Speaker 1: Hey, Seattle, will see you Thursday, January sixteenth at the
Speaker 1: More Theater in San Francisco. We're going to be at
Speaker 1: the Castro on January when else? Chuck? Uh? That is it? Man?
Speaker 1: January eighteenth at the Castro, our annual trip to Sketch Fest.
Speaker 1: We'd love performing there. We have great crowds there. Go
Speaker 1: get a ticket. If you want to come see me
Speaker 1: at Movie Crush the next night on Sunday and a
Speaker 1: small venue where you can shake my hand and hug
Speaker 1: my neck. I would welcome that as well. Well, that's
Speaker 1: what I was setting you up for when I said
Speaker 1: what else. I appreciate that. We'll see you guys. You
Speaker 1: can get all the info and tickets you need on
Speaker 1: s Y s K Live dot com or s F
Speaker 1: sketch Fest dot com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
Speaker 1: a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark's Charles W.
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know about. One of the most interesting mysteries
Speaker 1: in modern times. Yeah, like it's really tough to get across.
Speaker 1: What a mystery. The Missing Airliner MH three seventy is
Speaker 1: Malaysian Airlines Flight three seventy. Yeah, and this is uh,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a two parter because it's pretty robust,
Speaker 1: and boy, hats off to the grabster. He really put
Speaker 1: together a lot of great research for this one. He did.
Speaker 1: I also want to give a huge shout out to
Speaker 1: one of my journalistic heroes, William Langwish. He wrote something
Speaker 1: he writes in the Atlantic, but he's not just an
Speaker 1: Atlantic writer. Um. He wrote what really happened to Malaysia's
Speaker 1: missing airplane, big old long article on it. And this
Speaker 1: guy is an aviation expert to begin with, but he's
Speaker 1: also if you ever read a Tom wolf book or
Speaker 1: article or whatever, he has a really great knack for
Speaker 1: making you feel like you're there in the action. But
Speaker 1: then he also has a knack for making you step
Speaker 1: back and think, how does Tom Wolfe know all this? Was?
Speaker 1: He there? William Languish is the same way, and I
Speaker 1: will I will go ahead and recommend that you not,
Speaker 1: unless you are a very courageous person, read any of
Speaker 1: his work, especially the stuff about airline disasters, any time
Speaker 1: around when you're flying, because he puts you in that
Speaker 1: plane when it's going down or whatever. Um, he's really
Speaker 1: really good at it. So I recommend basically anything lang
Speaker 1: Watch has written go read. It's worth it for sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think this coupled with um the brief times
Speaker 1: that we've touched on this kind of thing in the past,
Speaker 1: whether it was D. B. Cooper or Bermuda triangle, Like,
Speaker 1: there's something about aviation disasters and mysteries that are really
Speaker 1: intriguing to me. And for airline forensics, it's all ri
Speaker 1: just super super interesting. It is. So you talked about
Speaker 1: airline forensics and and that kind of stuff. This is
Speaker 1: lousy with it. But the reason I was saying why
Speaker 1: it's tough to overstate, like what a mystery image three seventies,
Speaker 1: it's the only airliner that has considered disappeared vanished. They
Speaker 1: know where all the other ones are, they know what
Speaker 1: happened to all the other ones. It's the only major
Speaker 1: one that is just where the official investigation said we
Speaker 1: don't know. Yeah, I mean, and you know in part
Speaker 1: two will get to a pretty good well, actually, I
Speaker 1: think the leading theory comes in this episode, but we
Speaker 1: kind of think we know. But it's that thing where
Speaker 1: you like, you can't definitively say yeah. You can't say where,
Speaker 1: and you can't say why. Um, yeah, and that then
Speaker 1: the y is and the where we're both really confounding. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the reason why air travel in the twenty one
Speaker 1: century is way safer than auto travel is because anytime
Speaker 1: an airliner goes down, everyone in the international community comes
Speaker 1: together investigates it. They do so openly. The airline um
Speaker 1: that the airplane manufacturer, the um, everyone involved is expected
Speaker 1: to like tell the truth and you get it out
Speaker 1: there and you figure out what went wrong, and then
Speaker 1: you make things safer, and then that makes air air
Speaker 1: travel safer for everybody. They couldn't do this for all
Speaker 1: sorts of reasons m Age three seventy and so it's
Speaker 1: a huge failing um among the the international community, not
Speaker 1: not for lack of trying, but because it's just an
Speaker 1: asterisk out there. It's the only one. Yeah. And that's
Speaker 1: why airplanes don't crash as much anymore. I mean, growing up,
Speaker 1: it's not like it was every other week or anything,
Speaker 1: but I used to hear about airline crashes enough to
Speaker 1: where it gave you pause. Uh, And you just don't
Speaker 1: hear about it much anymore. It's true. It's still out
Speaker 1: there for sure. Yeah, but there they seem much more
Speaker 1: rare than they used to be, kind of like sky jackings.
