Speaker 1: San Francisco. We're coming to see you soon. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be there on Saturday, January chuck. And since it's
Speaker 1: San Francisco, we're gonna be wearing nothing but appropriately placed
Speaker 1: clumps of rice roni. It is the San Francisco treat, Yes,
Speaker 1: and we're the San Francisco treat too whenever we're in town.
Speaker 1: So everybody should come see us. That's right. It's part
Speaker 1: of Sketch Fest as always. We love performing there. You
Speaker 1: can go to s Y s K live dot com
Speaker 1: for details or s F sketch Fest dot com. Uh
Speaker 1: and if you're around Sunday night you can come see
Speaker 1: me do movie Crush Live and a very small fun
Speaker 1: venue where you can shake my hand. Very nice. So
Speaker 1: come see us, everybody. You won't regret it. We're pretty
Speaker 1: sure that's correct. And hey, another thing, this is weirdly
Speaker 1: edited in real time. We're recording this in our time.
Speaker 1: Two days previous melted out of my ear. Well, we
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of front load this with a listener
Speaker 1: mail because of what's going on in Australia. All this
Speaker 1: was sort of happening, been happening for a little while,
Speaker 1: but over the holiday break when we weren't in here
Speaker 1: and had a chance to do something. Um. This is
Speaker 1: from Sally M. Guys who live in Sydney, New South Wales.
Speaker 1: You've probably been hearing about the catastrophic wildfires that are
Speaker 1: being happening across the country since September. Having lived in
Speaker 1: California before, I thought I knew what to expect. However,
Speaker 1: this has been truly unprecedented. Uh. Minor inconveniences for us
Speaker 1: have been happening, but compared to what so many other
Speaker 1: Aussies and our wildlife is experiencing. Yet another example of
Speaker 1: the far reaching effects of this emergency. Uh, there's so
Speaker 1: much need in Australia, and I thought this stuff you
Speaker 1: should know Army might be primed to help out. This
Speaker 1: from Sally M. And this is uh something that you
Speaker 1: know has been on our radar for a little while,
Speaker 1: but obviously, UM, being across the world, America's becoming more
Speaker 1: aware and engaged thanks to social media in recent days
Speaker 1: and weeks. It's just devastating to see what's happening there.
Speaker 1: We've always had such incredible support from Australia and and
Speaker 1: we had a chance to visit there, just charmed by
Speaker 1: the people and by the beautiful country and it's just heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: So we want to direct people to quite a few
Speaker 1: places because there are lots of ways that you can
Speaker 1: give money to help out. Um, do you have some.
Speaker 1: I've got some too, Yeah, I've got a bunch, all right,
Speaker 1: go ahead, I mean you can do the the usual,
Speaker 1: the Australian Red Cross, the Salvation Army Australia, St Vincent
Speaker 1: De Paul's Society. Um, there's a something called Food Bank
Speaker 1: in Australia. Those are some pretty good places to start. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you know, we're huge fans of animals and held
Speaker 1: koalas and petted kangaroos while we were there and to
Speaker 1: see these images of these animals and needs just been
Speaker 1: really tough. So the World Wildlife Fund is always a
Speaker 1: great place to start. There's an organization called Wires Capital
Speaker 1: w I R E s UH, the Port Macquarie Koala
Speaker 1: Hospital U, the r s p c A of New
Speaker 1: South Wales is all going to help out our animal friends.
Speaker 1: And if you want to help the firefighters directly, the
Speaker 1: New South Wales Rural Fire Service has set up funds
Speaker 1: for the families of volunteers fighting the fires who have
Speaker 1: died fighting the fires. Yeah, so do what you can.
Speaker 1: It is a dire situation right now, and I think
Speaker 1: people can come together and spare a few bucks. Every
Speaker 1: little bit helps. Yea, and Australia, we are thinking of you.
Speaker 1: The whole world is sending you good vibes and hanging there.
Speaker 1: All right, So finally let's get on with the show.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You should know, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and
Speaker 1: this is part two of two about Image three seventy,
Speaker 1: the most mysterious disappearance of any airliner in the history
Speaker 1: of modern aviation. That's right. We won't do a full recap,
Speaker 1: but where we're picking up now, wait, you want to
Speaker 1: do a full recap twenty minutes easy. We are at
Speaker 1: the point where the plane has crashed, and we're going
Speaker 1: to pick up with post crash investigations, which, um, like
Speaker 1: many airline crash investigations were bungled, and was bungled in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. Oh yeah, So Ed points out
Speaker 1: that like kind of oddly that there are a lot
Speaker 1: of crash investigations you can point to that, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of deferred towards the airline manufacturer when they were
Speaker 1: at fault, or tried to do some cover up or
Speaker 1: was not great, none of them from what I can tell,
Speaker 1: to this one. This is very very not good. And
Speaker 1: the seems to be the roundly, roundly accepted reason for
Speaker 1: the whole thing being bungled was that Malaysia at the
Speaker 1: time was the dictatorship and you could disappear if you
Speaker 1: weren't doing your job very well or if you offended
Speaker 1: the people in charge, and a crash of a Malaysians
Speaker 1: Airline flight in particular was kind of a dicey thing
Speaker 1: to talk about because Malaysian Airlines was the pride of
Speaker 1: Malaysia and it was a at the time, a government
Speaker 1: largely government owned and controlled airline, a state owned airline.
