick in. A device called a Ram Air Turbine, or RAT, would deploy—it’s a propellor that pops out into the slipstream to generate electricity like a windmill. This would generate enough electricity to start up a powerplant in the back of the airplane called the Auxiliary Power Unit, or APU. Its generatorwould return power to the plane’s electrical system, including the satcom. This is why the plane reconnected to the satellite.
The process from fuel exhaustion to logon would take 3 minutes 40 seconds. So the plane presumable ran out of fuel around 00:16, or about 5 minutes after the previous handshake at 0:11.
At 0:19 the plane had been out of fuel for almost four minutes, which meant the engines hadn’t been providing power. At first the ATSB assumed that the most likely scenario was that the plane had flown on a ghost flight, and after losing power had fallen into a descending spiral. Based on previous accidents they estimated that it would have fallen into the ocean within 30 nautical miles of the 7th arc.
Later they looked more closely at the BFO data, and they realized that there was a simple explanation for the seemingly strange values recorded at the time. Since the SDU’s doppler precompensation algorithm doesn’t account for vertical velocity, the BFO data could be explained if the final transmissions were made in a steep and accelerating dive.
This dive would be so steep that it could only be accomplished by a pilot who was actively pushing the plane’s nose down into a deliberate steep suicidal dive.
That being the case, the plane’s wreckage should be found very close to the 7th arc. Perhaps no more that 5 or 10 miles away. But, to give themselves a bit of leeway, the authorities decided to define an initial search area that was 400 miles long and 58 miles wide.
They had every reason to be confident, based on what they knew, that the plane would be within these 23,000 square miles.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
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Today’s episode is something of a double-header, as we address two different but related topics: the scientific method, and how we the co-hosts came to be involved in the case. In the first half of the show, Andy and Jeff talk about their personal histories, and how their experiences prepared them for tackling the mystery of MH370.
In the second half, Jeff describes how working on this mystery has shaped his understanding of the scientific method, and in particular how scientist deal with uncertainties in data and in their knowledge of initial conditions. Understanding so-called Bayesian methods is crucial, because it’s the approach that search officials used in defining the the search area on the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean.
Bayes theorem has crept into the public discourse in recent years; you’ll often hear about people “updating their priors” and the like, meaning that they’ve changed their mind based on new information. In this episode Jeff refers to it as an inverse probability estimate, in the sense that rather than using one’s knowledge of a current system state to calculate a future state, you use knowledge of the current state to assess what previous conditions might have given rise to it.
There’s a neat example of this idea in The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie. Imagine that you have a 10-foot-long billiards table. If you fling a cue ball so that it vigorously bounces off multiple sides and effectively winds up in a random location, what is the probability that it will wind up within 1 foot of the far-left hand edge? It’s easy to see that the probability is 10 percent.
Now imagine that you have a billiards table of unknown length and the cue ball is one foot from the left-hand edge. How long is the table? The answer you give depends on your knowledge of possible prior states. For instance, it may be the case that all billiard tables are either 10 or 14 feet long. Or maybe they can be arbitrarily long.
The searchers for MH370 found themselves in an analagous situation when it came to defining a search area using the Inmarsat data. They had to ask themselves, “What is the universe of possible flights that could have given rise to this data, and what is the relative probability of each?” This would then allow them to calculate a probability heat map on the seabed of the southern ocean of where the plane’s wreckage might be located. We know a lot about how they carried out this work because the Australian scientists who carried it out wrote a very detailed and lucid account which they published in 2015 as Bayesian Methods in the Search for MH370.
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[Today’s episode is a remastered version of the 10th show I made with Andy Tarnoff as part of the original Deep Dive: MH370 podcast, in which we broke down the basics of the case step by step.]
Today we tackle our most controversial topic date: the question of whether a backdoor exist in MH370’s satcom system that would have allowed the BFO data to be tampered with. If so, it will have radical implications for what might have happened to the plane.
Back in Episode 7 we explained how the BFO data worked and how it showed conclusively that the plane must have gone south. But then some strange facts started to appear that, taken together, suggested that all might not be as it seemed.
The first was that, as we’ve discussed earlier, the Satellite Data Unit had been turned off and back on again. Officials didn’t let that slip until June 26. Up until that time, we’d all assumed that the satcom had inadvertantly been left on when everything else was turned off. The fact that it was turned on was really hard to explain. In fact to this day, people have had a hard time coming up with a convincing reason why anyone would either know how to do this or want to do this. I hasten to add that is a hugely contentious point. Some people say they have perfectly good explanations, but they all seem pretty daft to me. For instance, Victor Iannello thinks it was done in order to prevent someone in the cabin from using the satphone to call for help, but there are simpler ways to turn off the satphone.
The second surprising fact to emerge was that it turned out that the electronics bay, or E/E bay, the compartment that houses all of the computers that control the plane, is accessible through a hatch in the first-class cabin.