Speaker 1: So we'll do our best to uh put you in
Speaker 1: the in the plane, in the passenger seat. Yeah, can
Speaker 1: we at least be in business class? Buckle sure? Okay sure,
Speaker 1: We're about to say a buckle up. Yeah, okay, buckle up,
Speaker 1: because we're going to take off on March eighth, two
Speaker 1: thou fourteen in Kuala Lumpur. It's the very beginning of
Speaker 1: March eighth. UM. The takeoff schedule for Malaysian Airlines Flight
Speaker 1: three seven and DY from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was
Speaker 1: scheduled for twelve thirty five am. That's right. We're in
Speaker 1: a Boeing seven seven seven Dash two er and there
Speaker 1: are two hundred and twenty seven fellow passengers aboard twelve
Speaker 1: flight crew. It's a lot of people, almost about two
Speaker 1: thirds of the passengers or Chinese nationals. I believe there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of other people from other countries, but for
Speaker 1: the bulk of the people on the plane, we're from
Speaker 1: China and um it's a late night flight. It's expected
Speaker 1: to arrive in Beijing at about six o'clock six thirty
Speaker 1: in Beijing time, and it's gonna fly over the South
Speaker 1: China Sea, UM, over the Gulf of Thailand, through Laos, Vietnam,
Speaker 1: and then uh into China to arrive at Beijing. Um,
Speaker 1: it didn't actually take off at twelve thirty five. They
Speaker 1: took off at twelve forty two. Not too shabby, seven minutes.
Speaker 1: I'm not like sitting there rocking in my seat like
Speaker 1: let's go. Yeah, yeah, that might not have even noticed.
Speaker 1: And UM they take off and it flies up to
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand feet and the air traffic control center at
Speaker 1: Kuala Lumpur says, hey, you guys are cleared for UM
Speaker 1: to to go up to thirty five thousand feet, which
Speaker 1: is cruising altitude for this flight. I think that's right.
Speaker 1: And at this point, at eighteen thousand, they switched from
Speaker 1: the airport's air traffic to Kuala Lampur Area Control Center.
Speaker 1: And you know, the way, the reason we're mentioning all
Speaker 1: these details is because it turns out they're very important,
Speaker 1: very important. So these are all key. Keep rewinding fifteen
Speaker 1: thirty seconds to get every single detail, okay, because you're
Speaker 1: gonna need them for the big finish. So four minutes later,
Speaker 1: like you said, they were cleared to go to thirty
Speaker 1: five thousand talking about fifteen minutes. Uh, And it's here
Speaker 1: where Captain Zahari and there were two people on board
Speaker 1: flying this plane. Captain Zahari and uh, what was the
Speaker 1: other gentleman's name, First Officer Farik abdual Humid and Upton
Speaker 1: Zahari Ahmad Shaw is piloting the plane, UM, first Officer Hamid.
Speaker 1: This is his last training flight. After this he will
Speaker 1: be fully certified to fly Boeing seven seventy seven, which
Speaker 1: if you're a commercial airline pilot, that's pretty much the
Speaker 1: peak right there. Yeah, and that's important too because one
Speaker 1: of them is a very experienced pilot in his fifties. Uh.
Speaker 1: The other one is a brand new kind of greenhorn,
Speaker 1: and that's going to factor in for sure. So uh,
Speaker 1: like I said, it took about fifteen minutes to get
Speaker 1: to thirty five thousand feet. And this is when UM,
Speaker 1: the lead pilot radios that Kuala Lampoor Control Center says
Speaker 1: we're at thirty five thou feet. Then seven minutes later
Speaker 1: he radios again says, by the way, we're sta in.
Speaker 1: This is not me doing him. I don't know what
Speaker 1: he sounded like. There you go, this is Captain Zohari. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody sounds like Chuck Yeager. Yeah, I guess so. So
Speaker 1: he confirmed again that they were at thirty five thousand feet,
Speaker 1: and this is where Ed points out that this wasn't
Speaker 1: sort of big alarming thing. But what usually happens is
Speaker 1: you radio in when you leave an altitude, not when
Speaker 1: you arrive. And you also don't radio in seven minutes
Speaker 1: later and say, by the way, we're still at thirty
Speaker 1: five thou feet still here, like once you hit it,
Speaker 1: you're just sort of there that you're cruising altitude, right,
Speaker 1: So it's it wasn't alarming or anything, but it was
Speaker 1: weird that he made those two radio transmissions, but it
Speaker 1: was nothing compared to the weirdness that was about to
Speaker 1: take place um shortly after that, I think at one
Speaker 1: am qual Umpoor Area Control Center. It's like eleven minutes later,
Speaker 1: YEP said, Hey, MH three seventy, you're about to leave
Speaker 1: our jurisdiction and enter ho Chi Min's um jurisdiction. Go
Speaker 1: ahead and contract contact ho chie Man Air Traffic Control
Speaker 1: and let them know you are on with them on
Speaker 1: this frequency. Yeah. I mean, if you remember our air
Speaker 1: Traffic Control podcast, you you're you're handed off, like, don't
Speaker 1: just stick with one air traffic control when you fly
Speaker 1: around the world, you're handed off all along the way,
Speaker 1: whenever you enter the airspace of that whatever district precisely,
Speaker 1: and the way that it's set up is there's not
Speaker 1: supposed to be any time where you're just flying alone
Speaker 1: and then you move into the other one. You're going
Speaker 1: right from one to the other. You want to hand off.