Speaker 1: It was the Malaysia was the majority owner of stock
Speaker 1: and it was publicly traded. Malaysian Airlines was, but they
Speaker 1: owned the majority of it. They called the shots and
Speaker 1: after two fourteen was proved to be a terrible year
Speaker 1: by any airline standards, because not only was MH three
Speaker 1: seventy did vanish. MH seventeen was shot down over Ukraine
Speaker 1: the same year. Just less than six months later, the
Speaker 1: Malaysian government set about buying back all of the shares
Speaker 1: that were outstanding of Malaysian Airlines and took it off
Speaker 1: of public listing, made it a fully stayed owned company.
Speaker 1: So they certainly didn't want the bad press no short
Speaker 1: follow now. So there's a lot of people who say
Speaker 1: the Malaysian government covered this up, not because they did
Speaker 1: anything nefariest, 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 the investigation into what happened at mhe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the first problem here is, uh, we know now
Speaker 1: that this plane crashed in the South Indian Ocean, and
Speaker 1: it took a week before they were looking in the
Speaker 1: South Indian Ocean, so the first twenty four hours was
Speaker 1: in the South China Sea between Malaysian and Vietnam. Um
Speaker 1: they ended up hooking up and uh creating a joint
Speaker 1: Agency Coordination Center. Are actually Australia's who created that, and
Speaker 1: they led the search efforts because it was close to them,
Speaker 1: and uh they found no trace even after they did
Speaker 1: all this ocean floor mapping UM search. You know, they
Speaker 1: had that seventh arc Pegg searched all along there and
Speaker 1: twenty thousand square miles. Yeah, which is you know, even
Speaker 1: if you find that seventh arc and you know it's
Speaker 1: somewhere in here, that's still a vast, vast area. And
Speaker 1: this thing is on the bottom of the ocean at
Speaker 1: this point, and we should say it. By this time,
Speaker 1: Australia has stepped up and been like, well this happened
Speaker 1: not too far from US. I guess where the closest
Speaker 1: major country, certainly Western democracy in this in this area. Um,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll head this up. Malaysia will help you out.
Speaker 1: And they footed a lot of the bill, which was
Speaker 1: pretty cools from Yeah. And I think it was the
Speaker 1: most and still is the most expensive search in aviation history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is kind of surpresent. You think that more would
Speaker 1: have been spent, but I think they usually find them
Speaker 1: sooner than this. This was not found. They searched for
Speaker 1: two solid years for this thing in UM, just on
Speaker 1: that seventh arc. There's a lot of people who at
Speaker 1: the time we're like, no, you know how it forms
Speaker 1: a circle. Well, there's a northern arc in a southern arc,
Speaker 1: and some people said, no, northern ark somewhere, it's in Kazakhstan.
Speaker 1: The southern arc was in the Indian Ocean. Most people said,
Speaker 1: it's probably the southern arc um so that's where they searched,
Speaker 1: and they still didn't find it. Yeah, and it took
Speaker 1: so long to even get there. By that point, there
Speaker 1: were a lot of things. If you had that first
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, it's sort of like a a murder investigation.
Speaker 1: Those that first day is so key. The first forty
Speaker 1: eight is forty eight let's say I'm making I'm there
Speaker 1: and down to buddy. Okay. So Malaysia then heads up
Speaker 1: what's called the Joint Investigation Team. Uh, the US was involved, China, Britain,
Speaker 1: and France. This was the one that was meant to
Speaker 1: follow the protocols of just the internationally agreed upon accident
Speaker 1: investigation to make for for everybody. And Malaysia did not
Speaker 1: help out very well. No, so they issued the Malaysian
Speaker 1: Ministry of Transport issued a preliminary and a final rep wort.
Speaker 1: The preliminary report um ED describes as more or less
Speaker 1: a reprint of the Boeing seven seven seven manual just like, well,
Speaker 1: here there was the plane, which I think is kind
Speaker 1: of standard to have technical information, but this is the
Speaker 1: whole report. Uh. And then the second one, the final report,
Speaker 1: basically pointed out where air traffic control failed along the way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I saw in that languish article UM that that
Speaker 1: they were politically speaking the easiest targets they were not
Speaker 1: going to. There wasn't going to be any backlash by
Speaker 1: kind of taking them to task, especially taking the ho
Speaker 1: Chi min air traffic controllers to task too. They should
Speaker 1: have been taking the task. Eighteen minutes is a very
Speaker 1: long time to let an airliner in your jurisdiction just
Speaker 1: be disappeared, so that that was a big problem. But
Speaker 1: the Malaysian Air Force also UM should have been criticized
Speaker 1: for covering up the fact that they hadn't done anything
Speaker 1: for an hour that they were tracking this this unidentified
Speaker 1: UM airplane in their airspace and let an entire search
Speaker 1: multi national search be mounted in the South China Sea
Speaker 1: like a couple of days before they were like, um,
Speaker 1: actually we we think they went this way, you know,
Speaker 1: because it takes a long time to even as symbol
Speaker 1: that kind of search squad. So I think if they
Speaker 1: searched for two days and didn't get start till a
Speaker 1: week later. That's like four days just a like move right,
Speaker 1: you know. And so in that time, an oil slick,
Speaker 1: a debris field, all that stuff can just vanish, and
Speaker 1: an airliner really can in an area the size of
Speaker 1: the Indian Ocean, especially even when you know where to look,
Speaker 1: can just disappear. And that is why a lot of
Speaker 1: people say we will probably never find m H three seventeen.
Speaker 1: There's there's another couple of reasons why too, are we
Speaker 1: gonna get to this? The police in Malaysia and this
Speaker 1: bore a little bit of fruit. They conducted some background
Speaker 1: check on everyone on the plane, uh, and they did
Speaker 1: find two passengers who were Iranians that had stolen passports.
