Finding MH370

Big news in MH370 world with an announcement by the Malaysian government that it has okayed an agreement with seabed search firm Ocean Infinity to restart the search for the missing airliner.

The question we’re going to address today is, where are they going to look for it, and why is this happening now?

Civil aviation has entered a dangerous new era now that Russia has expanded its campaign of sabotage in northern Europe to attack civil aviation directly.

The question we’re going to address in today’s episode is whether those attacks are limited to the planting of incendiary devices on board aircraft, or whether Russia has also started hacking navigational sytems to destroy aircraft and kill flight crew, in particular with the November 25 crash of a DHL 737 freighter in Vilnius, Lithuania.

To be clear, we don’t yet know the answer to this question, but a point I’ve repeated several times in this podcast is that in compromised environment we have to ask the questions before we can find the answers.

To help us understand the issue, we’re joined today by Harshad Sathaye, a cybersecurity researcher who in 2019 published a paper describing an attack which, if carried out, could cause a crash like the one that occurred in Vilnius.

In early 2009, Iran’s secret proram to build nuclear weapons suffered a series of mysterious failures. Centrifuge machines used to purify uranium suddenly spun out of control and tore themselves apart. More than a thousand machines were destroyed, and Iran’s pursuit of the bomb was seriously delayed. It turned out that the machines had been sabotaged by a computer virus called Stuxnet, a sophisticated malware developed by Israel and the United States.

The attack demonstrated that hackers can not only take control of computer systems, but also reach through those systems to create physical effects in the real world. Today there’s a whole subspeciality of the cyber security field called “cyber physical” devoted to stuydying this kind of attack, and I’m fortunate to have with me today one of the leading lights, Dr Krishna Sampigethaya, a professor at Embry Riddle Aeronatical University, who will talk to us about its relevance to aviation and specifically to MH370. I ask him whether, in his view, MH370 could have been the victim of a cyber-physical attack.

In today’s episode we discuss a new approach to gathering the Lepas data that could help us finally understand how long MH370’s debris was in the water. By tapping into a worldwide community of oceangoing sailors who convence on the social media site No Foreign Land, it might be possible to retrieve data from barnacles that are just about anywhere in the ocean. I tried out this approach by reaching out to cruisers Leslie Graney and Peter Sheaff after I noticed that there boat “Itchy Feet” was quite close to an interesting Global Drifter buoy near the island of Vava’u in Tonga. With incredible graciousness and pluck Leslie and Peter immediately set out on a quest to intercept the buoy, while I looked on from halfway around the world. While the experiment didn’t succeed in achieving all of its goals, it was a great demonstration of how the idea could work in the future, and gave us important ideas for improvements going forward.

The ocean is a big place. So maybe it isn’t that surprising that MH370 wasn’t found.

At least, that’s what you hear a lot of people say.

It’s pretty widely accepted among the general public that the seabed search failed because, well, the ocean is big, why wouldn’t it be hard to find a plane in it?

But actually, the scientists who defined the search area had good reason to think that they knew where the plane had flown to, with a pretty good degree of accuracy. In today’s episode, we discuss how Australian scientists wrestled with the Inmarsat data, trying and discarding several approaches before settling on a method that allowed them to state, with mathematical certainty, where the seabed search would find the plane.

That search, of course, failed. But math is math — if the calculations failed to yield the correct location of the plane, there must be a reason why. A branch of statistics called Bayesian inference offers guidance on what to do next.

Sergei Deineka and Oleg Chustrak were childhood friends who graduated from high school together in Odessa, Ukraine, then served as conscripts in the Soviet Army before reuniting to open a furniture manufacturing and retail business in their home town. They also imported furniture from Malaysia and China, which is why they came to be on MH370 the fateful night of March 8, 2014. They were travelling from a furniture trade show in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to another one in Guanzhou, China.

At least, that’s the story their relatives told officials. But does it really hold water? I’ve spent years scouring government records and interviewing Ukrainians to better understand what Chustrak and Deineka were up to. The gaps in the story are significant—but at the end of the day, it all makes a kind of sense, if you understand the realities of the post-Soviet world.

