Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's me Josh, and I've said it before
Speaker 1: and I'll say it again. The disappearance of MH three
Speaker 1: seventy is one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history.
Speaker 1: In the second part, we talk about the investigation into
Speaker 1: the disappearance and the theories of what might have happened.
Speaker 1: Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and
Speaker 1: there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and this is part two
Speaker 1: of two about H three seventy, the most mysterious disappearance
Speaker 1: of any airliner in the history of modern aviation.
Speaker 2: That's right. We won't do a full recap, but where
Speaker 2: we're picking up now.
Speaker 1: No, no, wait, you want to do a full recap
Speaker 1: twenty minutes easy.
Speaker 2: We are at the point where the plane has crashed,
Speaker 2: and we're going to pick up with a post crash investigations, which,
Speaker 2: like many airline crash investigations, were bungled, and was bungled
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So Ed points out that like kind of
Speaker 1: oddly that there are a lot of crash investigations you
Speaker 1: can point to that, you know, kind of deferred toward
Speaker 1: the airline manufacturer when they were at fault or tried
Speaker 1: to do some cover up or was not great. None
Speaker 1: of them, from what I can tell, compower to this one.
Speaker 2: No agreed.
Speaker 1: This is very, very not good. And the seems to
Speaker 1: be the roundly accepted reason for the whole thing being
Speaker 1: bungled was that Malaysia at the time was a dictatorship
Speaker 1: and you could disappear if you weren't doing your job
Speaker 1: very well or if you offended the people in charge,
Speaker 1: and a crash of a Malaysian's airline flight in particular
Speaker 1: was kind of a dicey thing to talk about because
Speaker 1: Malaysian Airlines was the pride of Malaysia and it was
Speaker 1: at the time a government largely government owned and controlled airline,
Speaker 1: a state owned airline. It was the Malaysia was the
Speaker 1: majority owner of stock, and it was publicly traded. Malayia
Speaker 1: Airlines was, but they owned the majority of it. They
Speaker 1: called the shots. And after twenty fourteen, which proved to
Speaker 1: be a terrible year by any airline standards, because not
Speaker 1: only was MH three to seventy it vanish MH seventeen
Speaker 1: was shot down over Ukraine the same year. Just less
Speaker 1: than six months later, the Malaysian government set about buying
Speaker 1: back all of the shares that were outstanding of Malaysian
Speaker 1: Airlines and took it off of public listing made it
Speaker 1: a fully stayed owned company.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they certainly didn't want the bad press no
Speaker 2: was sure to follow.
Speaker 1: Now, so there's a lot of people who say the
Speaker 1: Malaysian government covered this up, not because they did anything
Speaker 1: the fariest, but because they were worried that something embarrassing
Speaker 1: was going to come out. And this is not a
Speaker 1: government that could handle embarrassment very well, and so they
Speaker 1: literally obfuscated the investigation into what happened at mh three
Speaker 1: to seventy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the first problem here is we know now
Speaker 2: that this plane crashed in the South Indian Ocean, and
Speaker 2: it took a week before they were looking in the
Speaker 2: South Indian Ocean, So the first twenty four hours was
Speaker 2: in the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam. They
Speaker 2: ended up hooking up and creating a Joint Agency Coordination
Speaker 2: Center or actually Australia's who created that, and they led
Speaker 2: the search efforts because it was close to them and
Speaker 2: they found no trace even after they did all this
Speaker 2: ocean floor mapping searching. You know, they had that seventh
Speaker 2: arc peg searched all along there.
Speaker 1: One hundred and twenty thousand square miles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is you know, even if you find that
Speaker 2: seventh arc and you know it's somewhere in here, that's
Speaker 2: still a vast, vast area. And this thing is on
Speaker 2: the bottom of the ocean at this point.
Speaker 1: And we should say it. By this time, Australia has
Speaker 1: stepped up and been like, well, this happened not too
Speaker 1: far from US. I guess we're the closest major country,
Speaker 1: certainly Western democracy in this in this area. We'll head
Speaker 1: this up. Malaysia will help you out. And they footed
Speaker 1: a lot of the bill, which was pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah for Australia. Sixty million bucks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, from what under stand me. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: it was the most and still is the most expensive
Speaker 1: search in aviation history. Yeah, which is kind of surprising.
Speaker 1: You'd think that more would have been spent, but I
Speaker 1: think they usually find them sooner than this. This was
Speaker 1: not found.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they.
Speaker 1: Searched for two solid years for this thing, and just
Speaker 1: on that seventh arc. Yeah, there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: who at the time were like, no, you know how
Speaker 1: it forms a circle. Well, there's a northern arc and
Speaker 1: a southern arc. And some people said, no, northern arc somewhere,
Speaker 1: it's in Kazakhstan. The southern arc was in the Indian Ocean.
Speaker 1: Most people said, probably the southern arc, right, So that's
Speaker 1: where they searched, and they still didn't find it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it took so long to even get there.
Speaker 2: By that point, there were a lot of things. If
Speaker 2: you had that first twenty four hours, it's sort of
Speaker 2: like a murder investigation. That first day is so key,
Speaker 2: the first forty eight Yeah is it forty eight? Say
Speaker 2: I'm making I'm there and done at twenty four buddy, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: So Malaysia then heads up what's called the Joint Investigation Team.
Speaker 2: The US was involved, China, Britain, and France.
Speaker 1: This was the one that was meant to follow the
Speaker 1: protocols of just the internationally agreed upon the accident investigation
Speaker 1: to make for everybody. And Malaysia did not help out
Speaker 1: very well.