Speaker 1: Apparently they were just seeking political asylum though although that
Speaker 1: does factor into some of the conspiracy theories that pop
Speaker 1: up later on. Yeah, anytime you have two Iranian nationals
Speaker 1: traveling under fake passports on him plane that disappeared, some
Speaker 1: people are going to say, sure, I don't know about
Speaker 1: that one, Yeah, exactly. Um. And then here was the
Speaker 1: one thing about their final report from the police, UH
Speaker 1: is they described Captain Sahari basically saying like this guy
Speaker 1: was great, nothing wrong, he was a great pilot. Uh uh,
Speaker 1: nothing to alarm anybody here about Captain Sahari And that's
Speaker 1: in the final report and we'll get to him. But
Speaker 1: that does not appear to be true. No. Um, So
Speaker 1: after the search after two years, in a hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty million dollars and a hundred and twenty thousand sorry
Speaker 1: a square kilometers, I think it's a square miles. Still
Speaker 1: a lot of square miles searched. Um, the Australians, the Malaysians,
Speaker 1: and the Chinese that made up the tripartite um Commission
Speaker 1: that we're kind of running the show in this search
Speaker 1: said officially, we don't know what happened. All we can
Speaker 1: say is that we believe MH three seventy ended somewhere
Speaker 1: in the Southern Indian Ocean. That was that's the official
Speaker 1: stance on what happened to a vanished airliner that they said,
Speaker 1: we don't know, And that's as far as we're gonna go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I do want to point out quickly there was
Speaker 1: one private agency called in um or I think volunteered,
Speaker 1: called Ocean Infinity from Texas. Yeah, they performed a search
Speaker 1: basically pro bono. If they find the plane, they get paid.
Speaker 1: But just as a sort of a nerd in this way,
Speaker 1: I looked into that company. They're awesome. Yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: cool man they are. They call it cbed Intelligence, and
Speaker 1: it's it's like James Cameron style stuff. The resources and
Speaker 1: the toys that these dudes play with, it's pretty pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they'll have a mothership at least, this is what they
Speaker 1: did for the MH three seventy search. They have a mothership,
Speaker 1: and I think the mothership goes through and maps the
Speaker 1: underwater terrain in three D first, and then that forms
Speaker 1: their search area. They release some autonomous drones. Yeah they
Speaker 1: look like torpedoes, but they're drones that can be controlled
Speaker 1: from this mothership and they go through and scan using
Speaker 1: sonar like in detail the sea bed. It's so cool
Speaker 1: and rus photography. It's like really cool stuff. It works
Speaker 1: really well. Ocean Ocean Infinity has a great track record
Speaker 1: finding stuff there. Who I would call they found like
Speaker 1: a missing submarine from Argentina. They found a bunch of
Speaker 1: other things. I would call them too. By the way,
Speaker 1: we should get them on the we should hire them
Speaker 1: out for the Tybee Island nuke. We totally should. I'm
Speaker 1: surprised they haven't just done that for fun. Yeah, as
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, I think they should solve the mystery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the broken era or the empty quiver. And they're like,
Speaker 1: we spent how many multimillions of dollars just to say
Speaker 1: we solve that mystery? Right? No, No, they're from Texas,
Speaker 1: so anytime they find something, they don't think about that.
Speaker 1: Instead they just shoot their six shooters into the air.
Speaker 1: About that, right, So that's fine, that's a good enough
Speaker 1: for them, let's pay enough. But Ocean Infinity, Yeah, they
Speaker 1: know what they're doing, and they still couldn't find There
Speaker 1: were some things that were found in the search Number one.
Speaker 1: This was uncharted um territory and now huge swaths of
Speaker 1: it are now mapped. They found an underwater volcano, an
Speaker 1: enormous one that they had no idea existed before. They
Speaker 1: found a couple of shipwrecks from the nineteenth century that
Speaker 1: had just been totally lost. But they still found no
Speaker 1: trace whatsoever of MH three seventy, despite two major searches
Speaker 1: and an official finally, an official final report from Australia
Speaker 1: is saying we don't know we will probably never know.
Speaker 1: All we can say is that the flight ended almost
Speaker 1: certainly in the Southern Indian Ocean. That's right, And um,
Speaker 1: we should shout out the Independent Group. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: an online group of enthusiasts Internet. Yeah, who got together
Speaker 1: to try and figure this out. And uh Ed even
Speaker 1: pointed out, like, you know, you hear Internet sluz and
Speaker 1: you're like, come on, get off the tinfoil hat. But
Speaker 1: it turns out that these people a lot of more.
Speaker 1: There were engineers, they worked in aviation formally or currently,
Speaker 1: and they were really interested in trying to help and
Speaker 1: I think ended up helping in a lot of ways. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and even even beyond like tinfoil hats, Internet slus can,
Speaker 1: they've done things like identified John does and Jane does. Um,
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: in and very dogged in their pursuits. Right with the
Speaker 1: Independent Group, these are actual like people with PhDs and
Speaker 1: electrical engineering and secondary radar and satellites and the stuff
Speaker 1: that they're they're doing. They just all happened to come together,
Speaker 1: bound by their common interest in the search for this plane.
