Finding MH370

Earlier this month the Malaysian government announced that the seabed search for MH370 would restart on December 30, and it looks looks like that is exactly what is happening. Right about now, as I’m putting together today’s episode on December 30, 2025, the Ocean Infinity marine survey vessel Armada 86 05 is pulling up to the search area, where it will deploy its three underwater robots to acoustically scan the seabed.

The area that they’re planning to search is relatively small — just 10,000 square kilometers, compared to about 250,000 square kilometers during earlier searches between 2014 and 2018. That implies that they think they have a pretty specific idea of where to look.

In today’s episode I discuss about how they got to the search area, where exactly they’ll be looking, and what likely comes next. I also talk with 777 pilot and podcaster John Waters about the seabed search and about his perspective on the mystery.

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It’s December 7, 2025, and Armada 86 05 has set sail from Benoa Port on the island of Bali, Indonesia. After spending a brief period conducting sea trials, it is now making a beeline for the area where it left off searching the seabed in March. If it maintains its current speed, it should arrive several days before the date previously given by the Malaysian government as the start of the new phase. In today’s episode, we discuss the capabilities as well as the limitation of the technology that Ocean Infinity will deploy once it arrives.

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It’s December 3, 2025, and the Malaysia Government has just announced that the private underwater survey company Ocean Infinity will officially recommence the seabed search for MH370 in three weeks’ time. Today, we’re going to talk about why they’re doing it now, where they’ll look, and whether they’re likely to succeed.

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Ocean Infinity’s state-of-the-art offshore support vessel, Armada 86 05, is currently on duty in the Philippines, about halfway through what is expected to be a two-week expedition to search the San Bernardino Strait for historical shipwrecks. Once it’s done, it will need to resupply, and then it will likely head to the southern Indian Ocean to once more take up the seabed scan that one of its sister vessels, Armada 78 06, carried out for several weeks in March. In today’s episode, we look at where I think it will go first, and I dive into the mathematics of probability to explain why Ocean Infinity likely thinks that their chances of success are quite high — and why they might have miscalculated.

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Last December, the Malaysian government announced that the American ocean survey and salvage company Ocean Infinity would once again take up a search of the Indian Ocean seabed in hopes of finding the missing Malaysian airliner, MH370. The company had searched a considerable area of the ocean floor in 2018, but had thrown in the towel after finding nothing. This time around, a single custom-built ocean exploration vessel arrived in the search area in late February, 2025, scanned about 5,000 square kilometers, and then left at the end of March. The company made no official statement about when it would be back, but the Malaysian government said it would be at the end of the year, and reputable sources close to Ocean Infinity said that it aimed to return in November. So we’re all on tenterhooks, waiting to see what will happen and when. In today’s episode, I reveal the latest insights from Kevin Rupp, who has an excellent track record for correctly reporting on what the company is about to do.

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Two episodes ago, I revealed that with the help of two volunteers on the island of Zanzibar I had been able to retrieve the first data showing how Lepas anatifera barnacles grow out on the open sea in the western Indian Ocean, where debris from MH370 was collected. In order to understand what this could tell us about the debris’ origin, I needed to measure the barnacles — more than 700 of them! — and perform a rudimentary statistical analysis. Today I present the results of that analysis. I think they go a long way towards resolving the myster of the missing plane.

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As the facts have emerged in the case of Air India 171, which crashed while taking off from Ahmedabad, India on June 12, it’s become increasingly clear that in all probability it was a case of mass murder suicide on the part of the captain. Mass murder suicide by pilot is a rare phenomenon, but until now they have all followed a certain pattern. Air India does not fit that pattern. In today’s episode, I make the case that the plane’s captain figured out a way to kill himself that is faster, easier, and more difficult to thwart. I fear that other suicidally minded airline pilots might be inspired to copy him, putting the flying public at risk.

Helping me to understand the phenomenon of pilot murder-suicide is Dr Alpo Vuorio of the University of Helsinki, who co-authored a 2023 paper in the journal "Safety" entitled "Commercial Aircraft-Assisted Suicide Accident Investigations Re-Visited—Agreeing to Disagree?" You can find the paper here: https://www.mdpi.com/2313-576X/9/1/17

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This week mark the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the first piece of physical evidence in the case of the missing Malaysian Airliner, MH370. When the badly damaged right flaperon washed ashore on La Réunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, on July 17, 2015, it immediately caused a worldwide sensation. Scientists realized that the barnacles found growing on the flaperon could provide important clues as to where it had drifted from — and that, presumably, would at last reveal the plane’s crash site. At a time when the seabed search had proven frustratingly empty, they hoped that this information could provide the key to finally solving the case. But scientists were missing an important piece of context: a robust understanding of how exactly Lepas anatifera barnacles grow when floating in the open ocean. For years, that understanding proved elusive. However, using data from the Atlantic Oceonographic & Meteorological Laboratory in Miami and the assistance of volunteers living by the ocean’s edge, I’ve finally been able to collect specimens of known age that put the growth of the flaperon barnacles in context and reveal when the object went into the water. It turns out that scientists’ initial expectations were way off the mark.

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So far we’ve been focused on the physical and electronic evidence left behind by whoever took MH370. But there’s also a lot we can infer about the psychology of those who did the deed based on the actions that they carried out. In today’s episode, we zoom in five segments of the disappearance and discuss how they can help us narrow down the list of possible perpetrators.

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As we wait for the seabed search for MH370’s wreckage to restart, it’s worth taking the time to reflect about what we’ve learned from the search thus far, and what future scanning will tell us about the plane’s likely fate. Under the principles of Bayesian inference, the more of the seabed is searched without the plane’s wreckage being discovered, the greater the probability becomes that the plane simply isn’t there at all. But there’s an escape hatch to this logic: according to an idea called Cromwell’s Rule, the probability will not change so long as we are 100 percent confidant in the proposition that the plane is somewhere in the ocean. In today’s episode whether such confidence is merited, or whether the widespread refusal to consider an alternative is due to a mental blockage or blind spot. I also discuss my new feature article in Vanity Fair magazine about mounting concerns about cyber attacks against airliners around the world — and now, for the first time, in the United States.

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