Speaker 2: No, so they issued the Malaysian Ministry of Transport issued
Speaker 2: a preliminary and a final report. The preliminary report ed
Speaker 2: describes as more or less a reprint of the Boeing
Speaker 2: seven to seven seven manual, just like, well, here here
Speaker 2: was the plane.
Speaker 1: Which I think think it's kind of standard to have
Speaker 1: technical information, but this is.
Speaker 2: The whole report, and then the second one, the final
Speaker 2: report basically pointed out where air traffic control failed along
Speaker 2: the way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I saw in that Langwish article that they
Speaker 1: were politically speaking the easiest targets they were not going to.
Speaker 1: There wasn't going to be any backlash by kind of
Speaker 1: taking them to task, especially taking the ho Chi Minh
Speaker 1: air traffic controllers to task too. They should have been
Speaker 1: taking the task. Eighteen minutes is a very long time
Speaker 1: to let an airliner in your jurisdiction just be disappeared.
Speaker 1: So that was a big problem. But the Malaysian Air
Speaker 1: Force also should have been criticized for covering up the
Speaker 1: fact that they hadn't done anything for an hour, that
Speaker 1: they were tracking this unidentified airplane in their airspace and
Speaker 1: let an entire search multi national search be mounted in
Speaker 1: the South China.
Speaker 2: Scene in the wrong place, like a couple of days.
Speaker 1: Before they were like, actually, yeah, we think they went
Speaker 1: this way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, because it takes a long time to
Speaker 2: even assemble that kind of search squad. Yeah, So I
Speaker 2: think if they searched for two days and didn't get
Speaker 2: start till a week later, that's like four days just
Speaker 2: to like move right, you know.
Speaker 1: And so in that time, an oil slick, a debris field,
Speaker 1: all that stuff can just vanish. Yeah, and an airliner
Speaker 1: really can in an area the size of the Indian Ocean,
Speaker 1: especially even when you know where to look, can just disappear.
Speaker 1: And that is why a lot of people say we
Speaker 1: will probably never find yeh three seventy's there's another couple
Speaker 1: of reasons, why too.
Speaker 2: Are we going to get to those? Sure? Okay, the
Speaker 2: police in Malaysia and this bore a little bit of fruit.
Speaker 2: They conducted some background checks on everyone on the plane,
Speaker 2: and they did find two passengers who were Iranians that
Speaker 2: had stolen passports. Apparently they were just seeking political assa though,
Speaker 2: although that does factor into some of the conspiracy theories
Speaker 2: that pop up later on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anytime you have two Iranian nationals traveling under fake
Speaker 1: passports on a plane that disappeared, some people are going
Speaker 1: to say, sure, I don't know about that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly. And then here was The one thing about
Speaker 2: their final report from the police is they described Captain T.
Speaker 2: Sahari basically saying like this guy was great, nothing wrong,
Speaker 2: he was a great pilot. Nothing to alarm anybody here
Speaker 2: about Captain Sahari, And that's in the final report and
Speaker 2: we'll get to him. But that does not appear to
Speaker 2: be true.
Speaker 1: No, So after the search, after two years and one
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty million dollars and one hundred and twenty thousand, sorry,
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty thousand square kilometers, I think it
Speaker 1: said square miles, still a lot of square miles searched.
Speaker 1: The Australians, the Malaysians, and the Chinese that made up
Speaker 1: the tripartite commission that we're kind of running the show
Speaker 1: in the search said officially, we don't know what happened.
Speaker 1: All we can say is that we believe MH three
Speaker 1: seventy ended somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. That the
Speaker 1: official stance on what happened to a vanished airliner that
Speaker 1: they said, we don't know, And that's as far as
Speaker 1: we're going to go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I do want to point out quickly there
Speaker 2: was one private agency called in Or I think volunteered
Speaker 2: called Ocean Infinity from Texas. Yeah, they performed a search
Speaker 2: basically pro bono. If they find the plane, they get paid.
Speaker 2: But just as a sort of a nerd in this way,
Speaker 2: I looked at that company and they are awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's really cool man. They are. They call it seabed Intelligence,
Speaker 2: and it's like James Cameron style stuff. The resources and
Speaker 2: the toys that the dudes to play with. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: pretty pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They'll have a mother ship. Well at least this
Speaker 1: is what they did for the Image three seventy search.
Speaker 1: They have a mother ship. Yeah, and I think the
Speaker 1: mothership goes through in maps the underwater terrain in three
Speaker 1: D first and then that forms their search area. They
Speaker 1: release some autonomous drones.
Speaker 2: Yeah they look like torpedoes yep, but.
Speaker 1: They're drones that can be controlled from this mothership and
Speaker 1: they go through and scan using sonar in detail the seabed.
Speaker 2: It's so cool and iris photography. It's like really cool stuff.
Speaker 1: It works really well. Ocean Ocean Infinity has a great
Speaker 1: track reckerally finding stuff there. Who I would call They've
Speaker 1: they found like a missing submarine from Argentina. They found
Speaker 1: a bunch of other things. I would call them too.
Speaker 2: By the way, we should get them on the We
Speaker 2: should hire them out for the Tybee Island nuke.
Speaker 1: We totally should. I'm surprised they haven't just done that
Speaker 1: for fun. Yeah, as a matter of fact, I think
Speaker 1: they should solve a mystery. Yeah, the broken arrow or
Speaker 1: the empty quiver.