Matt Wuillemin, an Australian former 777 pilot, wrote a master’s thesis on the security vulnerability of the unlocked hatch in June 2013. In his thesis, Wuillemin notes that in addition to the Flight Control Computers, the E/E bay also houses the oxygen cylinders that supply the flight crews’ masks in case of a depressurization event, and the controls for the system that locks the flight deck door. “Information is publicly available online describing the cockpit defences and systems located within this compartment,” Wuillemin notes. “This hatch may therefore be accessible inflight to a knowledgeable and malevolent passenger with catastrophic consequences.”
The last piece of the puzzle fell into place when I had a conversation with an influential independent reseracher named Mike Exner. I asked Mike how the Satellite Data Unit gets the navigational information that it needs to calculate the Doppler precomposition that produces the BFO. Exner replied that it comes through a cable from a unit called the IRS (Inertial Reference System) that’s in the electonics bay.
If you climbed down into the E/E bay and disconnected the SDU cable from the IRS, you could plug it into an electronic device capable of generating false position information. Such gear would have to be manufactured from scratch; “there are certainly no commercial, off-the-shelf boxes like that,” said Exner. In essence, the signal would be lying to the SDU about where the plane was located and how fast it was going, causing the SDU to transmit at an incorrect frequency.
Later, Victor Iannello developed this idea even further. He pointed out that if you changed just one parameter inside the SDU, you would create BFO values that would make the plane look like it was going south when it was really going north. He wrote a paper exploring the idea that you can find here.
Two important points:
a) We don’t know definitely that this vulnerability truly exists. There may be some aspect to the 777’s electronics that we don’t know about that would rule this out. One of the interviewees in the Netflix documentary says that you can’t take over the controls of a 777 from the electronics bay. Others have made the same claim. I don’t know how they would know this, and no one has explained so far, but it’s possible they’re right.
b) Victor later became convinced by other evidence that the vulnerability, even if it did exist, was not used.
But! The mere possibility that the data could have been tampered with to create what amounted to a false tale of breadcrumbs was breathtaking.
Remember: at the time, the authorities were getting ready to launch an incredibly ambitious search of the remote ocean seabed based at this point solely on the basis of a handful of signals the likes of which no plane had ever transmitted before, whose origin they couldn’t explain, and whose meaning they couldn’t verify by any means, whether satellite photos, radar returns, floating debris, or anything else.
Everything was hanging on these signals which everyone just assumed had been produced innocently and inadvertently, with no intention on anyone’s part.
What we’d discovered was that that wasn’t necessarily true. There was another way to create these signals. So now, as I saw it, we’d have to put an asterisk next to every instance where someone says, “We know the plane went into the southern Indian Ocean.” Beause there is another way to interpret that data.
And here’s something else to consider.
For this exploit to have been possible, a whole bunch of things had to line up.
The hijacked plane would have to be a Boeing, not an Airbus. It would have to be a fly-by-wire 777 or a 787, not one of Boeing’s earlier planes which used mechanical rather than electronic control systems. The airline would have to be subscribing to the low-cost version of Inmarsat’s service, called Classic Aero, and not its high-end version, Swift Broadband. Its route after disappearing would have to have been entirely under the footprint of an aging Inmarsat satellite in a decaying orbit. And the implied direction would have to be toward an oceanic basin in which the plane could be “lost.” And the mirror routes to discriminate would have to lie on a north-south axis.
MH370 meets all these criteria.
Grant you, if this hack were carried out it would involved some incredibly sophisticated perps. But not unthinkably so. If you work in the field of electronic warfare (EW), the idea of changing the apparent Doppler shift of a signal is used all the time. (As I discussed in a recent article about UAP sightings and EW for New York magazine.) So for some people, this kind of idea wouldn’t be that wacky at all.
Now, not many people understand how this vulnerability works; a lot of people don’t get past the words “Doppler Precompensation.” And of the ones who do, a great many find it preposterous that this vulnerability was exploited.
But no one, to our knowledge, has demonstrated that it is impossible. And that means that there’s a whole alternate lens that you can use to look at the disappearance of MH370.
Things that seem to be random or to have occurred just by chance, like the reboot of the SDU, now seem to have a very specific purpose.
Anyway, by the end of June, 2014, I had started to wonder if the whole world had gotten MH370 fundamentally wrong.
And I thought that the answer to that question would emerge pretty soon. Because a seabed search was about to start, and the if the vulnerability had been exploited, then it would leave a very specific clue:
The plane’s wreckage would not be found on the seabed floor where the BFO data suggested it had gone.
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In the weeks after the disappearance of MH370, many theories were proposed, but one in particular quickly came to the fore: that one of the pilots had seized control of the plane and flown it on a murder-suicide mission into the southern Indian Ocean. While there have been a handful of known cases where pilots have flown their own plane into the ground, no one had ever before carried out a sophisticated, complicated, and aggressive plan to abscond with an airplane only to spend seven hours patiently waiting to die. But there seemed no other way to easily explain the sequence of events that emerged from the Inmarsat data. What would such a person be like, psychologically? What kind of traces would they leave behind in their social media, in their personal photographs and work records, and in the memories of those who knew them? In today’s episode we turn our attention to Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid and take stock of the evidence.