Meanwhile, we’re still in our first week of the Kickstarter to raise money for the Finding MH370 Project, and we have a long way to go, so if you could make a pledge that would be amazing. Let’s bust open the paradox of the Lepas barnacles!

Today I’m very excited to introduce The Finding MH370 Project, an ocean experiment to gather the first new evidence about the missing Malaysian airliner in seven years. This data will resolve key paradoxes about MH370 and should clarify once and for all what happened to plane and the 239 people aboard.

To this day, the only physical evidence we have are several dozen pieces of debris that washed ashore years later, starting with the flaperon, a piece of the wing found on Réunion island.

Marine organisms living on some of these objects, such as barnacles, can tell us where in the ocean they drifted from. But when they examined these organisms, scientist were puzzled by two paradoxes. First, the barnacles were much too young, suggesting a year-long gap between when the plane disappeared and when the pieces went in the water. Second, they were living all over the entire surface of the flaperon, even above the waterline, something that barnacles never do.

The Finding MH370 project will resolve these paradoxes by getting a real 777 flaperon, outfitting it with sensors and telemetry, and deploying it into the southern Indian Ocean on a 15-month mission. At the end of the experiment, we’ll have a much clearer understanding of how the barnacles grew on the real flaperon and hence how and where the object entered the water.

The project’s final product will be a report detailing our findings, and revealing the implications for what happened to the missing plane.

Everything is lined up for the experiment to get underway — all we need is money to pay for it. To that end I’m launching a Kickstarter, and I’m hopeful that the community of people who care deeply about the fate of MH370—and there are many of us, all around the world—will rally to make this happen. It’s fitting, I think, that the solution to a mystery which affects every one of us should be found as a result of a collective effort.

Starting in 2014, Russia dramatically intensified its hybrid warfare attack against the democratic West, launching hacking operations, misinformation campaigns, assassinating critics, and tampering in elections. Was MH370 a part of this wide-front assault? I’ve argued that it likely was, but whether or not that is the case, what is inarguable is that the success of Russia’s efforts has been aided by the failure of officials and mainstream media outlets to fully understand the true scope and nature of the threat.

Few voices have been more dogged in trying to raise the alarm than Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis who also runs the Kremlin file blog. In today’s episode Olga details the various ways that Russia has attacked the US and its allies and explains the motivation and methods behind them.

In order to understand where MH370’s debris came from, we need to know how marine organisms like the goose barnacle Lepas anatifera typically grow under similar conditions to those that the debris likely experienced. To do that, we’re going to need to collect specimens from buoys managed by an office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. The AOML maintains reams upon reams of data that it makes freely available to anyone, scientist or not, all over the world, to use in their research. Mostly it’s used for modelling ocean currents. What we’re interested in isn’t their old data, but real-time information on where each individual buoy is right now, so that we can try to intercept them. On today’s episode I talk with the program’s Acting Deputy Directory, Rick Lumpkin, who knows more about Global Drifters and what happens to them than just about anyone on the planet.

The Lepas anatifera is basically the spirit animal of this podcast. As we’ve discussed before, these animals live all over the ocean, and they attach quickly to anything that’s floating there, and they grow quickly in a predictable way, so just from the size alone you can tell how long something’s been afloat. Also, as the shells grow they incorporate minerals into their shells at a different rate depending on the temperature of the water. That provides a clue as to where in the ocean something might have floated from.

So when the flaperon came ashore on Reunion in July of 2015, search officals were quite excited, because they realized they had new important evidence about where the plane had hit the water. But when they analyzed the shells, they were stumped. The barnacles were too small, meaning that they were too young. And not by a little! Based on what was known about barnacle growth rates at the time, it seemed like there was a year-long gap between how long the object had been floating and when the barnacles had started to grow.

No one knew how to explain that puzzle. Maybe the barnacles grew slower that people realized. Or maybe there are predators in the ocean that strip a piece clean so they have to regrow.