Speaker 2: And they're like, we spent how many multimillions of dollars
Speaker 2: just to say we solve that mystery? Rights for this?
Speaker 1: No? No, they're from Texas, so anytime they find something,
Speaker 1: they don't think about that. Instead they just shoot their
Speaker 1: six shooters into the air.
Speaker 2: That's right. I forgot about that, right.
Speaker 1: So that's fine, that's good enough for them. Let's pay enough.
Speaker 1: But Ocean Infinity, Yeah, they know what they're doing, and
Speaker 1: they still couldn't find it. A three. There were some
Speaker 1: things that were found in the search. Number one. This
Speaker 1: was uncharted territory and now huge swaths of it are
Speaker 1: now mapped. They found an underwater volcano, an enormous one
Speaker 1: that they had no idea existed before. They found a
Speaker 1: couple of shipwrecks from the nineteenth century that had just
Speaker 1: been totally lost, but they still found no trace whatsoever
Speaker 1: of MH three seventy, despite two major searches in an
Speaker 1: official finally an official final report from Australia saying we
Speaker 1: don't know, We will probably never know. All we can
Speaker 1: say is that the flight ended almost certainly in the
Speaker 1: Southern Indian Ocean.
Speaker 2: That's right, and we should shout out the Independent Group.
Speaker 2: This is an online group of enthusiasts Internet. Yeah, who
Speaker 2: got together to try and figure this out. And at
Speaker 2: even pointed out like you know, you hear Internet sleuths,
Speaker 2: and you're like, come on, get off the tinfoil hat.
Speaker 2: But it turns out that these people, a lot of
Speaker 2: them when there were engineers, They worked in aviation formally
Speaker 2: or currently, and they were really interested in trying to
Speaker 2: help and I think ended up helping in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and even beyond like tinfoil heads Internet can they've
Speaker 1: done things like identified John Doe's and Jane Doe's. For sure,
Speaker 1: they've done a lot of cool stuff. But typically they're
Speaker 1: not qualified in what they're doing. They're just very interested
Speaker 1: and very dogged in their pursuits. Right with the Independent Group,
Speaker 1: these are actual like people with PhDs and electrical engineering
Speaker 1: and secondary radar and satellites and the stuff that they're
Speaker 1: they're doing. They just all happened to come together, bound
Speaker 1: by their common interest in search for this plane. And
Speaker 1: if you go and read, I will give you one
Speaker 1: thousand dollars if you can make it through one of
Speaker 1: their blog posts. Yeah, it's so dense and so scientific,
Speaker 1: looked at one of them, but they're so legitimate. The
Speaker 1: Australian government when they wrapped up their search, maybe at
Speaker 1: some point during it they actually acknowledged and thanked the
Speaker 1: Independent Group for their work because they were relying on
Speaker 1: it to some extent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm sure like no one ever and this
Speaker 2: kind of thing or search and rescue, no one ever
Speaker 2: wants this to happen. But this is their chance to
Speaker 2: really get involved in try and do some good.
Speaker 1: Woo the Independent Group.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1: They also agitated for more transparency in this stuff, and
Speaker 1: I think they got their hands well. They went aroundabout way.
Speaker 1: They made friends with some of the family of MH
Speaker 1: three seventy, just by the families hearing about what they
Speaker 1: were doing, and from one of the families they got
Speaker 1: the raw m Marsat data. At a time when m
Speaker 1: Marsatt was saying thistually belongs to Malaysia or Malaysian Airlines.
Speaker 1: We can't release it. Malaysia was saying, well, no, in
Speaker 1: mar Set has to release it. They just went around
Speaker 1: both and got the raw data, and we're able to
Speaker 1: really do some much better calculations than they had before
Speaker 1: with the raw in mar set data.
Speaker 2: All right, so let's take a break and we'll go
Speaker 2: start up our own internet sleuthing concern. Get that ramped up.
Speaker 1: What are we going to get to the bottom of puppies?
Speaker 2: Sure? Okay, why are they so darn cute?
Speaker 1: That sounds like us?
Speaker 2: All right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Okay, chuck.
Speaker 2: So are we at wreckage?
Speaker 1: Not quite yet? I want to talk about the Yeah,
Speaker 1: we are at wreckage. I think they'll tie in nicely
Speaker 1: to what I was going to say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean because this thing disappeared. That is not
Speaker 2: to say there were no traces, because we have pieces
Speaker 2: of this plane. Now. There are people sort of like
Speaker 2: these internets loose that are captured by a story such
Speaker 2: that they will spend a large portion of their life
Speaker 2: trying to solve it and looking for.
Speaker 1: Stuff and savings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, a lot of money I think.
Speaker 1: By people you really mean person.
Speaker 2: No, there are a lot of other people. There was
Speaker 2: one man called Zahid Raza who searched for years and
Speaker 2: he was murdered in Madagascar, so he was.
Speaker 1: His job was as the Malaysian Council to Madagascar, who's
Speaker 1: like the ambassador to Madagascar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the conspiracy minded will say, now this guy's
Speaker 2: finding stuff, and they took him out.
Speaker 1: So there was a dude who did leave his life
Speaker 1: in I think Seattle and move well, actually just started
Speaker 1: moving around the world, which he did normally anyway. But
Speaker 1: his name is Blaine Gibson, and yeah, he factors big
Speaker 1: into that William Languish article. He talks about him a lot.
Speaker 1: But he just became moved by this and decided that
Speaker 1: he was going to go start finding wreckage. And he
Speaker 1: has I think a third of the debris found from
Speaker 1: MH three seventy has been personally found by Blaine Gibson,
Speaker 1: just globe trotting.
