Deep Dive: MH370, Remastered – Details, episodes & analysis

Andy Tarnoff and I spent eight months making the 31 episodes that comprised the podcast series “Deep Dive: MH370.” Our goal was to break down a complicated case so that it could be understood by viewers and listeners in an entertaining and easy-to-digest format. In today’s episode, we discuss the six important conclusions about the case that the public might not understand were it not for the podcast.

As a follow-up to this series I later started producing the series “Finding MH370,” currently ongoing, which builds upon the work of “Deep Dive” and extends it further with an eye to ultimately solving the case.

Today we’re going to go deeper than we’ve ever gone before on a question that I’ve called the crux of the whole MH370 mystery, and which is newly important because a bunch of viral MH370 videos have come out that spend a lot of time discussing it and, I’ll argue, they’re getting it wrong. And it matters a great deal because these videos are shaping what the public thinks is a reasonable explanation of the mystery.

To help us with this important task we have with us a very special guest today, Juan Browne, an experienced airline pilot and the host of the popular aviation channel Blancolirio on YouTube.

Juan has been flying airplanes for a very long time, and most recently he’s been working as a first officer on 777 flights over the Atlantic, so he really knows aviation and he knows this plane in particular. I reached out to Juan because I knew he could help us understand a crucial but widely misundersood aspect of the MH370 mystery. Namely: how did MH370’s satcom get turned off, and get turned back on again?

This is the central crux of the mystery because, first of all, no one’s been able to come up with a really good explanation for how and why it happened, and second, without it we don’t get the 7 ping arcs, we don’t get the BFO analysis, we don’t wind up having anywhere to look in the southern Indian Ocean.

Ever since Blaine Alan Gibson first crossed my radar screen, half a year before he found “No Step,” I’ve struggled to understand this eccentric character. In the media, he styled himself after Indiana Jones, always wearing a brown fedora. He portrayed himself as an inveterate adventurer and world traveler who before MH370 had pursued any number of quixotic international quests, including an attempt to find the lost ark of the covenant and an expedition to the site of the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. His was a wonderfully appealing persona. After I wrote about him in New York magazine, TV producers started getting in touch with me, hoping I could hook them up with him to pitch reality shows about his life.

He quickly became a central feature of the MH370 story, ubiquitous in media coverage the crash. But who, really, is this man of mystery? As with so many other aspects of this case, the more layers you peel away, the stranger things appear.

Last episode we talked about the surge of MH370 debris that started turning up in the western Indian Ocean in early 2016, and how search officials were optimistic that all this new data would help them understand where the plane went down. We focussed on drift modeling, and how the timing and location of the finds could have helped pin down the location of the crash through a process called reverse drift modeling. Today, we’re talking about other clues that the authorities were able to derive from the collected debris, namely the marine fauna found living on them. And to help us understand, we’re bringing in Jim Carlton, the world’s leading expert in marine invertebrates.

If there was one piece of debris, there should have been a lot more. Yet month after month went by without any further discoveries. Then in February of 2016 an independent researcher named Blaine Alan Gibson accomplished something no one ever had before: He set out to find a piece of MH370 debris, and he found one. In the months that followed, other people also found pieces of the plane. Blaine Gibson himself went on to find many more. For some, this influx of additional evidence only confirmed the conclusion that the plane had indeed crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. But in looking closer, I saw the same kinds of inconsistencies that have characterized every aspect of the case.

At 8.30am on July 29, 2015, on the northeastern shore of Réunion Island, a cleanup crew was working its way along a stretch of pebbly beach when a worker named Johnny Begue spotted an unfamiliar-looking object at the edge of the surf. Roughly rectangular and about six feet long, it somewhat resembled a stubby airplane wing encrusted with marine life. Soon gendarmes were on the scene, along with local news photographers. The piece was quickly identified as a flaperon, a part of a 777 wing’s trailing edge. Close examination revealed that it was indisputably a piece of MH370. Here at last, was physical evidence that the missing airliner really had crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

But was that conclusion inescapable? In today’s episode we discuss how, once again, the evidence in this case looks stranger the closer you examine it.

For this episode, we’re trying something different. Until now we’ve spent each episode diving into a particular aspect of the mystery. This time, we’re pulling back to look at the mystery from a global perspective in order to address the question: What is this case like?

Just as every person has a unique character, a mystery can have a personality of its own, and MH370 certainly does. The dominant feature of that personality is strangeness. Time and again, a piece of evidence emerges which changes what we understand about the case – but then it turns out the evidence itself contains mysteries that themselves need to be elucidated.

In today’s episode, we look at five of the most striking examples of this phenomena. Together, they raise the question: why is the MH370 like this? Is it just a matter of coincidence, or is there some underlying aspect of the case that keeps pulling it toward the unexpected?

In our last episode, we talked about the search of the seabed, which started in October 2014. By that time the plane had been missing for 8 months. And while the seabed search was everyone’s best hope for finding the black box and solving the mystery, people hadn’t forgotten about floating debris.

You’ll recall that in the first month after the disappearance, there had been an extremely extensive search of the ocean surface by ships and airplanes from many nations, and they hadn’t spotted anything.

When Australia called off the surface search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on April 28, Prime Minister Tony Abbot explained that “It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk.”

But would the debris really have sunk? Modern aircraft are made of metal, composites, and plastic, materials that do not get waterlogged. If, as the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) believed was most likely, MH370 ran out of fuel and then crashed, it would have been moving at hundreds of miles per hour when it hit the sea. Much of the resulting debris would have settled down through the water column, but innumerable pieces would have remained afloat. After Air France Flight 447 went down in the middle of the Atlantic in 2009, searchers found some 3,000 pieces of debris scattered across the surface.

Given that no debris from MH370 had been spotted from the air, a lot of people thought that the first hard proof of the plane’s fight might well take the form of flotsam washing up on a beach somewhere.

The question was, where would it wash up?

As the southern spring of 2014 approached the search authorities prepared to undertake a search of the seabed where their calculations indicated MH370 had gone. They hired a Dutch marine survey company called Fugro, which dispatched three ships to the area: Fugro Discovery, Fugro Equator and Fugro Supporter. The area they were going to search had been defined by the probability density function we’ve described earlier. It stretched about 600 miles long and covered water that was about three miles deep. One Australian politician declared that they were 97 percent confident that they would find the plane’s wreckage. Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way.

On July 17 Jeff was in his kitchen when the phone rang. It was a producer from CNN asking if he could go on air to talk about the Malaysia Airlines 777 that had just gone down over Ukraine. He’d spent so much time thinking about Ukraine and MH370 that it took him a moment to realize that she was talking about a completelely different airplane.

The details were still sketchy, but it seemed that in the late afternoon, Ukraine time, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it had exploded in midair. Initial reports suggested it might have been shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying over territory held by Russia-backed rebels.

A Malaysia Airlines 777. Ukraine. Russia. The echoes seemed too overwhelming to ignore. Boeing 777s are among the most reliable airplanes in the world; none had ever been lost mid-flight before. There were 15 Malaysia Airlines 777s at the start of 2014, out of some 18,000 registered aircraft in the world, and two had come to grief under mysterious circumstances in less than five months.

But on air at CNN, all the other aviation analysts agreed that of course the destruction of MH17 so soon after the loss of MH370 could only be a freak coincidence. What connection could there possibly be?

It was soon established that the plane had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile. A 150-pound shrapnel-laced warhead had torn open the aluminum airframe, scattering passengers and crew into the 500 mph slipstream. In most airplane crashes, the question is: what happened? This time, it was: who did it, and why?