It looked strange, but since the data on Lepas growth rates was pretty thin, the authorities just shrugged. They assumed there had to be a reasonable explanation.

Well, we don’t have to leave it at that. Because in fact there is tons of data out there just sitting there waiting to be collected.

NOAA has over a thousand drifters floating around the ocean at any given time, and you can see them on the web. Click on a map, see the information on the drifter. The data includes where it’s been for every single hour since it was deployed, and what the water temp was, so each of those drifters has a population of Lepas that will let you correlate water temperature with growth rate.

If you get a bunch of them you can also see how robust these correlations are — are they sometimes picked clean, or do they always have barnacles whose size matches the length of time they’ve been in the water.

In today’s episode, I talk about my first effort to collect data from a NOAA drifter. It turned out to be a pretty wild ride!

If you spend any time engaged in the discussion about what happened to MH370, you’ll encounter the idea that the United States, and in particular the shadowy US intelligence community, certainly must know what happened to the plane since they have such a vast and all-encompassing network of assets for gathering information. In effect, the work of the French journalist Florence de Changy, whose work was featured in episode 3 of the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane that Disappeared,” is built upon this idea and little else.

An important component of this idea, I think, is that the intelligence apparatus remain a shadowy Other, an unknown and unknowable entity to whom no attributes can be ascribed with any certainty. Because if one were to familiarize oneself with the actual human beings who engage with this work one would quickly realize that these are human beings, with their own foibles and limitations. Which is not to say that they don’t know a great deal; indeed I think they know a lot, and it would be very interesting to know exactly what they know, but in the clear light of day one has to shed the sense that their knowledge is unlimited and that they are capable of doing anything unbounded by comprehensible motives.

Today I’m delighted to be joined by Steven Horrell, a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Steve graduated from the US Naval Academy, got a Masters in Strategic Studies frmo the US Army War College and went on to serve in Naval Intelligence for 30 years, including three from 2012 to 2015 at U.S. European Command, where Russia was a major focus. So Steve is in a great position to give us the inside scoop on what the world looks like from the perspective of US military intelligence.

Also in the show I discuss the flaperon project that I’ve been working on with Keelie and, after the interview, I critique the latest MH370 theory that’s been making the rounds in the media.

Finally, a reminder that I’ve added a new feature for paid subscribers of the podcast show page: in addition to the weekly newsletter, you get exclusive access to additional weekly content. Right now I’m remastering all of the shows from the first season, with improved quality and updated information. In addition if you do a paid subscription you earn my undying gratitude, as the financial support goes a long way toward making this work possible. Thanks!

Understanding MH370 requires understanding how strategic planners think. One of the most important concepts in strategic thinking today is the decision loop, which is a way of describing how people gather information, use it to understand their situation, then decide what to do and act upon that decision. This process is sometime referred to as the OODA loop (for “observe, orient, decided, act”) after the formulation by the influential American strategist John Boyd.

To discuss the decision loop, and its role in maneuver warfare, we’re joined by Thomas Withington of the Royal United Services Institute, who recently published a fascinating article entitled “Manoeuvre Warfare and the Electromagnetic Spectrum.” Later in the show, we’ll discuss audience reaction to the UFO episode and talk about an exciting new idea for gathering Lepas barnacle data.

In recent months one of the most viral pieces of MH370-related content has been a video that purports to show the airplane being surrounded by a trio of UFOs, which then escort it through some kind of wormhole or interdimensional portal. The video has been tirelessly promoted by a man named Ashton Forbes who has developed a whole elaborate patter to explain how the video came to be.

On its face, the whole thing is ridiculous. For one thing, UFOs aren’t real — or, if they are, they’ve never so casually revealed themselves as they do in this video. And interdimensional portals aren’t real, either, except in Marvel movies. Yet for a great many people, the videos seem seem utterly real. They think that Ashton Forbes has solved the mystery of MH370.