Speaker 1: And if you go and read, I will give you
Speaker 1: a thousand dollars if you can make it through one
Speaker 1: of their blog posts. It's so dan and so scientific,
Speaker 1: but they're so legitimate. The Australian government when they wrapped
Speaker 1: up their search, maybe at some point during it they
Speaker 1: actually acknowledged and thank the Independent Group for their work
Speaker 1: because they were relying on it to some extent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure like no one ever and this kind
Speaker 1: of thing or search and rescue, no one ever wants
Speaker 1: this to happen. But this is their chance to really
Speaker 1: get involved and try and do some good. Who the
Speaker 1: Independent Group? Yeah, sure. They also agitated for um more
Speaker 1: transparency in this stuff, and I think they got their hands. Well.
Speaker 1: They went around about way um the they made friends
Speaker 1: with some of the family of MH three seventy, just
Speaker 1: by the families um hearing about what they were doing.
Speaker 1: And from one of the families they got the raw
Speaker 1: M Marsett data. At a time when M Marsett was
Speaker 1: saying this actually belongs to Malaysia or Malaysian Airlines, we
Speaker 1: can't release it. Malaysia was saying, well, no, M Marsett
Speaker 1: has to release it. They just went around both and
Speaker 1: got the raw data, and we're able to really do
Speaker 1: some much better calculations than they had before with the
Speaker 1: raw m Marsett data. All right, so let's take a
Speaker 1: break and we'll go start up our own Internet sleuthing concern.
Speaker 1: Get that ramped up. What are we going to get
Speaker 1: to the bottom of puppies? Sure? Okay, why are they
Speaker 1: so darn cute? That sounds like us? All right, we'll
Speaker 1: be right back, okay, Chuck. So, um 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 I was gonna say, yeah, I mean because this
Speaker 1: thing disappeared. That is not to say there were no traces,
Speaker 1: because we have pieces of this plane. Now. There are people, um,
Speaker 1: sort of like these Internet slues that are captured by
Speaker 1: a story such that they will spend a large portion
Speaker 1: of their life trying to solve it and looking for
Speaker 1: stuff and savings. Yeah, sure, a lot of money. I think.
Speaker 1: I think by people you really mean person. Now there
Speaker 1: are a lot of other people. There was one man
Speaker 1: called Zahid Raza who searched for years and he was
Speaker 1: murdered in Madagascar. So he was. His job was as
Speaker 1: the Malaysian Council to Madagascar's like the ambassador to Madagascar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the conspiracy minded will say, now this guy's finding stuff,
Speaker 1: and they took him out. So there was a dude
Speaker 1: who did leave his life in I think Seattle and
Speaker 1: moved well, actually just started moving around the world, which
Speaker 1: he did normally anyway. But his name was Blaine Gibson. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He factors big into that William Langwish article. He talks
Speaker 1: about him a lot. But he just became moved by
Speaker 1: this and decided that he was going to go start
Speaker 1: finding wreckage. And he has I think a third of
Speaker 1: the debris found from MH three seventy has been personally
Speaker 1: found by Blaine Gibson. Just globe trotting, basically, but he
Speaker 1: figured out if it was the Southern Indian Ocean, then
Speaker 1: this wreckage is probably going to start to show up
Speaker 1: somewhere around the southern the southwest coast of Africa, um
Speaker 1: South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar. And he was right. And the
Speaker 1: first piece turned up in two thousand and fifteen. It
Speaker 1: was a six ft piece of an airplane and it
Speaker 1: felt like, no, I can't a matter of fact. I
Speaker 1: mean looking for this and then finding it. It's like
Speaker 1: a searching for a needle in a haystack. But it
Speaker 1: was found on Reunion Island, um off of Madagascar, I
Speaker 1: think off 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 in controvertibly that the Southern arc was correct,
Speaker 1: that that there, that it hadn't flown north into Kazakhstan,
Speaker 1: that the flight had ended to the Indian Ocean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it showed that it crashed. That's a big one.
Speaker 1: It showed that it had broken up like it wasn't
Speaker 1: like a fire or anything like they had come apart. Well,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't secretly landed somewhere, because some of those
Speaker 1: conspiracies get pretty out there, right. But the other effect
Speaker 1: that this had was that it devastated the MH three
Speaker 1: seventy families who had been holding out hope because it
Speaker 1: was disappeared. This airliner vanished and people were saying, no,
Speaker 1: it actually is, and um the air based Diego Garcia
Speaker 1: under US control. No, it's under Russian control and kazakh
Speaker 1: stunt it's somewhere are people are somewhere maybe maybe there's
Speaker 1: this hope. This dashed those hopes. And it came um
Speaker 1: a full more than a year after the plane disappeared,
Speaker 1: So they had been like really holding onto this hope
Speaker 1: to desperate degree for more than a year and then
Speaker 1: it was dashed. So it was a big deal when
Speaker 1: it was found. And that was the first of several
Speaker 1: pieces that that washed up in that area. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: was a part of the airplane called a flap iron.
Speaker 1: It's on the back edge of the wing and it's
Speaker 1: a control surface, you know, the kind of kind of
Speaker 1: flaps up and down on it. It's a great name
Speaker 1: for it now all know. Uh and the serial numbers
Speaker 1: confirmed it. So it was definitely from uh MH three seventy.
Speaker 1: And then many other pieces have I think what dozens
Speaker 1: at this point the pieces of plane have been found. Um.
