Journalist and aviation expert Jeff Wise and OnMilwaukee publisher Andy Tarnoff have teamed up to take a deep dive into the mystery of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 370. The plane went missing on March 8, 2014, and almost a decade later, there are still no hard answers concerning the fate of its 239 passengers and crew. Wise, featured on the Netflix documentary, “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared,” joins Tarnoff to bring a new methodology to the investigation of tragedy – one that will sort hard facts from speculation and conspiracy theories and bring listeners closer to a comprehensive understanding of what might have happened to the missing plane.
Episode 25 of the podcast – a culmination of six months of content – reveals two major capstones that leaves Jeff and Andy confident to announce that they solved the mystery of MH370. Maybe not all the details ... yet ... but in broad strokes. Two key pieces of evidence, backed by experts, demonstrates that this place didn't crash in the South Indian Ocean.
Don't believe the new evidence? We invite you to analyze it yourself.
On the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of MH370, this is big.
Details and more on our episode show page here: https://www.deepdivemh370.com/24-breakthrough-part-2
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Over the next two episodes, we’re going to reveal a major break in the case — new data that upends our understanding the case. It’s the first significant break in the case since the final report in 2017.
But before we do that, we have to set the stage. For the data to have meaning, you have to understand its context. It has to do with a method of dating events that occurred in the past, involving Lepas barnacles. The idea 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, it can tell you when and where something went in the water. In the case of MH370, it can tell us what happened to the plane.
Even more details at our show page here: https://www.deepdivemh370.com/24-breakthrough-part-1
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For those following the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and had already suspected pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah of hijacking the plane, killing his passengers and himself – the discovery of data on his home flight simulator was the smoking gun.
Out of some 600 saved routes on his PC, one resembled the flight that allegedly ended in the South Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014. Except the routes between the satellite-data-backed projected flight path and Zaharie's simulated course didn't match up in many important ways. Was it a training run for mass murder-suicide, or just an eerie coincidence made by a man who didn't fit the psychological profile of a criminal with that kind of a murderous capacity?
As usual, it depends how you see the mystery. In Episode 23, Jeff Wise and Andy Tarnoff break it down and recreate the evidence to explore the key similarities and differences between flight and flight simulator.
Even more details at our show page, here: https://www.deepdivemh370.com/23-the-flight-simulator
Episode 23 is sponsored by OnMilwaukee.com, an award-winning independent local media company based in Milwaukee, Wis. More at https://corporate.onmilwaukee.com or on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/onmilwaukee.
The episode is also sponsored by Jeff Wise's previous titles for sale now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jeff-Wise/author/B002A56GPQ?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1708324391&sr=8-1&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
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Part one of the process of figuring out the mystery of MH370 is finding explanations for the previously inexplicable things that happened. Part two is trying to verify whether those explanations hold water.
In Episode 10, Andy and Jeff talked about a theory that MH370's specific vulnerabilities could've led to a hacking that not only allowed hijackers to take the plane north, but how it would've helped them cover their tracks.
In Episode 22, they revisit this topic with a renowned ethical "white hat" hacker, Ken Munro of the Pen Test Partners in the UK. He talks about whether this Boeing 777 could've been hacked – and if he thinks it really was.
Also, Andy shares his theory on what happened to MH370, an opinion accumulated after six months working on the Deep Dive podcast.
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It's a story that reads like the plot of reality show. Self-styled adventurer, former State Department employee, self-proclaimed fluent Russian speaker, Blaine Alan Gibson, found dozens of pieces from the doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. Sometimes with a camera crew in tow. Often in places that had been extensively scoured with a fine-tooth comb.
Was Gibson the luckiest adventure seeker ever? Was he a Russian spy? Listen as Jeff and Andy play never-before-heard interviews with Blaine and a Russian "friend" who allegedly met Gibson when he was "in Siberia on business trips." If nothing else, Gibson's resumé seems a little too good to be true.
Or is it?
Whether or not you believe Jeff's theory that this wreckage was planted and conveniently found by Gibson, his peculiar back story definitely raises some questions.