The videos have gotten so much traction that various debunkers have taken it upon themselves to demonstrate their fraudulence, for instance by tracking down the original snippet of video game that the wormhole effect was cadged from. But these debunking efforts never seem to work; Ashton Forbes simply responds by claiming that the debunkers have themselves been debunked. He says so with unreserved confidence. For those who want to believe, he seems very convincing.

From my perspective, it’s futile to try to push back against someone like Ashton Forbes by trying to show that the video is fake. People will continue to believe him because they want to believe the things that he’s telling them.

Are we helpless, though? I don’t think we are, entirely. For one thing, we can try to understand the dynamic of the misinformation peddler so that we can navigate today’s complicated information space more effectively. To help me in that effort I’m joined in today’s episode by David Dunbar, co-author of the book “Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts.” In years of dealing with believers in delusional ideas about the destruction of the World Trade Center, David has learned a lot about the emotional forces that drive true believers. Among other things, we discuss how to distinguish conspiracy theories from actual conspiracies and delusional beliefs from well-informed ideas that can lead us toward knowledge.

It’s been years since anyone’s reported finding a new piece of MH370 debris, and even longer since anyone has come up with any other evidence of what happened to the plane.

But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to collect new evidence.

In today’s podcast, I’m joined by Andy Sybrandy, the founder and president of Pacific Gyre Inc., a company that makes sensors and telemetry for ocean data collection. He helped develop the SVP drifters that are the mainstay of NOAA’s Global Drifter Program, which has dispatched thousands of buoys to constantly circulate throughout the world’s oceans so scientists can develop models of global currents.

Andy and I discuss a plan that I’ve been developing to shed light on some key mysteries surrounding crucial pieces of evidence in the case — namely, why the pieces of debris collected in the western Indian Ocean floated the way they did and why the marine life growing on them was so unexpected.

By outfitting a 777 flaperon with the kind of sensors that Andy makes, we could determine whether the debris evidence is truly paradoxical, or there is a perfectly good reason for why it looks the way it does.

In today’s episode we also revive a feature we haven’t don in a while, Community Radar. Today we’re discussing a comment from reader collinsm999 suggesting that an accident I mentioned in last week’s episode, TWA 800, was not due to an accidental electrical fault but to a shootdown by a missile.

Black box data is the ne plus ultra of aircraft accident investigation. But it is not the only kind of physical evidence. Pieces of debris—in particular, their dents and fractures — can tell a vivid story in themselves.

When a plane crashes, it’s common for all different parts to exhibit different kinds of failure. Imagine a plane whose wingtip hits a tree. The impact would crush the leading edge of the wingtip—compression failure—and then wrench the wing backwards from the body of the plane, causing a tension failure at the forward wing root and compression failure at the aft end.

By collecting many pieces of debris after a crash, investigators can place the mechanical failures in a chronological order to tell a story that makes sense, much as you might arrange magnetic words on a refrigerator.

In episode 6 we discussed a recent paper by Usama Kadri that examined whether the crash of MH370 should have been detected by a network of underwater microphones. Kadri argued that it should have been easily detected. The paper received a lot of attention in the mainstream press. Among the community of marine hydroacoustic researchers, it stirred some consternation. In today’s episode Dr David Dall'Osto of the University of Washington explains his misgivings about Kadri's work.

In the earlier episode, titled “Tracking the Sound of a Plane Crash,” we talked about how Kadri’s analysis presented something of a “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” situation, because while Kadri found an event that was similar in timing and location to the presumed crash site of MH370, it wasn’t close enough to really be a plausible match. Since earlier in the paper Kadri had made a compelling case that if a plane had gone in the water it should have been detected, based on historical analogues, then the fact that there was no good match implied (I argued) that the plane hadn’t impacted the ocean.

Kadri’s paper got a lot of attention in the popular press, which for the most part presented his work uncritically. But as I’ve argued over and over again, science isn’t just about retrieving data and interpreting it. It’s about arguing about the data and what it means. Because all of us are imperfect. We make mistakes, we leap to unsupported conclusions. Only by hashing things out collectively can we make sense of the world around us.