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 planes
Speaker 1: are these coming from? Well, yeah, that's creepy. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think maybe every is there any way to completely tag
Speaker 1: every square inch of an airplane? I don't know, and
Speaker 1: not necessarily with a stamp, but Um, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I know it means some kind of technology. If there's
Speaker 1: a you could probably attach some sort of marker to
Speaker 1: atoms eventually, and you will be able to tag any
Speaker 1: any part of any plane down to can you find
Speaker 1: a little four inch piece of metal and you know
Speaker 1: what it is? You just like analyze the atomic makeup
Speaker 1: and being oh, look, mh three seventy. But that's the
Speaker 1: future everyone, that's not too far. Once we get into nanotechnology,
Speaker 1: that will be commonplace. Although we'll also probably be able
Speaker 1: to make planes that don't come apart, right. Uh. So
Speaker 1: the other thing that suggests to is that, um, the
Speaker 1: plane hit and we talked earlier about when a plane
Speaker 1: is descending into an ocean like that, it's going super fast,
Speaker 1: and this really kind of confirms that because they didn't
Speaker 1: find much wreckage the plane. Um, these parts probably ripped
Speaker 1: off on the way down, and most of the plane
Speaker 1: fairly intact hit the ocean and went south very very fast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: right to the bottom, right to the bottom. So this
Speaker 1: also dashed the hopes of the families even further in
Speaker 1: that those four electronic location transmitters the beak of the
Speaker 1: life beacons that were supposed to go off, and all
Speaker 1: four failed. Some family members and a lot of conspiracy
Speaker 1: theorists are saying all four of those failing. No way,
Speaker 1: it means that the plane didn't didn't descend quickly, didn't
Speaker 1: catch fire, didn't hit water because some of those transmitters
Speaker 1: are supposed to go off when they hit water, but
Speaker 1: if they broke up on the way down, Because here's
Speaker 1: the thing is the planes if it entered a steep
Speaker 1: decline at six miles an hour, which is about what
Speaker 1: they think that was cruising at, if it drops from
Speaker 1: thirty five thousand feet at six hundred miles an hour
Speaker 1: within two minutes, it's going to just break up, either
Speaker 1: on the way down or the moment it hits 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 it's to transmit
Speaker 1: to the satellite. So they think this thing hits so
Speaker 1: fast that that beacon might have just gone right down
Speaker 1: underwater 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. Yeah, and you know, we mentioned the
Speaker 1: black boxes and the previous episode. Obviously we don't have
Speaker 1: these black boxes. They're down there with everything else. I
Speaker 1: haven't recovered any anything like that, but they think that
Speaker 1: they probably wouldn't tell much of a story anyway. No,
Speaker 1: not unless there was some sort of final communications 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, Uh, who would you be talking to. Well,
Speaker 1: let's go ahead and talk about who this might be, because, um,
Speaker 1: all indications point that it was the captain of the
Speaker 1: airplane himself, Captain Shaw, yep, Captain Zahariamad Shaw. That's right. So, uh,
Speaker 1: the wreckage basically, I mean, there's a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of clues. Again, we can't say anything for sure,
Speaker 1: but no one ever claim you know, it's unlikely it
Speaker 1: was terrorists because one thing terrorists do, which is what
Speaker 1: makes them. Terrorists claim responsibility. They like to brag, well,
Speaker 1: so everyone knows who it was. No one did this,
Speaker 1: no one even falsely did this, which happened. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: same can be said for a kidnapping because there are
Speaker 1: some theories about that that there were some important people
Speaker 1: aboard that they wanted to disappear or something. Right, But
Speaker 1: like if you were kidnapping somebody, you want them alive
Speaker 1: and they can't be alive if the planes and a
Speaker 1: million pieces in the Southern Indian Ocean, that's right, uh,
Speaker 1: And there were only two people on that plane who
Speaker 1: knew and had the knowledge and access to do this stuff,
Speaker 1: and that was Captain Shawn, first Officer hamid Um. Also, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's something really important to point out here to Chuck,
Speaker 1: there was no distress call and for if if it
Speaker 1: was a hijacking, between the time that Zahari said goodnight
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. A lot super bolted. Um,
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. Uh. The
Speaker 1: idea that these two are working together is not very plausible. Uh.
Speaker 1: The idea that it was UM First Officer Hamid himself
Speaker 1: is not plausible because, like we said, this is a greenhorn.
Speaker 1: He was just getting started in his career. He was
Speaker 1: super happy to be to have this job, this great
Speaker 1: job flying the Pride of Malaysia. Um. Nothing at all
Speaker 1: points that he had anything to do with this. No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't. And also it would have been much harder
Speaker 1: for him to get um Captain Shaw out of the cockpit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like once you uh go take a bathroom break would
Speaker 1: have been like I don't need to He's like no,
Speaker 1: but seriously, go do it. I'm wondering how Captain Shawn
Speaker 1: might have gotten him out. So one thing Lang was
Speaker 1: this is a well I will keep going back to
Speaker 1: all day long. The language. Well yeah, um he said
Speaker 1: that Captain Shaw was known as a uh somebody who
Speaker 1: wanted to know all the details of what was going on,
Speaker 1: So it would have been very normal back and check
Speaker 1: on something exactly. It would have been very normal, It
Speaker 1: would have been very easy. And first Officer how Meade
Speaker 1: would have hopped right up and gone right out of
Speaker 1: the cockpit, leaving Shaw alone to lock the door, lock
Speaker 1: him out. And that's all it took. That's all it took.