Speaker 2: Basically amazing.
Speaker 1: But he figured out if it was the Southern Indian Ocean,
Speaker 1: then this wreckage is probably going to start to show
Speaker 1: up somewhere around the southern the southwest coast of Africa,
Speaker 1: South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, and he was right, and the
Speaker 1: first piece turned up in twenty fifteen. It was a
Speaker 1: six foot piece of an airplane, and it won. No.
Speaker 1: I can't as a matter of fact, I mean looking
Speaker 1: for this and then finding it.
Speaker 2: It's like a search for a needle in a haystack.
Speaker 1: But it was found on Reunion Island off of Madagascar.
Speaker 1: I think it's under the control of Mauritius. And this
Speaker 1: was a really big deal for a couple of reasons. One,
Speaker 1: it showed incontrovertibly that the Southern Arc was correct, that
Speaker 1: it hadn't flown north into Kazakhstan, that the flight had
Speaker 1: end into the Indian Ocean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it showed that it crashed.
Speaker 1: That's a big one. It showed that it had broken
Speaker 1: up like it wasn't like a fire or anything like
Speaker 1: that had come apart.
Speaker 2: Well, and it wasn't secretly landed somewhere. Some of those
Speaker 2: conspiracies get pretty out there, right.
Speaker 1: But the other effect that this had was that it
Speaker 1: devastated the MH three seventy families who had been holding
Speaker 1: out hope because it was disappeared this airliner vanished and
Speaker 1: people were saying, no, it actually is in the air
Speaker 1: based Diego Garcia under US control. No, it's under Russian
Speaker 1: control in Kazakhstan. It's somewhere, our people are somewhere. Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe there's this hope. This dashed those hopes. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it came a full more than a year after the
Speaker 1: plane disappeared. So they had been like really holding onto
Speaker 1: this hope to a desperate degree for more than a
Speaker 1: year and then it was dashed. Yeah, So it was
Speaker 1: a big deal when it was found. And that was
Speaker 1: the first of several pieces that washed up in that area.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This was a part of the airplane called a flaperon.
Speaker 2: It's on the back edge of the wing and it's
Speaker 2: a control surface.
Speaker 1: You know, the kind of this kind of flaps up
Speaker 1: and down on it. It's a great name for it.
Speaker 2: It is now all no and the serial numbers confirmed it.
Speaker 2: So it was definitely from MH three seventy. And then
Speaker 2: many other pieces have I think what dozens at this
Speaker 2: point the pieces of plane have been found.
Speaker 1: What's creepy is other pieces have been found, but they're
Speaker 1: not from MH three seventy. It's like, well, what plane
Speaker 1: are these coming from? Oh? Well, yeah, that's creepy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think maybe every is there any way to
Speaker 2: completely tag every square inch of an airplane? I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't know, and not necessarily with a stamp, but
Speaker 2: I don't know, know, I know what you means, some kind
Speaker 2: of technology.
Speaker 1: If there's a you could probably attach some sort of
Speaker 1: marker to atoms eventually, and yeah, we would be able
Speaker 1: to tag any any part of any plane, down to the.
Speaker 2: Way you find a little four inch piece of metal
Speaker 2: and you know what it is.
Speaker 1: You just like analyze the atomic makeup and yeah, oh
Speaker 1: look image three seventy.
Speaker 2: But that's the future everyone, that's.
Speaker 1: Not too far up. Once we get into nanotechnology, that
Speaker 1: will be commonplace, although we'll also probably be able to
Speaker 1: make planes that don't come apart.
Speaker 2: So the other thing that suggests too is that the
Speaker 2: plane hit and we talked earlier about when a plane
Speaker 2: is descending into an ocean like that is going super fast,
Speaker 2: and this really kind of confirms that because they didn't
Speaker 2: find much wreckage the plane. These parts probably ripped off
Speaker 2: on the way down, and most of the plane fairly
Speaker 2: intact hit the ocean and went south very very fast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right to the bottom, right to the bottom. So
Speaker 1: this also dashed the hopes of the families even further
Speaker 1: in that those four electronic location transmitters, yeah, the beak
Speaker 1: of the life beacons that were supposed to go off,
Speaker 1: and all four failed. Some family members and a lot of
Speaker 1: conspiracy theorists are saying all four of those failing. No way, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it means that the plane didn't descend quickly, didn't catch fire,
Speaker 1: didn't hit water because some of those transmitters are supposed
Speaker 1: to go off when they hit water. But if they
Speaker 1: broke up on the way down, because here's the thing
Speaker 1: is the planes if it entered a steep decline at
Speaker 1: six hundred miles an hour, which is about what they
Speaker 1: think that was cruising at, if it drops from thirty
Speaker 1: five thousand feet at six hundred miles an hour within
Speaker 1: two minutes, it's going to just break up, either on
Speaker 1: the way down or the moment it hit its water.
Speaker 1: So much so that some of these beacons that are
Speaker 1: designed for the scenario are not going to function. And
Speaker 1: there's another there is one beacon that is designed to
Speaker 1: go off on impact. It's designed for that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: but it needs fifty seconds above water to transmit to
Speaker 1: the satellite. So they think this thing hits so fast
Speaker 1: that that beacon might have just gone right down underwater
Speaker 1: and not been able to transmit in that fifty seconds.