Speaker 1: So um, Captain Zahari responded with good night Malaysian three
Speaker 1: seven zero. Those are the last words anyone heard from
Speaker 1: Captain Zahari as far as we know. And UM, that
Speaker 1: in and of itself was kind of an odd transmission
Speaker 1: because typically any airline captain would have replied with the
Speaker 1: frequency we said the frequency back to confirmed that that
Speaker 1: was the right one. But instead all he said was
Speaker 1: good night Malaysian three seven zero, And very shortly after that,
Speaker 1: two minutes later, um MH three seventy disappeared from the radar.
Speaker 1: The moment it showed up on ho Chi Min air
Speaker 1: Traffic Controls radar screens, it just vanished, right without everyone
Speaker 1: having made contact with them via radio frequency. This should
Speaker 1: have like set off alarms with Ho Chi Minh city,
Speaker 1: and apparently they did notice. Kuala Lumpur didn't notice. The
Speaker 1: guy was they had all this other air traffic to
Speaker 1: deal and they were out of their zone at this point,
Speaker 1: and he'd said good night, and you know everybody knows
Speaker 1: good night. You can't go back on that. You have
Speaker 1: to wait until tomorrow to make contact again. UM. So
Speaker 1: the Kuala Lumpur's I don't know about blameless in this,
Speaker 1: but certainly less blameful than um. Ho Chi Minh and
Speaker 1: Ho Chi min noticed that they just disappeared from the screen,
Speaker 1: but it took them a full eighteen minutes before they
Speaker 1: called Kuala Lumpur and said, hey, do you know anything
Speaker 1: about where MH three seventy is because they kind of
Speaker 1: vanished from our radar. Yeah. Like, I don't know the
Speaker 1: exact process. Um. In their defense, they were trying to
Speaker 1: get in touch. It's not like they just said, well,
Speaker 1: we'll see what happens. Uh. They got in touch with
Speaker 1: another pilot who was nearby in that airspace to contact them,
Speaker 1: and this this pilot reported there was interference and static.
Speaker 1: I heard mumbling on the other end. But that's the
Speaker 1: last we heard and we lost connection. Right, we're not
Speaker 1: even sure that who he was talking to the right people? Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean they were trying to get in touch, but
Speaker 1: you're right, I think like sooner than eighteen minutes, they
Speaker 1: should have said, by the way, this plane that just
Speaker 1: left your airspace has disappeared, Like, do you know what's
Speaker 1: going on? Right? Protocol, international protocol is five minutes. Okay,
Speaker 1: So they waited thirteen minutes longer than protocol dictated, and
Speaker 1: it was so so much beyond when they should have
Speaker 1: called that the controller and qual Umpoor actually said on
Speaker 1: the record, like, why didn't you call me sooner? How
Speaker 1: are you just calling me about this? That may have
Speaker 1: MISSI have been yesterday, right, it's missing for eighteen minutes, which,
Speaker 1: as we'll get to later on the stuff that came
Speaker 1: up in the investigation, that was just the first step
Speaker 1: in a series of missteps that led to the reason
Speaker 1: why MH three seventy may never be found. Uh So,
Speaker 1: uh should we take a little break and talk about
Speaker 1: radar radar Oriley. We'll be back right after this. Radar Oriley,
Speaker 1: not radar o Riley radar used by air traffic control
Speaker 1: so different. It is different um than radar oriley. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is called secondary radar, and it sends out a
Speaker 1: little beam that um, it's very narrow and it sweeps
Speaker 1: the area. And on board the aircraft they have a
Speaker 1: transponder that to Texas beam and sends their own signal
Speaker 1: back that says this, how fast we're going, is where
Speaker 1: we're headed in a code that says that, and this
Speaker 1: is who I am? Yeah, maybe even m H three
Speaker 1: seventy as simple as that something like that. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's what's supposed to show up on air traffic controls
Speaker 1: radar screen. That's so they can see, oh, here's MH
Speaker 1: three seventy coming toward d L two or whatever at
Speaker 1: this speed. Right, Um, they have all this information and
Speaker 1: it's it's called secondary radar. Primary radar is what you
Speaker 1: think where it's like, um, you know, it's a blip
Speaker 1: on a screen that this big um, this big radar
Speaker 1: ray is is bouncing off of and receiving information back from.
Speaker 1: But it's just you see, it's physically there. This has
Speaker 1: far more information and that's why air traffic control around
Speaker 1: the world uses right. And this is very key because
Speaker 1: just a few seconds after it made that switch over
Speaker 1: into ho Chiman's airspace, the transponder stopped sending information. That
Speaker 1: transponder that's supposed to say who you are, where you are,
Speaker 1: and how fast you're going just stopped right. It vanished.
Speaker 1: And this is when the ball was dropped by a
Speaker 1: little bit by Kuala lamp Or not noticing, and definitely
Speaker 1: by ho chi Man not doing anything immediately in response
Speaker 1: to Kuala lamp Or so. UM. Primary radar the radar
Speaker 1: that you typically think of when you think of radar.
Speaker 1: That's there are very few places in the world where
Speaker 1: you can't be tracked by someone on radar. It's fairly
Speaker 1: old technology, it's been around for a while. UM. But
Speaker 1: the places where you can't be tracked can be vast
Speaker 1: over the ocean, in the desert, over extremely mountainous or
Speaker 1: wooded areas. There are places where you can't really put
Speaker 1: a radar tower, and there you can disappear from radar. Right.