Speaker 1: So when you start, uh, we said that the report
Speaker 1: from the Malaysian police came back as a glowing report
Speaker 1: for uh for Shaw. When you start doing a little
Speaker 1: digging around, that's not exactly the case. Um. Before this
Speaker 1: plane disappeared, in the months before, he had separated from
Speaker 1: his wife, he was living by himself. Apparently was having
Speaker 1: an affair with a married woman I think a platonic affair,
Speaker 1: but of a weird emotional affair. Yeah. He also involved
Speaker 1: her children that he was really into. Um. He would
Speaker 1: apparently was very big on social media. Uh. But he
Speaker 1: did not leave like a Facebook post no suicide note
Speaker 1: no suicide note no that e O. And he was
Speaker 1: on YouTube. He did d I Y repair things on
Speaker 1: YouTube videos, which is pretty remarkable. Um. But here's the
Speaker 1: big clue to me and everyone else is that he,
Speaker 1: like Microsoft, has a flight simulator that's a lot of
Speaker 1: fun and if you ever played around with one of those.
Speaker 1: Uh not for many many years. It's a ton of fun.
Speaker 1: I've crashed tons of planes because it's really hard, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, to fly one of these. But he
Speaker 1: loved doing this. He loved flying these. It was one
Speaker 1: of his hobby was flying this. Flights them so they
Speaker 1: were able to get into the flights um that he
Speaker 1: flew preceding this disappearance, and one of them really closely
Speaker 1: matches the flight path of MH three seventy right into
Speaker 1: the Indian Ocean. Some people might say, like, hey, listen, uh,
Speaker 1: that doesn't prove anything. But all the other flights that
Speaker 1: he had played around with he took from take off
Speaker 1: to landing, this is the only one where he jumped
Speaker 1: forward like a like a podcast commercial. Don't say that
Speaker 1: he's skipping forward in time on that flight alone to
Speaker 1: see how these fuel calculations were going to play out
Speaker 1: and where this plane would be when it ran out
Speaker 1: of fuel over the Indian Ocean. Flights him over right,
Speaker 1: And that is so suspicious, Like I mean, it's I know,
Speaker 1: you can speculate, but it's almost open and shut case
Speaker 1: when you hear that, it's so suspicious. I saw one
Speaker 1: member of the Independent Group said that this that he
Speaker 1: left it as a bread crumb. Oh interesting, you know that,
Speaker 1: like he wouldn't have learned anything from Microsoft Flight Simulator,
Speaker 1: which is, to a guy in the seven seventies seven,
Speaker 1: basically a game. You know that he was just basically
Speaker 1: leaving something behind. That was That was one guy's interpretation
Speaker 1: in the Independent group. Well, the very least he could
Speaker 1: say if I if I'm here and I'm on this
Speaker 1: header and I put it on autopilot, who knows, he
Speaker 1: may have killed himself. Uh, he may have wanted that
Speaker 1: thing to fly into the ocean for sure. So the
Speaker 1: the idea is that Captain Zahari took control of the
Speaker 1: plane by locking First Officer Hamid out of the cockpit,
Speaker 1: turned off the electrical system, um took the the seven
Speaker 1: seventy seven in a hard turn, back tracking and probably
Speaker 1: going up to about forty ft at the same time,
Speaker 1: accelerating the effects of depressuration depressurization in the cabin, killing
Speaker 1: everyone on board, killing everyone on board, putting it on autopilot,
Speaker 1: and setting a course for the Southern Indian Ocean with
Speaker 1: a plane full of dead people for a good six
Speaker 1: something hours. He may have killed himself at some point.
Speaker 1: He may not. He may There's some data that suggests
Speaker 1: that the plane running out of fuel and dropping from
Speaker 1: the sky would not have hit the ocean as hard
Speaker 1: as the wreckage suggests that it hit, and that it
Speaker 1: might have taken somebody driving the plane into the ocean.
Speaker 1: So he may have been alive to the very bitter end.
Speaker 1: And if he was a seven seventies seven pilot dying
Speaker 1: by crashing a plane in the ocean, I'm betting that
Speaker 1: he wouldn't have killed himself before the crash. It just
Speaker 1: doesn't seem right. But the idea is that he killed
Speaker 1: his passengers and then killed himself by crashing this plane
Speaker 1: into the Southern Indian Ocean. And this like the mind
Speaker 1: recoils from that idea. But the problem is it's happened before.
Speaker 1: Pilots have killed their passengers and yes, multiple times in
Speaker 1: the history of air travel. Yeah, and here's the other
Speaker 1: final clue, which to me is kind of the cherry
Speaker 1: on top. Is that, really I found this one tough
Speaker 1: to reah. I didn't think so, because we we mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier he took a very deliberate path to do a
Speaker 1: little fly by a Penang Island that was out of
Speaker 1: the way and he grew up on Penang Island. And
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, I don't think that was I
Speaker 1: don't think that was an accident. Okay, Um, I think
Speaker 1: a final little fly by. I mean I could see
Speaker 1: it sure. To me, it's the simulator. Well, it's like
Speaker 1: a smoking gun, both those things to me. So so
Speaker 1: we were saying that people have done this before, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: German Wings flight remember that one Eli m Mozambique uh
Speaker 1: for seventy egypt Air And that's another article you should read.