Speaker 1: So it's an explanation that the plane came apart in
Speaker 1: the Southern Indian Ocean. Didn't just crash in the Southern
Speaker 1: Indian Ocean. It came into a million pieces in the
Speaker 1: Southern Indian Ocean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, we mentioned the black boxes in
Speaker 2: the previous episode. Obviously we don't have these black boxes.
Speaker 2: They're down there with everything else. Haven't recovered anything like that, but.
Speaker 1: They think that they probably wouldn't tell much of a
Speaker 1: story anyway.
Speaker 2: No, not unless there was some sort of final communications
Speaker 2: or something.
Speaker 1: That's what it would take. It would take whoever was
Speaker 1: in charge of the plane at that time still talking
Speaker 1: and explaining. And if you were the only person alive
Speaker 1: on this plane, who would you be talking to.
Speaker 2: Well, let's go ahead and talk about who this might be,
Speaker 2: because all indications point that it was the captain of
Speaker 2: the airplane himself, Captain Shaw.
Speaker 1: Yep, Captain Zahariamad Shaw.
Speaker 2: That's right. So the wreckage basically, I mean there's a
Speaker 2: lot of clues. Again, we can't say anything for sure.
Speaker 2: But no one ever cl you know, it's unlikely it
Speaker 2: was terrorist, because one thing terrorists do, which is what
Speaker 2: makes them terrorists, is claim responsibility.
Speaker 1: They like to brag.
Speaker 2: Well, so everyone knows who it was. No one did this,
Speaker 2: no one even falsely did this, which happened. Sometimes the
Speaker 2: same can be said for a kidnapping because there are
Speaker 2: some theories about that that there were some important people
Speaker 2: aboard that they wanted to disappear or something.
Speaker 1: Right like, if you were kidnapping somebody, you want them
Speaker 1: alive and they can't be alive if the planes and
Speaker 1: a million pieces in the southern Indian Ocean.
Speaker 2: That's right. And there were only two people on that
Speaker 2: plane who knew and had the knowledge and access to
Speaker 2: do this stuff, and that was Captain Shawn, first Officer Hamid.
Speaker 1: Also, yeah, there's something really important to point out here too, Chuck.
Speaker 1: There was no distress call and for if it was
Speaker 1: a hijacking, between the time that Zahari said good night
Speaker 1: Malaysian three seven zero and the transponder went off at
Speaker 1: exactly the right time, right when it hit a ho
Speaker 1: Chi Minh Air Traffic Controls jurisdiction, it would have taken
Speaker 1: a minute for terrorists to make their way into the cockpit,
Speaker 1: which was sealed with an electronic lock lot super bolted.
Speaker 1: It would have taken less than a minute at a
Speaker 1: precise moment in time for terrorists to take control of
Speaker 1: the plane. That just would not have happened.
Speaker 2: The idea that these two were working together is not
Speaker 2: very plausible. The idea that it was First Officer Hamid
Speaker 2: himself is not plausible because, like we said, this is
Speaker 2: a greenhorn. He was just getting started in his career.
Speaker 2: He was super happy to be to have this job,
Speaker 2: this great job, flying the Pride of Malaysia. Nothing at
Speaker 2: all points that he had anything to do with this.
Speaker 1: No, it doesn't. And also it would have been much
Speaker 1: harder for him to get Captain Shaw out of the cockpit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like want you go take a bathroom break? Yeah,
Speaker 2: would have been like I don't need to you. He's
Speaker 2: like no, but seriously, go do it. I'm wondering how
Speaker 2: Captain Shaw might have gotten him out.
Speaker 1: So one thing languish. This is a well I will
Speaker 1: keep going back to all day long.
Speaker 2: The language.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, he said that Captain Shaw was known as
Speaker 1: a somebody who wanted to know all the details of
Speaker 1: what was going on, So it would have been very normal.
Speaker 2: Go back and check on something exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would have been very normal. It would have
Speaker 1: been very easy, and First Officer Hamid would have hopped,
Speaker 1: dried up and gone right out of the cockpit, leaving
Speaker 1: Shaw alone to lock the door, lock them out.
Speaker 2: Yep. And that's all it took.
Speaker 1: That's all it took.
Speaker 2: So when you start, we said that the report from
Speaker 2: the Malaysian police came back as a glowing report for Shaw.
Speaker 2: When you start doing a little digging around, that's not
Speaker 2: exactly the case. Before this plane disappeared. In the months before,
Speaker 2: he had separated from his wife, he was living by himself.
Speaker 2: Apparently was having an affair with a married woman.
Speaker 1: I think a platonic affair, but a weird emotional affair.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I also involved her children that he was really into, right.
Speaker 2: He was apparently was very big on social media. But
Speaker 2: he did not leave like a Facebook post.
Speaker 1: No suicide note, no suicide note.
Speaker 2: No video. And he was on YouTube. He did diy
Speaker 2: repair things on YouTube videos, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But here's the big clue to me and everyone else
Speaker 2: is that Microsoft has this flight simulator that's a lot
Speaker 2: of fun. I don't know if you ever played around with.
Speaker 1: One of those, not for many, many years.