Speaker 1: There's this I think what I'm trying to say here
Speaker 1: is if you take your plane out of radar range
Speaker 1: and you turn off your transponder, you can make a
Speaker 1: modern airliner as big as a seven s vanish where
Speaker 1: people don't know where it is. And that's a really
Speaker 1: I think hallmark point or trade to this. This mystery
Speaker 1: that kind of like gets people a little unnerved. Is
Speaker 1: wait a minute, like this is the century, this happened
Speaker 1: in two four. What do you mean? There's times and
Speaker 1: situations where an airliner can disappear and people don't know
Speaker 1: where it is. And that was the situation and as
Speaker 1: um Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur starting to
Speaker 1: scramble to try to figure out, you know, where this is.
Speaker 1: Apparently they called Malaysian Airlines and said, hey, do you
Speaker 1: know anything about MH three seventy. Malaysian Airlines said, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they're flying over Cambodia right now, and they're like where,
Speaker 1: what do you how are you seeing this? After an hour,
Speaker 1: finally Malaysian Airlines is like, no, we're just referring to
Speaker 1: the flight plan. They should be over Cambodia right now.
Speaker 1: What do you mean you can't find them? What's what's
Speaker 1: going on? Yeah? But because of that primary radar, uh,
Speaker 1: the secondary radar wasn't functioning like we said, because the
Speaker 1: transponder was off, but the primary radar did track them
Speaker 1: for about an hour after those communications dropped UM because
Speaker 1: of the Malaysian military was able to track it with
Speaker 1: the primary radar. Yeah, apparently it flew through the primary
Speaker 1: radar of five different countries and the only one that
Speaker 1: bothered to track it was Malaysia's um Air Force. But
Speaker 1: they they didn't do anything about it. They didn't follow
Speaker 1: up to see who it was. They didn't scramble any
Speaker 1: jets to go see if everybody was okay, or they
Speaker 1: just knew that there was an unidentified plane flying through
Speaker 1: Malaysian airspace and there force didn't do anything about it.
Speaker 1: This is embarrassing enough that the Air Force didn't reveal
Speaker 1: this to anybody for a while. Which was a really
Speaker 1: important point because during this time, about an hour UM,
Speaker 1: about an hour and a half after the takeoff and
Speaker 1: an hour after the thing disappeared from transponders, the Malaysian
Speaker 1: Air Force was tracking MH three seventy and it saw
Speaker 1: that it seemed to have taken a turn. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean they know what happened at this point. For a
Speaker 1: little while, it made a sharp turn that was not
Speaker 1: part of the planned flight plan. No, not at all.
Speaker 1: This is where things definitely took a metaphorical and literal turn.
Speaker 1: It headed southwest at that point, crossed over the Malay Peninsula,
Speaker 1: over Malaysia again and then parts of Thailand. Then it
Speaker 1: made a right turn this is very key near the
Speaker 1: island of Penang, just put a pin in that. Then
Speaker 1: headed west by northwest towards the Andaman Sea, and then
Speaker 1: at two a M vanished from radar, from that primary
Speaker 1: right radar as well. Right, so the Malaysian Air Force
Speaker 1: saw this happen on this radar, didn't tell anybody for
Speaker 1: a while. The flight plan had it leaving Malaysia, crossing
Speaker 1: over the Straight of Malacca um into the Um the
Speaker 1: peninsula where Thailand is located, into China, right just away
Speaker 1: from Malaysia. And from what the Malaysian Air Force saw,
Speaker 1: this thing doubled back on itself and then went in
Speaker 1: some totally different directions, almost the opposite direction it was
Speaker 1: supposed to be going in. And like you said, it
Speaker 1: dropped off of the radar, and that was the last
Speaker 1: time anyone saw it on radar. But that's not the
Speaker 1: last time we were able to track um M H
Speaker 1: three seventy and that's thanks to a satellite network that's
Speaker 1: run by an outfit called in MARSAT. Yeah, so in
Speaker 1: mar SAT. If you've ever been on a plane and
Speaker 1: you've enjoyed the benefits of watching movies, streaming or connected
Speaker 1: to your computer via WiFi, that is because of satellite communication.
Speaker 1: Um these airplane. Airplanes are equipped with a system and
Speaker 1: it transfers data and all their voice communications via satellite.
Speaker 1: And some of this data from the plane is automatically
Speaker 1: shared with these ground tracking stations, which is a really
Speaker 1: big deal. So not only are there letting you watch
Speaker 1: movies and doing all that, but it's sending this automatic
Speaker 1: data on a regular on the rag basically from that
Speaker 1: satellite to these ground stations. Right. So, um, they think
Speaker 1: by this time, Um, actually I believe they know. By
Speaker 1: this time MH three seventies navigational systems, entertainment systems, UH,
Speaker 1: A bunch of its systems have been turned off. The
Speaker 1: only thing that was still operating was this satellite link. Um,
Speaker 1: I guess beacon. It's called a satellite data unit. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the satellite data unit which was capable of of
Speaker 1: contacting and receiving contact from the m mar SAT satellites. Now,
Speaker 1: at the time, no one knows that this is happening right,
Speaker 1: Like there's no sound being made, there's nobody tracking this.