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From the first day MH370 went missing, it was the subject of an intense surface search. Planes, ships and satellites scoured millions of square kilometers of ocean. Not a single piece was ever spotted. In today’s episode we talk about how it went down, and what we might conclude from it. We also touch on a strange coda to the search, that involved an attempt to find the plane by listening for audible pings from the plane’s black boxes.
As we’ve previously discussed, at first everyone thought that the plane had crashed in the South China sea, under its original route to Beijing. At first this was a Search and Rescue mission, as authorities hoped that the plane might have ditched à la Miracle in the Hudson and some survivors could be rescued. But as time went by hope quickly faded.
At first, planes and ships searched the South China Sea and the Andaman Sea to the West. After the Inmarsat data was discovered, the search area shifted into the South China Sea. The hope was that once debris was spotted, its location would give them a rough idea where the plane had crashed. They would then be able to lower listening devices in order to detect automatic acoustic pings generated by the plane’s black boxes. Once the black boxes were found and retrieved, the data they contained would allow investigators to know exactly why the plane had crashed. The mystery would be solved.
This sequence of events has been followed numerous times, such as with the crash in 2009 of Air France 447, which we’ve discussed several times before.
Over the course of the next month, an armada of ships and planes searched over millions of square kilometers of ocean surface, but no debris from the plane was spotted. Frustrated, the investigators realized that the batteries on the acoustic pingers would soon run out. These pingers have an underwater detection range of one one or two miles, so without any surface debris to provide guidance the chance that you could lower a listening device into any random spot on the ocean and detect a signal are vanishingly small. Yet with time running out searchers figured they might as well give it a shot. At the beginning of April they started to listen. Lo and behold, they detected a signal!
The Australian government, which was now in charge of the search, was very confident that they had solved the mystery of MH370. The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, declared: "we are very confident that the signals that we are detecting are from the black box on MH370.”
I (Jeff) was very skeptical. I went on CNN and pointed out that, among other things, the acoustic pings that were detected were of the wrong frequency. And I turned out to be right. The authorities sent down submersibles to scan the seabed where the pingers had been heard and found nothing at all.
By late May, officials started to admit that it had been a wild goose chase.
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On March 24, 2014, the Malaysian Prime minister made a shocking announcement: using a new kind of mathematical analysis, scientists at the British satellite communications company Inmarsat had determined conclusively that MH370 had flown into a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean. Because there are no islands in the area, there was no possibility that anyone on the plane could have survived. Therefore, all 239 passengers and crew must be dead. It was a stunningly sweeping conclusion to reach based entirely on a kind of mathematics that no one in the outside world knew the details of. But was it correct?
Up until that time it had seemed to me that the plane more likely went north. It seemed implausible that someone sophisticated and motivated enough to steal a plane so aggressively would do it just to die a protracted death. In fact I’d written two articles for Slate making that case. At the time, most people already thought the plane probably went south, so my editor had only let me write the articles after I’d promised that I would write an apology article if I turned out to be wrong. I thought it was worth it, so I said yes.
After the Prime Minister made his announcement, it looked like I’d lost my bet. But I wasn’t 100 percent convinced yet. What was this math that he was talking about? Until I could see for myself what the basis for his claim was, I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. But I had to wait, because the Malaysians remained secretive about the data and the process that Inmarsat had used to analyse it. Finally, they released the data, and the various independent investigators began working to figure out the mathematical process. It took some work, because the math was indeed a bit tricky, but before long they figured it out. It made sense. The Malaysian Prime Minister had been right — the Inmarsat data did indeed unequivocally indicate that MH370 flew into the remote southern Indian Ocean.
I wrote an article explaining how the math worked, and then another explicitly apologizing for being wrong. It wasn’t the outcome I’d wanted — for one thing, a flight to the south removed any hope that the passengers might still be alive — but part of science is a willingness to accept new evidence. And I was happy that the mystery of MH370 now seemed very close to being solved.
With the first set of metadata, investigators had been able to specficy that MH370 flew one of two quite narrow sets of possible routes, with a crash location very close to the end of them. With this second set of data, they now knew which route was correct. All they had to do was go to the end of the southern route, scan the seabed using sonar, locate the wreckage, retrieve the black box, and figure out what had happened. Voila. Case closed.
The probability map of where the plane probably ended up looked like this, with the most likely resting place in red:
But of course, when it comes to MH370, nothing is ever quite what it seems.
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The First Law of MH370 is that the closer you look at it, the weirder it gets. A good example of this principle can be found in today’s episode, in which we explore how exactly the satellite communications system, or satcom, came to be turned off and back on again after the plane disappeared from radar. At first, most observers assumed that an inattentive hijacker must simply have left they system on when turning off all the other form of communication.
But careful analysis of the data revealed that that was not the case, and raised the crucial question: what procedure could have been used to turn the system turned off and off again, how much expertise would be required to do it that way, and what does this tell us about the perpetrators? Also, Jeff reveals evidence of a little-noticed turn hidden in the Inmarsat data.
This episode is a remastered version of one I made in 2013 as part of the first season of the podcast, “Deep Dive: MH370,” with co-host Andy Tarnoff.
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