Speaker 1: I'm not reading any of these. You got him, man,
Speaker 1: He's so good than Silk Air or flight they murdered
Speaker 1: everyone on board. Um, Like, there's no other way to
Speaker 1: take your own life. Yeah, there's so many other ways
Speaker 1: to take your own life that don't involve the innocent
Speaker 1: lives of your passengers. That this is one of the
Speaker 1: most despicable things you can possibly do. And so in
Speaker 1: response a lot of people's suicide bomber, you know a
Speaker 1: lot of people say there's no way he did this,
Speaker 1: including his face, like they are like, no, this guy
Speaker 1: did not do that. He was a nice guy. He
Speaker 1: wouldn't kill a bunch of people. But if you follow
Speaker 1: the evidence, and again, nobody can say for certain and
Speaker 1: probably no one will ever be able to say that
Speaker 1: it was Captain Shaw that did this. But if you
Speaker 1: follow the evidence and you form your own opinion, there's
Speaker 1: there's a pretty it's it's pretty convincing that he did. Um,
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 theory, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of them. Yeah, so we'll take our
Speaker 1: last break here and we will um, we're not gonna
Speaker 1: go too deep into those, but we will kind of
Speaker 1: rattle off some of the 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.
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, but 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 uh air disaster experts the
Speaker 1: likeliest explanation. Yeah, we are not saying, to be clear
Speaker 1: that it was Captain Shaw. Nobody can say that it was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're just sort of following Acam's razor here and the
Speaker 1: findings of experts like you said that. It just it's
Speaker 1: the cleanest explanation there is. Alright, well, some things that
Speaker 1: aren't so clean. Should we go over some of these?
Speaker 1: This was compiled by The Week dot c O dot
Speaker 1: UK The Week. I didn't see Yeah, I didn't see
Speaker 1: uh any authorship though on this one. Yeah. Maybe they're
Speaker 1: like the economists and they don't. It's all the economists speaking.
Speaker 1: It's all the Week speaking, you know what I mean exactly,
Speaker 1: they're collective. So let me see here. One of these
Speaker 1: is that Captain Shaw parachuted out of the plane to
Speaker 1: meet that woman on a boat. Totally unnecessary because he
Speaker 1: and his wife had already separated. Yeah, he was living alone,
Speaker 1: that's right. But that was actually written by a journalist
Speaker 1: in a book called The Hunt for MH three seventy
Speaker 1: by e An Higgins. What else? This one is interesting
Speaker 1: that it was cyber hijacked. This is another book called
Speaker 1: Beneath Another Sky colin A Global Journey into History. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is the suggestion that um Boeing's Honeywell interruptible
Speaker 1: autopilot onboard computer was hacked and reprogrammed. Yeah, there's that
Speaker 1: kind of that ties into another one that the c
Speaker 1: I a UM got their hands on the plane remotely.
Speaker 1: But the I don't know that it's true, but there's
Speaker 1: a definite thread through conspiracy minded groups that after nine
Speaker 1: eleven they have engineered some sort of mechanism on the
Speaker 1: airliners so that they can be remotely controlled in case
Speaker 1: they are hijacked, so nobody can fly something into the
Speaker 1: world traits and or anything like that. Again makes sense,
Speaker 1: It does make sense. It's it makes so much sense
Speaker 1: that I'm like, wait, did 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 to vanish MH
Speaker 1: three seventy. What else Asian Bermuda Triangle yeah, should we
Speaker 1: just that's all you need to say. Well, this one,
Speaker 1: I thought it was funny because it said that, Um,
Speaker 1: when you look at where it crashed, it's the exact
Speaker 1: opposite of the Bermuda triangle on the other side of
Speaker 1: the globe. And then I guess someone just looked and
Speaker 1: they're like, UM, no, it's actually not right. So go
Speaker 1: ahead and throw that down the two maybe in the
Speaker 1: general neighborhood, but definitely not on these And also there's
Speaker 1: no Bermuda triangle. That's that's a big, big issue with that.
Speaker 1: What do you got? Another one is that that it
Speaker 1: was used as MH seventeen. Remember I said that two
Speaker 1: four two is a terrible year for Malaysian airlines. And
Speaker 1: the idea is that they hijacked. They meaning probably the
Speaker 1: CIA or the U S government or some shadowy cabal
Speaker 1: hijacked MH three seventy safely landed it in some at
Speaker 1: Diego Garcia Airbase or somewhere under US control. UM killed everybody,
Speaker 1: or maybe they were dead from hypoxia to begin with. Anyway,
Speaker 1: UM put him in freezers and then stage this changed
Speaker 1: the call sign from a zero or from an O
Speaker 1: to a D on the plane um and then used
Speaker 1: it to be shot down over Ukraine. And supposedly there's
Speaker 1: reports from Ukrainian journalists and humanitarian workers and even Ukrainian
Speaker 1: rebels saying that the corpses that fell from this this
Speaker 1: shot down plane MH seventeen over Ukraine were already decomposing
Speaker 1: and rotting as if they died weeks before. Um. I've
Speaker 1: not found anybody who actually said that or anything like that.
Speaker 1: But that's the whole thing, is that it was a
Speaker 1: big false flag operation. Okay, but isn't it nuts that
Speaker 1: Like if you can't explain something like a disappeared airliner,
Speaker 1: people go onto the internet and write books and say
Speaker 1: here's what really happened. And then it's this. I think
Speaker 1: about the level of distrust we have for the people
Speaker 1: running the show that this has an audience, Like, I
Speaker 1: do not blame anybody who believes stuff like this because
Speaker 1: we've been lied to for so long that you can
Speaker 1: buy this. You know, that's that some from an agency
Speaker 1: would hijack a plane, kill everybody, and then use it
Speaker 1: to pin it on um, you know, putin controlled uh
Speaker 1: Ukrainian forces. Come on, yeah, it was Hunter Biden. Right.
Speaker 1: So here's another one that I thought was interesting and
Speaker 1: not I'm saying it's interesting, is like, could it be?