Speaker 1: This all came out much later when m mar Sette
Speaker 1: realized they were sitting on a bunch of data. Um
Speaker 1: But during different points over the next six seven hours,
Speaker 1: the satellite and the satellite data unit talked to each
Speaker 1: other under a few different circumstances. And because of this,
Speaker 1: this company M Marsett, which is located in or headquartered
Speaker 1: in Great Britain, but literally covers the globe, not just
Speaker 1: with airline stuff but maritime thing, which I think where
Speaker 1: they were originally, um they were originally um founded to
Speaker 1: to do is to to enable maritime communications, like you know,
Speaker 1: satellite phone you're calling through in Marsett, right, Um. So
Speaker 1: they've got this whole constellation of satellites and when in
Speaker 1: Marsett heard about MH three seventy, they were like, we're
Speaker 1: all bet our satellites were tracking this thing in some way,
Speaker 1: ship or form. And it turns out that they were right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there's four and this is important here. There's four
Speaker 1: different ways um or circumstances where that satellite data unit
Speaker 1: on the plane is communicating with the satellite in space
Speaker 1: whenever you're making a data transmission or a voice transmission.
Speaker 1: Whenever someone on the ground tries to contact the plane. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's something that happens every hour. If no one has
Speaker 1: made either one of these contacts for an hour, you
Speaker 1: get a check in called a handshake. It's just like
Speaker 1: you're still here, shake hand's buddy, Yeah, just want to
Speaker 1: make sure you're logged on. It's kind of like um,
Speaker 1: when you watch too much Netflix and Netflix message, yeah,
Speaker 1: have you finished all the tub of cookie dough yet? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And then as the thing that says go outside, right,
Speaker 1: or actually it doesn't, it says, watch another one, watch
Speaker 1: some more? Why not have some more cookie dough? It's
Speaker 1: the same thing. It's it's sending a message to the
Speaker 1: planes satellite data unit saying like, just are you still
Speaker 1: logged on? And then the final thing, and this is
Speaker 1: super key, is whenever the uh, whenever you first log
Speaker 1: onto the satellite system, that thing on the plane, whenever
Speaker 1: it kind of checks in and links up. That is
Speaker 1: very key because what can also happen if that thing
Speaker 1: goes down and then reboots, It treats that as a
Speaker 1: new log in, so it'll make another ping. Basically that
Speaker 1: it's logged onto the system, right So in mars goes
Speaker 1: back and looks their data and says, okay, so here's
Speaker 1: a couple of things right now. This is I think
Speaker 1: within the first few days, um, everybody is looking in
Speaker 1: the South China Sea for MH three seventy because that
Speaker 1: was what was along its flight plan. The Malaysian Air
Speaker 1: Force hasn't revealed yet that it tracked MH three seventy
Speaker 1: turn around and go the opposite direction of what its
Speaker 1: flight plane was was where it was scheduled to carry it.
Speaker 1: And m Marsett is now saying, wait a minute, this
Speaker 1: thing didn't crash like an hour and a half after takeoff.
Speaker 1: This thing turned around and flew into the Indian Ocean
Speaker 1: for six or seven more hours because our satellite was
Speaker 1: talking to the to the plane at various points during
Speaker 1: this during this time. Yeah, and we should point out
Speaker 1: to after Air France flight four four seven, which crashed
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine. This is when in Marsett really
Speaker 1: kind of beefed up their system. They added more ground
Speaker 1: stations and they added a lot more capability to add
Speaker 1: story age for this data because they know that this
Speaker 1: can really help out in situations like this that was
Speaker 1: a big one too, Um do you remember that one?
Speaker 1: So that one was the first one that really opened
Speaker 1: people's eyes where it was like, wait a minute, when
Speaker 1: we're flying over the ocean, like no one knows where
Speaker 1: we are, and they were like, no, actually not really, um,
Speaker 1: and they I think that's why m MARSAT was like,
Speaker 1: we gotta build more ground stations, we got to bulk
Speaker 1: up our data, data stores, all that stuff, we got
Speaker 1: to add more satellite capabilities, and in doing so, they
Speaker 1: made it so that you could be tracked when you're
Speaker 1: over the ocean, even if you didn't want to be,
Speaker 1: as seems to have been the case with MH three seventy.
Speaker 1: So it was a huge difference between two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: was it two thousand four, two two nine and two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen just five years the thing proved itself. These
Speaker 1: upgrades they made were substantial. But um Air France flight
Speaker 1: four four seven in and of itself another languish gem
Speaker 1: that just puts you in the seat of this terrifying
Speaker 1: plane crash. Um that one in party killer. They knew
Speaker 1: where the plane was, and it still took two years
Speaker 1: to recover the black boxes and figure out what went wrong,
Speaker 1: which is terrifying. And if you know what happened to
Speaker 1: that one, it's basically the controllers got ripped away but
Speaker 1: from the pilot and it just went right into the ocean,
Speaker 1: and they're still down there. Apparently there was a big
Speaker 1: debate over what to do with these people. When they
Speaker 1: started raising them, they were perfectly preserved because they're so
Speaker 1: deep in the pressure in the anaerobic situation, and yeah,
Speaker 1: the temperature just kept them perfectly preserved. But as they
Speaker 1: were raised up into warmer waters, the decomposition over two
Speaker 1: years just happened immediately. So they I think the French
Speaker 1: government said they have to stay there. It's now a memorial,
Speaker 1: do not try to raise anybody. And they're still down there,
Speaker 1: strapped to their seats, which when you just do not
Speaker 1: think about that the next time you get on a plane,
Speaker 1: it's a terrible thing to think about. I can tell
Speaker 1: you firsthand, you've gotten so much better over the years.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure this isn't going to be a setback. Now.