Speaker 2: It's a ton of fun. I've crashed tons of planes
Speaker 2: because it's really hard, as it turns out, to fly
Speaker 2: one of these. But he loved doing this. He loved
Speaker 2: flying these. It was one of his hobby, was flying
Speaker 2: this flight. Some so they were able to get into
Speaker 2: the flights that he flew preceding this disappearance, and one
Speaker 2: of them really closely matches the flight path of MH
Speaker 2: three seventy right into the Indian Ocean. Some people might say, like, hey, listen,
Speaker 2: that doesn't prove anything. But all the other flights that
Speaker 2: he had played around with he took from takeoff to landing,
Speaker 2: this is the only one where he jumped forward like
Speaker 2: a podcast commercial. Don't say that he's skipping forward in
Speaker 2: time on that flight alone to see how these fuel
Speaker 2: calculations were going to play out and where this plane
Speaker 2: would be when it ran out of fuel over the
Speaker 2: Indian Ocean. Flights him over right, and that is so suspicious,
Speaker 2: Like I mean, it's I know, you can speculate, but
Speaker 2: it's almost open and shutcase when you hear.
Speaker 1: That, it's so suspicious. I saw. One member of the
Speaker 1: Independent group said that he left it as a bread crumb.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, you know that, like he wouldn't have learned
Speaker 1: anything from Microsoft Flight simulator, which is, to a guy
Speaker 1: in the seven seventy seven, basically a game. You know
Speaker 1: that he was just basically leaving something behind. That was
Speaker 1: That was one guy's interpretation in the Independent group.
Speaker 2: Well, the very least he could say if I if
Speaker 2: I'm here and I'm on this header and I put
Speaker 2: it on autopilot, who knows, he may have killed himself. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he may have wanted that thing to fly into the
Speaker 2: ocean for sure.
Speaker 1: So the the idea is that Captain Sahari took control
Speaker 1: of the plane by locking First Officer Mead out of
Speaker 1: the cockpit, turned off the electrical system, took the seven
Speaker 1: seventy seven in a hard turn, back tracking and probably
Speaker 1: going up to about forty thousand feet at the same time,
Speaker 1: accelerating the effects of depressuration depressurization in the cabin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, killing everyone on board.
Speaker 1: Killing everyone on board, putting it on an autopilot, and
Speaker 1: setting a course for the Southern Indian Ocean with a
Speaker 1: plane full of dead people for a good six something hours.
Speaker 1: He may have killed himself at some point. He may not.
Speaker 1: He may there's some data that suggests that the plane
Speaker 1: running out of fuel and dropping from the sky would
Speaker 1: not have hit the ocean as hard as the record
Speaker 1: suggests that it hit, and that it might have taken
Speaker 1: somebody driving the plane into the ocean. So he may
Speaker 1: have been alive to the very bitter end. And if
Speaker 1: he was a seven to seventy seven pilot dying by
Speaker 1: crashing a plane in the ocean, I'm betting that he
Speaker 1: wouldn't have killed himself before the crash. It just doesn't
Speaker 1: seem right. But the idea is that he killed his
Speaker 1: passengers and then killed himself by crashing this plane into
Speaker 1: the Southern Indian Ocean. And this like the mind recoils
Speaker 1: from that idea. But the problem is it's happened before.
Speaker 1: Pilots have killed their passengers and these four times, yes,
Speaker 1: multiple times in the history of air travel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and here's the other final clue, which to me
Speaker 2: is kind of the cherry on top. Is that?
Speaker 1: Really I found this one tough toes?
Speaker 2: Oh really?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Oh I didn't think so, because we mentioned earlier he
Speaker 2: took a very deliberate path to do a little fly
Speaker 2: by a Penang island that was out of the way,
Speaker 2: and he grew up on Panang Island. And I don't know, man,
Speaker 2: I don't think that was it. I don't think that
Speaker 2: was an accident. I think a final little fly by,
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 1: I could see it. Sure. To me, it's the simulator. Well,
Speaker 1: it's like a smoking gun, those things to me. So
Speaker 1: we were saying that people have done this before.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, German Wings flight ninety five twenty five, I
Speaker 2: remember that one lam Mozambique four seventy, egypt Air nine
Speaker 2: ninety and.
Speaker 1: That's another marish article you should read.
Speaker 2: I'm not reading any of these.
Speaker 1: You got it, man, he's so good, chuck.
Speaker 2: Than Silk Air flight at one eighty five. They murdered
Speaker 2: everyone on board.
Speaker 1: Ye, Like there's no other way to take your own life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's so many other ways to take your own life
Speaker 1: that don't involve the innocent lives of your passengers. That
Speaker 1: this is one of the most despicable things you can
Speaker 1: possibly do.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And so in response, a lot of as suicide bomber.
Speaker 1: Sure, you know a lot of people say there's no
Speaker 1: way he did this, including his family. They are like, no,
Speaker 1: this guy did not do that. He was a nice guy.
Speaker 1: He wouldn't kill a bunch of people. But if you
Speaker 1: follow the evidence, and again, nobody can say for certain
Speaker 1: and probably no one will ever be able to say
Speaker 1: that it was Captain Shaw that did this. But if
Speaker 1: you follow the evidence and you form your own opinion,
Speaker 1: there's there's a pretty it's it's pretty convincing that he did.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people say, no, no way, And
Speaker 1: because they've not been able to explain what happened, it's
Speaker 1: formed this vacuum that's being filled by conspiracy theories. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we'll take our last break here and we
Speaker 2: will we're not going to go too deep into those,
Speaker 2: but we will kind of rattle off some of the
Speaker 2: leading ones right after this.