Among those critical of Kadri’s paper is David Dall’Osto, a senior research scientist at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboraory. He studies hydroacoustic detection and last year coauthored a presentation with Alec Duncan of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, called “Revisiting the acoustic detections made in the Indian Ocean at the time of the loss of MH370.”

There were three main questions I put to Dr Dall’Osto. First, did he agree with Kadri’s conclusion that hydrophone network had historically been able to detect even low-speed, low-energy airplane crashes? Secondly, did he agree that the event that Kadri highlighted in his paper might be associated with MH370? And finally, did he agree with Kadri’s proposal that we try to nail down the sensitivity of the hydroacoustic network by deploying bombs (or some other way of creating noise) near MH370’s presumed crash location?

It turns out that not only does Dr Dall’Osto have deep concerns about Kadri’s paper, he has reason to question whether search officials are even looking in the right part of the ocean.

MH370 is a mystery, but more specifically, it’s a murder mystery. It was an action carried out with a perpetrator with nefarious intent. That’s a lens that we can use to gain perspective on what happened.

As you know this is a podcast all about trying to understand aviation’s most perplexing mystery. We not only talk about the evidence of the case in great detail with the help of leading experts, but we also try to find new ways to frame what we know, to see if by looking at the facts from a different viewpoint we can gain new insight.

In Episode 28 of Season 1 we looked at the case from the lens of stage magic, which uses a practical understanding of applied psychology to get inside the audience’s perceptual feedback loop in order to fool them.

In today’s episode we’re going to look at the case from a similar but somewhat different perspective, that of the criminal deceiver, who like the magician is always probing his targets for perceptual weaknesses, hoping to find or widen a gap between reality and what the subject thinks is real.

Because one thing about MH370 is crystal clear: the perpetrators, whoever they were, outwitted the officials who set out to figure out their deed.

It might not surprise you to learn that I’m always thinking about MH370, and I find relevant tidbits everywhere I look. Recently I was watching the Netflix series “Ripley,” which is a retelling of the story of the con artist and murderer Tom Ripley written by Patricia Highsmith in the 1950s.

The new show stars Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, and I found the show wonderfully stylish and entertaining. If you’ve already seen the 1999 movie with Matt Damon you’ll already know the plot but I don’t think will spoil the fun. All the same if you haven’t seen the new show and would like to, you might want to pause the podcast now and then come back to it afterwards because a lot of spoliers lie ahead.

Anyway, as I was watching and enjoying the show I was really overwhelmed by the parallels between the web of deception Tom Ripley weaves and the strange set of clues that we have in the case of MH370.

I wanted to talk about this with someone who is an expert in the genre of murder mysteries, so I reached out to Jackie Raimondi, the co-host of a delightful podcast called Killer Fun, in which Jackie and her co-host Christy Norman watch and break down crime shows. Jackie agreed to come on the show and talk to me about Ripley and the art of weaving a web. Jackie is also a psychologist and brought a wealth of insight about real-world human behavior.

I had a lot of fun talking with her and I think that you will enjoy the conversation, too.

In Episode 5, we discussed how MH370's captain might have planned an elaborate murder/suicide in a way that would create the body of evidence we have today. In this episode, we re-run the exercise from a different perspective, guessing at the methods and motivations of a Advanced Persistant Threat actor.

In 2011, the US was flying one of its most advanced drones over Iran when they lost control. To their shock and embarrassment, they came to realize that the Iranians had used Russian electronic warfare technology to take over control of its navigation system. They seized the drone, decrypted its secrets, and reverse-engineered its technology to build their own version. It was a painful lesson — but have we learned it well enough to avoid such catastrophes in the future?

A new paper published by a researcher at Cardiff University in the UK explores whether the hydrophone network maintained by a nuclear test-ban monitor should have detected the ocean crash of MH370, and analyses the signal that seems to be the most likely to have come from the missing plane.