Andy Tarnoff and I spent eight months making the 31 episodes that comprised the podcast series “Deep Dive: MH370.” Our goal was to break down a complicated case so that it could be understood by viewers and listeners in an entertaining and easy-to-digest format. In today’s episode, we discuss the six important conclusions about the case that the public might not understand were it not for the podcast.

As a follow-up to this series I later started producing the series “Finding MH370,” currently ongoing, which builds upon the work of “Deep Dive” and extends it further with an eye to ultimately solving the case.

Today we’re going to go deeper than we’ve ever gone before on a question that I’ve called the crux of the whole MH370 mystery, and which is newly important because a bunch of viral MH370 videos have come out that spend a lot of time discussing it and, I’ll argue, they’re getting it wrong. And it matters a great deal because these videos are shaping what the public thinks is a reasonable explanation of the mystery.

To help us with this important task we have with us a very special guest today, Juan Browne, an experienced airline pilot and the host of the popular aviation channel Blancolirio on YouTube.

Juan has been flying airplanes for a very long time, and most recently he’s been working as a first officer on 777 flights over the Atlantic, so he really knows aviation and he knows this plane in particular. I reached out to Juan because I knew he could help us understand a crucial but widely misundersood aspect of the MH370 mystery. Namely: how did MH370’s satcom get turned off, and get turned back on again?

This is the central crux of the mystery because, first of all, no one’s been able to come up with a really good explanation for how and why it happened, and second, without it we don’t get the 7 ping arcs, we don’t get the BFO analysis, we don’t wind up having anywhere to look in the southern Indian Ocean.

It doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Unless you understand the man who makes the decisions in Russia, and how he sees the world.

Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer stationed in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Like many patriotic Russians, Putin experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union not as the blossoming of freedom, but as the humiliation of a once-great power. Territory that had once been considered the heartland of the empire split off into independent states. Putin later called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” After he came to power, he was determined to return his country to its rightful place of greatness in the world. To do that, he would need to adopt a mode of warfare suited to Russia’s diminished resources — an approach called hybrid warfare. And that involves hurting your adversary in all sorts of ways, some blunt and obvious, others quite sophisticated and unexpected.

Today’s topic is one that I’ve been fascinated by for a long time: the art of stage magic and what it can tell us about MH370. I’m joined by Ed Dentzel, the host of an excellent podcast Unfound, in which he’s examined hundreds of missing persons cases. In a previous life Ed was the stage manager for “The World’s Greatest Magic Show” at the Greek Isles in Las Vegas from 2005 to 2008. While there he worked with more than 50 magicians, helping them create and hone new tricks. Ed wrote a guest post for my blog back in 2019 and I found what he said really fascinating and I’ve been wanting to have him on the show for a long time.

If the satcom was hacked and MH370 was taken north, the perpetrators presumably had a plan that ended with them alive, and this would have to involve landing the plane at an airport.

But is there an airport they could have landed at?

If there are no airports near the part of the 7th arc where MH370’s flight would have terminated, then that would be a major blow to the cyber-hijack theory. As it turns out, though, there are a number of airports where the plane could plausibly have landed, and in today’s eposide we look at some of the more intriguing ones.

When Andy and I made the original version of this episode in March, 2024, Malaysia and the underwater search company Ocean Infinity were publicly discussing the idea of restarting the scan of the seabed. At the time it had been several years since Fugro and then Ocean Infinity had carried out searches that together had covered an area the size of Great Britain. In this episode Andy and I discuss how the original seabed search area had been defined and assessed whether expanding that area would likely result in success. It’s newly relevant because, while those discussions petered out without action, the parties have recently been discussing such a move once more. My personal assessment of the idea’s value remains unchanged.

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.

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.

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.

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.