An Experiment to Solve the Mystery of MH370 [S2Ep19 audio]

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.