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, first in the South China Sea, then in the Andaman Sea, then in the remote southern Indian Ocean. Not a single piece was ever spotted. Today we’re going to talk about how the search went down, and what we might conclude from its failure to find any debris. We’ll also discuss a new discovery that Jeff made while researching today’s episode, and revisit 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. For show notes and links to the video-only version of this podcast, visit deepdivemh370.com.

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? Herein lies the technical heart of the MH370 mystery, one that no TV documentary (and only one book) has ever delved into, involving as it does such arcana as geosynchoronous orbital drift and Doppler precompensation. But Jeff and Andy break it down for you in plain, easy-to-understand English. For show notes and links to the video-only version of this podcast, visit deepdivemh370.com.

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 episode six, 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 the 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.

For more information about the episode, and a link to the video-only podcast, visit our show page at deepdivemh370.com or our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@DeepDiveMH370.

This week, Jeff Wise and Andy Tarnoff break down the latest in a string of stunning developments into the disappearance of Malaysia Airline flight MH370. It’s the week after the revelation that Inmarsat had been collecting data from the missing plane for a full six hours after it vanished from military radar. Now it turns out that, with a bit of clever math, Inmarsat scientists have been able to narrow down the plane’s location to seven broad arcs — and more than that, these arcs imply that the plane took one of two routes towards its final destination. One route goes north, the other goes south — but which is correct?

For more information about the episode, and a link to the video version of this podcast, visit our show page at deepdivemh370.com

In episode four of Deep Dive: MH370, Jeff Wise and Andy Tarnoff explore yet another twist and turn in the vanishing of the missing plane. They also debunk some popular theories of what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, as well as comment on another story making the rounds online: that the plan was taken by UFOs. A video version of this podcast is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUXIrQ2rO5B_z-AEpjmKaAw

This week, the mystery deepens as, in the days after MH370’s disappearance, the Malaysian authorities first deny, then confirm that their military radar detected the missing 777 as it turned back from its planned route to Beijing just a few seconds after it passed the final waypoint in Malaysian airspace. The plane reversed course, flew back over the Malayan Peninsula, then flew up the middle of the Malacca Strait toward the northwest before disappearing again over the Andaman Sea. Jeff and Andy discuss the difference between primary and secondary radar, and Jeff explains why the timing of the turnback struck him as suspicious.

The mystery begins. Shortly after midnight on March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and headed to the northeast, towards Beijing. For the first 40 minutes of the flight, everything was absolutely routine. But then, at 1.21 a.m. local time, the plane vanished from the radar screens of air traffic control. In today's episode, Jeff and Andy discuss what it means for a civilian flight to disappear from radar screens, and why the timing of the disappearance might raise a red flag for investigators. We'll talk about why it took so long for authorities to realize that something had gone wrong, and why the initial assumption was that the plane most likely had crashed close to its last known position.

In this first episode, journalist and aviation expert Jeff Wise and OnMilwaukee publisher Andy Tarnoff set the stage for how to discuss the mystery of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 370. They interview Peter Waring, who was a lieutenant in the Australian Navy in 2014 and participated in the search for wreckage with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. Wise and Tarnoff talk about how best to approach this unsolved case, laying out the journalistic and scientific methods they will use to peel away the layers of the onion in each upcoming podcast episode.