Speaker 1: And Chuck before we you know, rattle off some of
Speaker 1: these these conspiracy theories. I want to say, because we
Speaker 1: can't explain this, nobody can say that it was Captain Shaw. Sure,
Speaker 1: there are some things you can say. It's not like
Speaker 1: it wasn't an accident, it wasn't there was it wasn't
Speaker 1: you know, terrorists or anything like that. Yeah, but you
Speaker 1: can't say definitively that yes, it was Captain Shaw. And
Speaker 1: if this floats your boat, this is a there's a
Speaker 1: whole rabbit hole for you to dive down with MH
Speaker 1: three seventy. And there's a lot of other interpretations, but
Speaker 1: this seems to be, among air disaster experts the likeliest explanation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we are not saying, to be clear that it
Speaker 2: was Captain Shaw.
Speaker 1: Nobody can say that it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're just sort of following Okham's razor here in
Speaker 2: the findings of experts like you said that. It just
Speaker 2: it's the cleanest explanation there is. Yeah, all right, Well
Speaker 2: some things that aren't so clean. Should we go over
Speaker 2: some of these? This was compiled by the Week dot
Speaker 2: co dot UK The Week. I didn't see, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: didn't see any authorship though on this one.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Maybe they're like the economists and they don't it's
Speaker 1: all the economists speaking. It's all the Week speaking, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 2: Exactly, they're collective. So let me see here. One of
Speaker 2: these is that Captain Shaw parachuted out of the plane
Speaker 2: to meet that woman on a boat.
Speaker 1: Totally unnecessary because he and his wife had already separated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was living alone.
Speaker 2: That's right, But that was actually written by a journalist
Speaker 2: in a book called The Hunt for MH three seventy
Speaker 2: by e An Higgins. Okay, what else? This one is
Speaker 2: interesting that it was cyber hijacked. This is in another
Speaker 2: book called Beneath Another Sky colon A Global Journey into History,
Speaker 2: And this is the suggestion that Boeing's Honeywell uninterruptible autopilot
Speaker 2: onboard computer was hacked and reprogrammed. Yeah, there's the on
Speaker 2: the ground.
Speaker 1: That ties into another one that the CIA got their
Speaker 1: hands on the plane remotely. But I don't know that
Speaker 1: it's true, but there's a definite thread through conspiracy minded
Speaker 1: groups that after nine to eleven, they have engineered some
Speaker 1: sort of mechanism onto airliners so that they can be
Speaker 1: remotely controlled in case they are hijacked, so nobody can
Speaker 1: fly something into the world traitson or anything like that. Again,
Speaker 1: makes sense, It does make sense. It makes so much
Speaker 1: sense that I'm like, wait, did they actually do that?
Speaker 1: But that's the that's like step one to that conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: Step one is that that's that exists, and then step
Speaker 1: two is that somebody used it to vanish MH three seventy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what else Asian Bermuda triangle?
Speaker 1: No? Yeah, should we just that's all you need to say.
Speaker 2: Well, this one, I thought it was funny because it
Speaker 2: said that when you look at where it crashed, it's
Speaker 2: the exact opposite of the Bermuda triangle on the other
Speaker 2: side of the globe. And then I guess someone just looked,
Speaker 2: They're like, no, it's actually not right, So go that down.
Speaker 1: The two maybe in the general neighborhood, but definitely not
Speaker 1: on the air.
Speaker 2: And also there's no Bermuda triangle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's a big, big issue with that.
Speaker 2: What do you got?
Speaker 1: Another one is that that it was used as MH seventeen.
Speaker 1: Remember I said that twenty fourteen was a terrible year
Speaker 1: for Malaysian airlines. And the idea is that they hijacked
Speaker 1: They meaning probably the CIA or the US government or
Speaker 1: some shadowy cabal, hijacked MH three seventy, safely landed it
Speaker 1: in some at Diego GARCIA air base or somewhere under
Speaker 1: US control, killed everybody, or maybe they were dead from
Speaker 1: hypoxia to begin with. Anyway, put them in freezers, and
Speaker 1: then stage this changed the call sign from a zero
Speaker 1: or from an O to a D on the plane
Speaker 1: easy enough, and then used it to be shot down
Speaker 1: over Ukraine. And supposedly there's reports from Ukrainian journalists and
Speaker 1: humanitarian workers and even Ukrainian rebels saying that the corpses
Speaker 1: that fell from this shot down plane I'm seventeen over
Speaker 1: Ukraine were already decomposing and rotting as if they died
Speaker 1: weeks before. I've not found anybody who actually said that
Speaker 1: or anything like that. But that's the whole thing, is
Speaker 1: that it was a big false flag operation. Okay, but
Speaker 1: isn't it nuts that, Like, if you can't explain something
Speaker 1: like a disappeared airliner, people go onto the internet and
Speaker 1: write books and say here's what really happened, and that
Speaker 1: it's this. Yeah, think about the level of distrust we
Speaker 1: have for the people running the show that this has
Speaker 1: an audience, Like, I do not blame anybody who believes
Speaker 1: stuff like this because we've been lied to for so
Speaker 1: long that you can buy this. You know that some
Speaker 1: government agency would hijack a plane, kill everybody and then
Speaker 1: use it to pin it on, you know, putin controlled
Speaker 1: Ukrainian forces.
Speaker 2: Come on, Yeah, it was Hunter Biden, right, So here's
Speaker 2: another one that I thought was interesting and not I'm
Speaker 2: saying it's interesting, is like, could it be? But if
Speaker 2: you go to look at passengers on an airplane and
Speaker 2: try and find a thread, you might want to look
Speaker 2: at the fact that there are twenty people that worked
Speaker 2: for a company. Oh yeah, all on board called Free
Speaker 2: Scale Semiconductor. So I hear that, and I think, well,
Speaker 2: we should at least look into this. Is there any
Speaker 2: reason someone would want to tank this company or tank
Speaker 2: twenty people that worked important people that work for this company,
Speaker 2: And the theory is that they might have been killed
Speaker 2: by a plane crash, either for secret technology or to
Speaker 2: manipulate stock prices.