Video version here: https://youtu.be/R53NGXxlYTo
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“Lepas don’t lie,” says Jim Carlton, one of the world’s leading experts in marine invertebrates. This week Andy and Jeff tried something we haven’t done before, incorporating an interview with a subject expert into our discussion of the MH370 evidence. In this case, Jim helps us try to understand how it could be that a piece of aircraft debris could float across the ocean in the way that Australian authorities assumed, with Lepas barnacles growing on a section that stuck up high into the air. (Spoiler alert: it couldn’t.) Jim also explains some other puzzling aspects of the debris. The upshot is that when we look at the marine growth on all the pieces of MH370 debris, it just doesn’t tell us the story we’d expect if the plane had crashed into the 7th arc search zone in March 2014. Once again, the closer we look at the evidence, the stranger the tale seems to become. More information at https://deepdovemh370.com, as well as the video version of this podcast at https://www.youtube.com/@DeepDiveMH370.
Thanks to our Episode 20 sponsor, Finnished MKE. More information here: https://www.instagram.com/finnished_mke/
For half a year after MH370’s right-hand flaperon washed ashore on La Réunion, no other pieces of aircraft debris turned up. Was that remarkable piece a one-off? And then, suddenly, everyting changed. The following February an American adventure-seeker named Blaine Alan Gibson found a trianguler piece of a with the words “No Step” on a sandbar in Mozambique. Experts confirmed that it, too, came from MH370. In an instant, Gibson became famous around the world, and his examples inspired others to look more carefully at coastlines in the western Indian Ocean. In short order another half-dozen had been turned in, several of them encrusted with marine organisms that could help scientists figure out where they drifted from. As they confronted all this new data, however, search officials found them grappling with some puzzles. At first, they couldn’t figure out how the flaperon had floated to La Réunion in the time in had—and once they resolved that problem to their satisfaction, they realized they were even more perplexed by the arrival of a piece of one of the engines in South Africa. Was there something about these pieces that they didn’t understand?
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On July 29, 2015, a worker in the French territory of Réunion Island discovered MH370’s flaperon, the first confirmed piece of wreckage from the missing plane. It seemed like case closed, that the doomed plane crashed near the seventh arc in the Indian Ocean. But not everything added up. Between reverse drift models and sea life that was growing inconsistently on the debris, it raised the question: are we 100% sure that flaperon came from where authorities suspected? Details at deepdivemh370.com, and a video version of this podcast at https://www.youtube.com/@DeepDiveMH370
So far in this podcast we’ve spent each episode diving into a particular aspect of the mystery. This time, we’re taking a different approach. We’re pulling back to look at the mystery from a global perspective in order to address the question: What is this case like? Just as every person has a unique character, a mystery can have a personality of its own, and MH370 certainly does. The dominant feature of that personality is strangeness. Time and again, a piece of evidence emerges which changes what we understand about the case – but then it turns out the evidence itself contains mysteries that themselves need to be elucidated. In today’s episode, we look at five of the most striking examples of this phenomena. Together, they raise the question: why is the MH370 like this? Is it just a matter of coincidence, or is there some underlying aspect of the case that keeps pulling it toward the unexpected? For more info, visit our show page at DeepDiveMH370.com.
By mid-2015, the search for MH370 had entered a kind of limbo. The designated seabed search area had been scanned without success. So what evidence was there that the plane had really gone south? Attention turned to the topic of floating debris and where it might be found. If the plane had impacted the ocean in the way the Inmarsat data implied — namely, with catastrophic velocity — then there should be many thousands of pieces of wreckage floating on the surface. Oceanographers turned to the science of drift modeling, which can produce probabilistic models of where floating objects in any given stretch of ocean might go. It seemed like the most likely place for stuff to wash ashore was going to be the western shore of Australia, where thousands of beachcombers waited expectantly. They were disappointed. But then a stunning discovery emerged thousands of miles away. For more info and for the video version of this podcast, visit our show page at https://www.deepdivemh370.com/p/episode-16-debris
Seven months after MH370 disappeared, ships leased from the Dutch maritime survey company Fugro were at last ready to begin searching the seabed that Australian scientists had defined using data mysteriously transmitted from the aircraft during its final six hours. Fugro’s ships faced a daunting task: searching a vast area, far from land, where abyssal plains and steep-walled canyons lay concealed beneath three miles of water. The search authorities were confident that success was right around the corner — at least at first. But as days turned to months turned to years without any sign of the missing plane, they began to wonder if they had made a mistake. Had one of their assumptions been wrong? Was it possible the plane wasn't in the underwater search area? And if so, where else could it have gone? More info at deepdivemh370.com.