Speaker 1: I'm hanging in there, all right. Yeah, if it happens,
Speaker 1: it happens, like that's the way I kind of view
Speaker 1: you can do about it. This isn't something that they
Speaker 1: are that you guys are gonna play my memorial at
Speaker 1: my funeral, my last words. But if you're if if
Speaker 1: I go down in a plane crash, my number was
Speaker 1: up right, and everyone else would be like, that's so weird.
Speaker 1: He always talked about it. Yeah, there was. Actually I
Speaker 1: had a tweet once it said, um, if I ever
Speaker 1: go down in a plane crash, I'm going to shout
Speaker 1: I wish I were to spend more time at work.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I get that. Well, you know it's
Speaker 1: like no one ever says that in their deathbed they
Speaker 1: wish they'd spend more time at work. Well I got it.
Speaker 1: An ironic funny on the way. Oh yeah, i'll make
Speaker 1: people laugh. Good for you give them their last laugh.
Speaker 1: So uh, this uh, where they're getting all this information
Speaker 1: was from a ground station in Perth, Australia, a place
Speaker 1: we have been to. It was quite lovely, lovely town.
Speaker 1: That's right, it was great. Uh. Anyone ever tells you
Speaker 1: don't go to Western Australia, You tell them that's b S.
Speaker 1: Because Josh and Chuck said it's great, all right, very stupid.
Speaker 1: So b S stands for So they had a lot
Speaker 1: of data, like we said, because they had beefed up
Speaker 1: their storage capabilities over the past five or six years,
Speaker 1: and they have a couple of types of data. Um
Speaker 1: something called burst timing offset and burst frequency offset b
Speaker 1: t O is it measures how long that a signal
Speaker 1: takes to reach a satellite, you know, the speed of
Speaker 1: the signal, so you know exactly how far that plane
Speaker 1: is from the satellite at that exact moment. It's very
Speaker 1: easy to kind of understand, right, and first taken into account,
Speaker 1: m Marsat has Oh here was a here was a ping,
Speaker 1: here's a pin, here's a pin, here's a pink. Right now,
Speaker 1: they're digging in to analyze these pings and just the
Speaker 1: quality of them, the timing of them, all this stuff,
Speaker 1: because they're like, I'm pretty sure we can figure out
Speaker 1: where this plane was and maybe where it went if
Speaker 1: we really drill in and do some incredible math and
Speaker 1: figure out, uh, just kind of the nature of these pains. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what they're trying to do here is to narrow
Speaker 1: it down into an arc instead of a circle. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that's just naturally what happened. Oh, yeah, you're right,
Speaker 1: you're right. I'm sorry because ed explained in a very
Speaker 1: easy way. If you tell someone, hey, I'm a hundred
Speaker 1: miles from Atlanta, then you draw a circle around Atlanta.
Speaker 1: That's a hundred miles and you could be at any
Speaker 1: point along that circle. But if that phone call was
Speaker 1: from Athens, which is not a hundred miles from Atlanta,
Speaker 1: but it's you know, too far or so. But if
Speaker 1: you said you're from some other city in Georgia, then
Speaker 1: you would know where you were, and if you knew
Speaker 1: how fast you were going, then you could. Really it
Speaker 1: doesn't become a circle, then it becomes an arc. Right,
Speaker 1: the number of points on that circle where that person
Speaker 1: could possibly be yes is smaller, yeah, much more or
Speaker 1: maybe by half, maybe by two thirds. And yet so
Speaker 1: the circle becomes an arc. And because of that burst
Speaker 1: timing offset, UM they could establish those those arcs, and
Speaker 1: there were seven of them, I believe, no, they could
Speaker 1: establish the circles. And because of the other one, the
Speaker 1: the BFO, the burst frequency offset, those are more complicated.
Speaker 1: They involved the Doppler effect, and basically UM tell the
Speaker 1: satellite or the satellite data tells in mar set we're
Speaker 1: going in this direction. Because the you know, the Doppler
Speaker 1: effectiveists an ambulance, SIRN is coming to you and then
Speaker 1: changes in pitch. Because of the relative distance and the
Speaker 1: direction that it's traveling. They could tell from this ping
Speaker 1: the satellite ping um, not even a data transmission, just
Speaker 1: to ping which direction thing was headed and roughly how
Speaker 1: fast it was going. And so they were able to
Speaker 1: create seven arcs. And after the seven arcs, the seventh
Speaker 1: arc was created by a pin that took place at
Speaker 1: eight nine am. And after that there was another uh,
Speaker 1: there was a log on request, a handshake request that
Speaker 1: the SDU failed to respond to. And they think that
Speaker 1: in between eight nine am and that last log on
Speaker 1: request at nine fifteen am, the plane finally crashed, probably
Speaker 1: from running out of fuel. Yeah, And they think the
Speaker 1: eight nineteen was from one of those reboots that I
Speaker 1: was talking about when that system comes back on, which
Speaker 1: will come after power failure, right, which will come into
Speaker 1: play pretty soon. Alright, So let's take another break here, Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, we'll be back with the leading theory right
Speaker 1: after this. All right, So the leading theory and this
Speaker 1: is uh, the more I read this, the more it
Speaker 1: was Akam's razor kind of staring you in the face.
