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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