If MH370 didn’t fly into the southern Indian Ocean but instead wound up in Kazakhstan, that implied that Russia was behind a sophisticated hijacking plot. Intrigued by the presence on the flight manifest of three Russian-speaking passengers, Jeff had already hired researchers in Russia and Ukraine to look into their background when he learned on July 17, 2014, that one of MH370’s 14 sister aircraft, a 777 operating as Flight MH17, had been shot down over eastern Ukraine. Jeff immediately suspected a possible link between the fate of the two flights, but at first, aviation experts and political pundits alike were convinced that the shoot-down had been a mistake and could not possibly have been connected to MH370’s vanishing. In time, however, powerful evidence emerged that undermined those early assumptions. More info at deepdivemh370.com. The video version of this episode can be found here: https://youtu.be/cf0lcbSNPAg
Careful analysis of satellite signals sent from MH370 to Inmarsat indicated that the plane had flown into a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean. But another possibility existed. The equipment that MH370 carried and the circumstances under which it operated together created a potential vulnerability that sophisticated hijackers could have exploited to make the plane appear to have flown south when it really headed north. If that occurred, then the plane would have flown instead to the northwest, over India, Nepal, China, and Kyrgyzstan before winding up in Kazakhstan. In today’s episode we discuss the details of the plane’s possible northern route, and explore whether it could have flown all that way without being detected by military radar. More info at deepdivemh370.com. Video version here: https://youtu.be/CxMdcTtLKsQ?si=stECu8s82Ght45Xl
Once the scientists at CSIRO had generated the probability distribution for the plane’s last known location on the 7th arc, the next question they had to answer was: how far did the plane travel from that point before it impacted the water? As we've discussed previously, their goal was to define a search box within which the plane was likely to be found. The plane’s location along the 7th arc defined the length of the rectangle, and the distance it could have traveled from the 7th arc would define the width of the search box. So the question of how far the plane could have flown after the last transmission depends on what the investigators thought was going on with the plane at that moment. They decided that, based on the nature of the Inmarsat signals, the plane had mostly run out of fuel and had already started its inevitable descent into the ocean. But had it plummeted steeply, or taken a long, gradual glide? More information at deepdivemh370.com.
In episode 11 of the podcast, Jeff and Andy discuss the elephant in the room: who are they to speculate on the mystery of missing Malaysia Air Flight MH370? They talk about their unique backgrounds, what brought them together for this podcast, as well as how the Bayesian Method provided authorities to look for the plane where they did. For more, visit their website at deepdivemh370.com
In what’s sure to be the most controversial episode of the series so far, Jeff and Andy delve into the question of whether MH370 might have had a previously unrecognized security backdoor. In the months after the disappearance, a series of surprising facts emerged which, taken together, raised the possibility that the Inmarsat data guiding the official search might not be as infalliably trustworthy as previously assumed. One Independent Group member even identified a specific parameter in the plane’s Satellite Data Unit which, if switched, would make the plane look like it was going south when it was really going north. Whether or not this vulnerability was exploited, its existence means that there was now a second lens through which the evidence of the case could be viewed.
Do you think that this back door is a flat-out impossibility that should be discarded alongside theories of UFOs and black holes? Or a plausible hypothesis that needs to be explored further? Let us know in the comments.
And as always, for more information (or to sign up for our free weekly newsletter) check out the full show notes and link to video podcast at deepdivemh370.com.
Within weeks after the disappearance of MH370, one theory of its disappearance had come to the fore: that one of the pilots had seized control of the plane and flown it on a prolonged and sophisticated murder-suicide mission into the southern Indian Ocean. Nothing like it had ever happened before, but there seemed no other way to easily explain the picture that had emerged from the Inmarsat data. So who were these men? In today’s episode we’ll look at what friends and family said about Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid and what traces could be found of them on social media. Based on what we’ve found, do you think one of them is a cold-blooded mass murderer? Let us know in the comments. And as always, for more information (or to sign up for our free weekly newsletter) check out the full show notes at deepdivemh370.com. For a video version of this podcast, check out https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAonCb_2GvOsYtVgh7gBGt7QYeFiBCEkL
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.