Speaker 1: Because we'll get into some of the kind of cockamami theories,
Speaker 1: and there are many of them, but this one is
Speaker 1: the simplest, and uh, it's probably what happened. It is
Speaker 1: that uh, someone on board and should we should we
Speaker 1: tease this out? Yeah, okay, someone on board uh took
Speaker 1: control of the plane, disabled that transponder and then started
Speaker 1: flying in the other direction back across Malaysia, then put
Speaker 1: it on autopilot until it ran out of gas and
Speaker 1: it crashed into the ocean. Yeah, about the southern Indian Ocean,
Speaker 1: which is where the southern seventh arc was. Right. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons this makes a lot of sense is
Speaker 1: because that transponder going off at the exact moment when
Speaker 1: the plane transition from Kaua Lampoor's airspace into ho Chi
Speaker 1: Men's it would be an incredible coincidence. If that was
Speaker 1: just an incredible coincidence, that in and of itself says
Speaker 1: that some that there was a human factor involved, like
Speaker 1: someone knew what that meant, right exactly, so somebody who
Speaker 1: knew how to do that when to do it, and um,
Speaker 1: the timing of it was just too spectacular for it
Speaker 1: to have been an accident. Yeah, because what they probably
Speaker 1: counted on is exactly what happened. Was there was a
Speaker 1: period of time. They might have figured five minutes, which
Speaker 1: is what you said the standard was, but what they
Speaker 1: got was eighteen minutes of confusion. I mean they it
Speaker 1: tripled what they were counting on best case scenario. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: The other thing was that the turn that the MH
Speaker 1: three seventy made was so um abrupt that an autopilot
Speaker 1: wouldn't have done that if you put it. If you
Speaker 1: put a plane on autopilot and have it and it turns,
Speaker 1: it would make a much wider turn. This is a
Speaker 1: hard kind of backtracking turn that it made to its
Speaker 1: left to the southwest from the north. Traveling the northeast,
Speaker 1: the turn was to the southwest. So just the turn alone,
Speaker 1: which came after the transponder was turned off um shows
Speaker 1: that it was under human control. It was a person
Speaker 1: piloting the plane making it turn like right, and that
Speaker 1: rules out things like mechanical failure or fire. Everything from
Speaker 1: meteor strike to the squaw line to any kind of weather.
Speaker 1: It was all that was ruled out by the fact
Speaker 1: that this turn took is clearly under human control. Right.
Speaker 1: That also rules out hypoxia. If you remember the very
Speaker 1: eerie crash for with Golfer plane Pain Stewart on that
Speaker 1: private jet, I don't really remember that. Can you kind
Speaker 1: of refresh my memory? That was and the I think
Speaker 1: the post mortem on that one was that this private
Speaker 1: plane essentially everyone on board died of hypoxia, including the pilots,
Speaker 1: and it flew for a number of hours on autopilot.
Speaker 1: It was a ghost plane essentially. Yeah, so they don't
Speaker 1: think that hypoxia affected whoever was in control of the
Speaker 1: plane because it made that turn. Yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: very deliberate turn, and then it followed a more and
Speaker 1: even more deliberate flight pattern after that. This was not
Speaker 1: random movements of a plane where somebody who was suffering
Speaker 1: from hypoxia but still alive would make. These weren't confused decisions.
Speaker 1: They were and they were difficult to understand to say,
Speaker 1: but they weren't random and confused behavior. They were deliberate.
Speaker 1: That's right. So hip one of the pilots or both
Speaker 1: of the pilots suffering from hypoxia has ruled out um
Speaker 1: and the fact that they were deliberate turns also rules
Speaker 1: out the idea that both of the high, the pilots
Speaker 1: were dead. That again, it was just the plane flying itself, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: These log on requests by that STU unit on the plane. Um,
Speaker 1: it was another big clue there because there was a
Speaker 1: log on request made at one forty three am, and
Speaker 1: that basically says that the power on the plane's electrical
Speaker 1: system was shut off for a period of time in
Speaker 1: between that transponder disappearing and that time of that log
Speaker 1: on request. Right. So someone like purposely disabled, purposefully disabled
Speaker 1: these systems. Right. So one forty three am would have
Speaker 1: been um about an hour after takeoff, just over an
Speaker 1: hour after takeoff, um, after the transponder was turned off
Speaker 1: with perfect timing between Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh,
Speaker 1: but also um before the turn that that Malaysian Air
Speaker 1: Force tracts or at about the same time, right. Um.
Speaker 1: The other thing that could have happened when these when
Speaker 1: the transponder and the STU are shut off, it could
Speaker 1: have depressurized the plane. Um. If that happens, then hypoxy
Speaker 1: is the fear. Those oxygen masks are gonna drop down,
Speaker 1: but you only get about ten minutes of oxygen as
Speaker 1: a passenger. The cockpit is going to have a lot
Speaker 1: more oxygen than that, but we do know for a
Speaker 1: fact from that log on request that the systems will
Speaker 1: all for an hour. So even if that were the case,
Speaker 1: then the masks run out ten minutes later and the
Speaker 1: people die of hypoxy at the passengers shortly after that.