Speaker 1: Right, And apparently that company helped the NSA or the
Speaker 1: CIA or the US government in general create some of
Speaker 1: its PRISM program surveillance technology, so they were supposedly already
Speaker 1: in cahoots with shadowy agencies within the US government to
Speaker 1: begin with. And since this plane was headed to Beijing, China,
Speaker 1: perhaps this company was going over to work with China
Speaker 1: now and the CIA didn't like that, so they did
Speaker 1: this pretty interesting, as you said, interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's all it is. Yeah, And then there are
Speaker 2: other various ones from life insurance scams, to false flag hijackings,
Speaker 2: to alien abductions. Apparently five percent of Americans surveyed believe
Speaker 2: it was abducted by aliens.
Speaker 1: Believe Image three seventy was abducted by aliens. I saw that,
Speaker 1: and my brain wouldn't accept that. I think I just
Speaker 1: saw it as five percent of Americans believe in alien abductions.
Speaker 2: No, I think that.
Speaker 1: I can't hear what you're about.
Speaker 2: It's just something dumb service.
Speaker 1: Okay, you got anything else? No, Well, if you want
Speaker 1: to know more about Image three seventy, friend, meet your
Speaker 1: new hobby because it is all over the internet and
Speaker 1: you can follow whatever thread you like. And since I
Speaker 1: said that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2: This one's a bit long, but boy is it a
Speaker 2: good one and super important one for this gentleman and
Speaker 2: his family. Hey guys, my name's Tyler. I live in Michigan.
Speaker 2: Got a story for you. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, my
Speaker 2: family and I woke up and I went around business
Speaker 2: as usual. I was playing a video game with my
Speaker 2: two boys, and my wife said she was going out
Speaker 2: to the garage to get something and walked at the door.
Speaker 2: After about ten minutes, my neighbor banged on the door.
Speaker 2: I opened it to see my next door neighbor pointing
Speaker 2: at my wife laying motionless on the ground in front
Speaker 2: of my car. Full on, panic mode set in. I
Speaker 2: ran the ten feet or so to find her not breathing,
Speaker 2: fingers and face already blew, and my neighbor started calling
Speaker 2: nine to one one. Luckily, I remembered some advice from
Speaker 2: your CPR episode, not only how much pressure to apply
Speaker 2: to the sternum, which is a lot, but the rhythm,
Speaker 2: and I began to staying alive that is so great
Speaker 2: by the beg's in my head as I did the
Speaker 2: chest compressions. Trying to sing along while my adrenaline was
Speaker 2: pumping was not easy, but I did my best to
Speaker 2: stay calm and keep singing that part the song in
Speaker 2: my head. The colors started coming back to her face
Speaker 2: a little bit after I started the EMTs and police
Speaker 2: were at my house within five minutes and used the
Speaker 2: I always missed that word up defibrillator on her three times,
Speaker 2: gave her three shots of epinephrine before they finally got
Speaker 2: her heart beating again. Her brain went without blood for
Speaker 2: twenty minutes, though, and as a result, she's been diagnosed
Speaker 2: with brain damage. She's got a long road to recovery
Speaker 2: ahead of her, but the doctors think she has a
Speaker 2: good chance because of her age. Her heart had a
Speaker 2: severe rhythmia that ultimately calls cardiac arrest. I'm doing the
Speaker 2: best I can for her and my kids while she heals.
Speaker 2: I'm the primary provider for my family while my wife
Speaker 2: was a primary caregiver. Having to take off work and
Speaker 2: take care of my kids. It has been really scary,
Speaker 2: but I've gotten tremendous support from friends and family here
Speaker 2: in my time of need. So i just want to
Speaker 2: thank you guys for the work you do. Without your podcast,
Speaker 2: I likely would have been burying my wife instead of
Speaker 2: visiting her in the hospital. Right this is like Christmas
Speaker 2: time too.
Speaker 1: Chuck, I wasn't prepared for this one. You could have
Speaker 1: given me like sorry, stuff me in the hand with
Speaker 1: the needle or something first.
Speaker 2: Sincerely, thank you both so much. That is from Tyler Elliott.
Speaker 2: He said, if you guys read this on the show,
Speaker 2: could you shout out my best friend justin Sure. He
Speaker 2: got me into the show back in the day and
Speaker 2: has been there for me and my family every step
Speaker 2: of the way.
Speaker 1: So Justin is the one who should be thanked.
Speaker 2: Really, It all in a weird way comes back to
Speaker 2: Justin Man.
Speaker 1: What is his name again?
Speaker 2: Tyler Elliott? And I hope your wife is recovering.
Speaker 1: Yeah, same here, Tyler.
Speaker 2: Best of luck to you man. That's a quite a
Speaker 2: herring experience.
Speaker 1: Not only are we thinking of you, but everybody listening
Speaker 1: to this podcast right now is thinking about you too.
Speaker 2: That's right, sending out the best vibes into the universe.
Speaker 1: Greed. Wow. Well, if you want to try to top
Speaker 1: Tyler's email best of luck, good luck, you can go
Speaker 1: on to stuff you Should know dot com and check
Speaker 1: out our social links there, and you can also send
Speaker 1: us an email yourself to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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