Speaker 1: But if you go to look at passengers on an
Speaker 1: airplane and try and find a thread, uh, you might
Speaker 1: want to look at the fact that there are twenty
Speaker 1: people that worked for a company all on board called
Speaker 1: Free Scale Semiconductor. So I hear that and I think, well,
Speaker 1: we should at least look into this. Is there any
Speaker 1: reason someone would want to tank this company or tank
Speaker 1: twenty people that worked important people that work for this company,
Speaker 1: And the theory is that they might have been killed
Speaker 1: by plane crash, either for secret technology or to manipulate
Speaker 1: stock prices. Right, And apparently that company helped the n
Speaker 1: s A or this CIA or the U. S government
Speaker 1: in general create some of its PRISM program surveillance technology,
Speaker 1: so they were supposedly already in cahoots with shadowy agencies
Speaker 1: within the US government to begin with. And since his
Speaker 1: plane was headed to Beijing, China, perhaps these this company
Speaker 1: was going over to work with China now and the
Speaker 1: CIA didn't like that, so they did this pretty interesting,
Speaker 1: as you said, interesting, Yeah, that's all it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then there are other various ones from life insurance
Speaker 1: scams to uh false flag hijackings, to alien abductions. Apparently
Speaker 1: five percent of Americans survey to believe it was subducted
Speaker 1: by aliens believe MG three seventy was abducted by aliens.
Speaker 1: I saw that, and my brain wouldn't accept that. I
Speaker 1: think I just saw it as five percent Americans believe
Speaker 1: in alien abductions. You know, I can't hear what you're about.
Speaker 1: I've done Okay, Uh, you got anything else? Well, if
Speaker 1: you want to know more about mhe three, set a
Speaker 1: neat friend, meet your new hobby because it is all
Speaker 1: over the internet, and follow whatever thread you like. Um.
Speaker 1: And since I said that, it's time for listener mail,
Speaker 1: this one's a bit long, but boy is it a
Speaker 1: good one, uh and super important one for this gentleman
Speaker 1: and his family. Hey guys, my name is Tyler. I
Speaker 1: live in Michigan. I got a story for you. The
Speaker 1: Sunday before Thanksgiving, my family and I woke up and
Speaker 1: I went around business as usual. I was playing a
Speaker 1: video game with my two boys, and my wife said
Speaker 1: she was going out to the garage to get something
Speaker 1: and walked out the door. After about ten minutes, my
Speaker 1: neighbor banged on the door. I opened it to see
Speaker 1: my next floor next door neighbor pointing at my wife
Speaker 1: laying motionless on the ground in front of my car.
Speaker 1: Full on panic mode set in. I ran the ten
Speaker 1: feet or so to find her not breathing, fingers and
Speaker 1: face already blew, and my neighbor started calling nine one one. Luckily,
Speaker 1: I remembered some advice from your CPR episode, not only
Speaker 1: how much pressure to apply to the stern hum, which
Speaker 1: is a lot, but the rhythm, and I began to
Speaker 1: say staying alive by the bgs in my head as
Speaker 1: I did the chest compressions. Trying to sing along while
Speaker 1: my adrenaline was pumping was not easy, but I did
Speaker 1: my best to stay calm and keep singing that part
Speaker 1: of the song in my head. The color started coming
Speaker 1: back to her face a little bit after I started
Speaker 1: the E M T s and police were at my
Speaker 1: house within five minutes and used a defibrulous uh deep
Speaker 1: I always missed that word up defibrillator on her three times,
Speaker 1: gave her three shots of epinephrin before they finally got
Speaker 1: her heart beating again. Her brain went without blood for
Speaker 1: twenty minutes, though, and as a result, she has been
Speaker 1: diagnosed with brain damage. She's got a long road to
Speaker 1: recovery ahead of her, but the doctors think she has
Speaker 1: a good chance because of her age. Her heart had
Speaker 1: a severe aridmia that ultimately caused cardiac arrest. I'm doing
Speaker 1: the best I can for her and my kids while
Speaker 1: she heals. I'm the primary provider for my family. While
Speaker 1: my wife was a primary caregiver. Having to take off
Speaker 1: for it can take care of my kids has been
Speaker 1: really scary. But I've gotten tremendous support from friends and
Speaker 1: family uh here in my time of need. So I
Speaker 1: just want to thank you guys for the work you do.
Speaker 1: Without your podcast, I likely would have been burying my
Speaker 1: wife instead of visiting her in the hospital. This is
Speaker 1: like Christmas time too. I wasn't prepared for this when
Speaker 1: you could have given me like sorry in the hand
Speaker 1: with the needle or something first. Uh sincerely, thank you
Speaker 1: both so much. That is from Tyler Elliott. He said,
Speaker 1: if you guys read this on the show, could you
Speaker 1: shout out my best friend Justin. He got me into
Speaker 1: the show back in the day and has been there
Speaker 1: for me and my family every step of the way.
Speaker 1: So Justin is the one who should be thanked. Really,
Speaker 1: It all in a weird way comes back to Justin Man.
Speaker 1: What is his name again? Tyler Elliott? And uh, I
Speaker 1: hope your wife is recovering and the same here Tyler,
Speaker 1: Best of luck to you man. That's a quite a
Speaker 1: herring experience. Not only are we thinking of you, but
Speaker 1: everybody listening to this podcast right now. I was thinking
Speaker 1: about you too, that's right, sending out the best vibes
Speaker 1: into the universe. Wow. Well, if you want to try
Speaker 1: to top Tyler's email best of luck, good luck, you
Speaker 1: can go on to step you Should Know die com
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