Speaker 1: The thing is is they believe that um not only
Speaker 1: was MH three seventies still at cruising altitude, it probably
Speaker 1: actually climbed to forty thousand, maybe a little over forty feet.
Speaker 1: It's basically the maximum that a seven seventy seven could
Speaker 1: stay aloft at. So the drop down masks would have
Speaker 1: been totally useless to begin with. There's not enough oxygen
Speaker 1: coming through them to offset that kind of height into
Speaker 1: deep pressurized cabin that's meant for a much lower altitude,
Speaker 1: and the reason why I found it very disconcerting to
Speaker 1: learn that there's only like ten or fifteen minutes worth
Speaker 1: of oxygen coming out of those masks. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: the idea there that a plane crash doesn't take longer
Speaker 1: than that. The idea is that it's used for an
Speaker 1: emergency transition down to a much lower altitude where you
Speaker 1: could breathe without a pressurized cabin and that that takes
Speaker 1: less than ten or fifteen minutes. You can do that
Speaker 1: much more quickly a few minutes. So basically you're gonna
Speaker 1: start flying with your own oxygen tank. Basically, Okay, I'll
Speaker 1: be like trying to take it away from the t
Speaker 1: you can't do it. Uh. Here's another thing is that
Speaker 1: that STU log on request UM at the end, it's
Speaker 1: it suggests that it was turned back on. And the
Speaker 1: thinking here is that whoever did this UM it probably
Speaker 1: didn't care at that point because it was too late
Speaker 1: because everyone on board was dead. Right. So the idea
Speaker 1: of behind all this is that the power was shut off,
Speaker 1: and they know that the power was turned off because
Speaker 1: the log on request came at a certain point, right,
Speaker 1: So that means that the power had been shut off
Speaker 1: and it was coming back on. And they think that
Speaker 1: it was to de pressurize the cabin and be a
Speaker 1: very easy way to depressurize the cabin just turn off
Speaker 1: all of the power and then maybe whoever did this
Speaker 1: and we'll get to that. Uh, it was like, I
Speaker 1: want to get back down to normal cruising altitude here
Speaker 1: so I can fly this plane UM without wearing a mask.
Speaker 1: Maybe or just in a less stressful environment, right exactly,
Speaker 1: maybe go get a bite to eat or something like that.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of there's a lock that can be
Speaker 1: done in pressurized cabin. And then there was that final arc,
Speaker 1: the seventh one that log on ust was probably the
Speaker 1: plane running out of fuel, and this I thought was
Speaker 1: super interesting. So the plane runs out of fuel, those
Speaker 1: engines shut down, but there's still air pumping through those
Speaker 1: turbines and that's gonna spin the turbine and that's certainly
Speaker 1: not going to be enough to fly your plane, but
Speaker 1: it could be enough to act as a generator and
Speaker 1: power up the auxiliary power system. That's right, super super interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So in the running out of fuel, electrical goes down,
Speaker 1: those air ram jets come on, in the auxiliary power
Speaker 1: system comes on. The thing logs back on just enough
Speaker 1: to get that going again, right exactly. So let's let's
Speaker 1: just before we stop for um this episode, Chuck, let's
Speaker 1: just kind of recap what m Marset has been able
Speaker 1: to figure out from seven pings between its satellite and
Speaker 1: the satellite data unit seven pings. They dove into these
Speaker 1: things so deeply that they were able to figure out
Speaker 1: that the that the flight did not crash, that it
Speaker 1: um there was probably a hypoxia event among the cabin,
Speaker 1: that it was deliberate, and that the plane kept flying. UM,
Speaker 1: not that it did not crush, but that it kept
Speaker 1: flying for at least six more hours and finally did
Speaker 1: probably crash in the Southern Indian Ocean. All from seven
Speaker 1: little pings between the plane and the satellite. That's right. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then the final little clue here from the satellite
Speaker 1: is the e l T emergency transmitter UM failed. It's
Speaker 1: emergency location transmitter, and that's linked to a different satellite system.
Speaker 1: And one person, if you're conspiracy minded, might say, well,
Speaker 1: you know what this means. It didn't actually crash into
Speaker 1: the ocean. But these e l T s apparently have
Speaker 1: a pretty low success rate. And when you dive into
Speaker 1: the ocean with no power, it's at tremendous speed and
Speaker 1: that would have been enough probably to destroy the plane instantly.
Speaker 1: And this e l T there's UM. There's another. So
Speaker 1: there's four I think on the plane. Did you say that.
Speaker 1: I didn't say four, So believe there's four on the plane.
Speaker 1: One of them like they can be disabled. It's not
Speaker 1: a black box. By the way, no, no, no, this
Speaker 1: is just a beacon that's pings of satellite but isn't
Speaker 1: even it's a different satellite from m MARSAT, so it's
Speaker 1: like an extra fail safe. And this means that they
Speaker 1: all four of them failed, which again some people think
Speaker 1: that's that's that's evidence right there that this thing didn't
Speaker 1: actually crush. We'll talk about that in the next episode.
Speaker 1: About that, all right, I think we don't do listener
Speaker 1: mails on a part one, so just strap in and
Speaker 1: I hope you can hold off from researching for a
Speaker 1: couple of days on this one. Maybe you have a
Speaker 1: bloody mary while you're waiting. Well, anyway, in the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with us, you
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