Finding MH370

Someone took MH370. But who, and why? In today’s episode of Finding MH370, we delve into the motivation and methodology of one potential culprit with someone who has a rare and compelling perspective — recently retired CIA officer Sean Wiswesser, who spent decades studying and applying the lessons of espionage and spy tradecraft.

I want to be clear up front, I’m not talking to Sean about what the CIA thinks happened to MH370. Rather, we're discussing the strategic environment in which the disappearance took place. That will help us understand the number one question that people always ask me: Why was this plane taken? What was the motive?

The most widely held assumption, of course, has long been that the captain must have taken the plane. In the previous three episodes, we saw how the three pillars underlying that main theory turn out to be fragile. The implication — that the captain wasn’t the culprit — leaves us with only one plausible alternative explanation, that the hijacking was carried out by extremely ruthless and sophisticated outside actors. Namely, Russia.

But why would Russia want to do such a thing?

This is where Sean Wiswesser’s expertise comes in. He has studied their motives, he has studied their mindset and their methodologies, he has gone toe to toe with Putin’s Russia for decades. You can find his book here: https://www.usni.org/press/books/tradecraft-tactics-and-dirty-tricks

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In the previous two episodes I talked about how search officials became convinced that the plane must have gone into the southern Indian Ocean because they didn’t think that debris could be planted, and they didn’t think that Inmarsat data could be tampered with.

Today I’m going to talk about a third belief: that the plane had to have been hijacked by the captain because that’s who was in the cockpit, and the plane can only be flown from there. It was a reasonable-sounding assumption, but it turns out to be wrong. There is a relatively simple way to fly the plane from the electronics bay, and I was able to figure it out in detail by looking at publicly available documents and talking to professors at aeronautical universities and retired control system engineers.

To help me explain it, I’m honored to be joined today by John Waters, a former US Air Force fighter pilot who now flies 777s for a living, and is also the host of the excellent Afterburn Podcast.

As for this podcast, if you want to get a free newsletter that goes out with every new episode, you can sign up at the showpage, FindingMH370.com.

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Soon after MH370 vanished in 2014, investigators became convinced that there was only one possible explanation: that the plane's captain, Zaharie Ahmed Shah, had hijacked the plane and carried out an elaborate and technically sophisticated plan to commit mass murder-suicide by flying to a remote stretch of ocean and crashing there.

Underlying their sense of certainy were three core beliefs. In today's episode we explore the second of those: their belief that the data that they had received from the plane’s satellite communication system, and which scientists had analyzed to designate a search area, was 100 percent reliable and couldn’t have been tampered with.

We'll look at new research which finds that the 777 data bus is actually wide open to data tampering, and that by feeding falsified information into a program called the Doppler Precompensation Algorithm, sophisticated hiijackers could have made the plane seem to investigators like it had traveled south into the remote ocean when it had actually flown north to an airfield in Central Asia.

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In July of 2015, fifteen months after Malaysica Airlines Flight 370 disappeared into the night, a piece of its right wing washed ashore on La Réunion island in the western Indian Ocean. Investigators hoped that barnacles growing on the wing could offer a clue as to where the plane had crashed. But unfortunately, so little was known about these creatures at the time that no inferences could be drawn.

Over the last year and a half, I've been carrying out a project to collect scientific drifter buoys that have come ashore, in order to collect the barnacles growing on the and create a database to finally show in detail how these animals grow, so that we can at last understand what they're trying to tell us. Now that we've collected more than a dozen buoys from all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans, a picture is starting to emerge that is quite at odds with what investigators expected -- and indeed, even thought possible -- at the time.

Also in this episode I respond to a critique from the man who once headed up the seabed search conducted by the Australian government, and I explain why the seabed search for MH370 might be permanently over.

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With the latest round of seabed search suspended after a fairly miniscule of progress, there’s a lot of frustration right now about the search for MH370. A lot of people just can’t believe that, in this day and age, countries like the United States and Australia, which have some of the most advanced technology in the world available to them, can’t find a 200 foot long airplane with 239 people aboard.

One of the most frequent comments I get is, “I can’t believe that the government doesn’t know where the plane is,” or, put another way, “the government isn’t telling us the whole truth.” Well, over the years I’ve talked to a fair number of people inside the official investigation, and I think I have a fairly well grounded understanding of their mindset, and I will say that, while there isn’t a grand coverup going on, there are definitely things that the government — whether that be Malaysia, Australia, or the United States — isn’t telling us. In today’s episode I’m going to talk about what those are and why they matter.

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It’s Sunday, February 8, and Armada 86 05 has set sail from Gage Roads near Perth Australia, and is not heading back out to the search area, as many had hoped, but is instead sailing for the Pacific, putting the search for MH370 back on ice. Some have speculated online that Ocean Infinity stopped looking because they found the wreckage; I’ll unpack why that is probably not the case, and will look at what lies ahead in the search for MH370. I’ll also unpack the mystery of a long telephone call that Captain Zaharie Ahmed Shah took part in before taking off on the fateful flight: Who was the call with, and was it tied to the plane’s disappearance?

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Phase 2 of the seabed search for MH370 has ended, as Ocean Infinity’s search ship pulls its robot subs from the water and hands for port. In today’s episode we’ll talk about what they accomplished in the fourth week of their seabed scan and what lies ahead for future searches. We’ll also solve a mystery that cropped up in last week’s episode and see what we can make of a new one — namely, what entries in an Australian port schedule can tell us about Ocean Infinity’s plans.

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Last week we expected that the scan of the seabed was about to take a short-term break, as Ocean Infinity’s research ship, Armada 86 05, was scheduled to return to port the very next day. Well, right after that episode dropped Ocean Infinity changed its plans, and its arrival data in Fremantle was changed from January 20 to January 29. This was definitely a welcome change, as it’s always a good thing if Ocean Infinity is going to spend more time on station scanning the seabed. But unfortunately, the weather did not play along. A storm hit the area, forcing Armada 86 05 to retrieve the AUVs and wait out the strong winds and massive waves.

In today’s episode we break down how the seabed search progressed, and I have deep conversation with NASA’s Dr Nigel Packham, who spent decades at NASA studying safety and risk in manned spaceflight and was involved in the investigation into the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Unlike MH370, that was a case that officials were determined to pursue relentlessly until they had all the answers the needed to make sure that the same tragedy wouldn’t happen twice. I asked Dr. Packham how that kind of implacable attitude could be applied to MH370.

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Ocean Infinity has completed its second week of searching the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysian airliner, MH370, and it’s making good progress. But Armada 86 05, while a modern ship with state-of-the-art technology, isn’t really equipped to keep a substantial crew of mariners out at sea for very long, and the word on the street is that it will have to return to port very soon. In today’s episode we look at the area that it appears to have scanned, look ahead to the future, and answer questions sent in my viewers.

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The marine survey vessel Armada 86 05 has been back out on station, resuming the search for MH370. Things haven’t gone entirely smoothly. The ship did a couple days’ worth of scanning, had to go on standby for a couple of days due to bad weather before deploying its deep-scanning robot subs once more. We happen to know more about the details of the search than we usually do because lately the company doing the search, Ocean Infinity, has been been unusually communicative with the families of the missing passengers and crew. In today’s episode I fill you in on everything that’s been happening and respond to viewer questions.

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