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Someone took MH370. But who, and why? In today’s episode of Finding MH370, we delve into the motivation and methodology of one potential culprit with someone who has a rare perspective on the the subject: recently retired CIA officer Sean Wiswesser, who spent decades studying and applying the lessons of espionage and spy tradecraft. He also has a new book out, Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War.

I want to be clear up front: We’re not discussing what the CIA thinks happened to MH370. That is not his bailiwick, and frankly, I don’t think the US intelligence community has any idea what happened to the plane. What we’re going to talk about is the strategic environment in which the disappearance took place. That will help us understand the number one question that people always ask me: Why was this plane taken? What was the motive?

The most widely held assumption, of course, has long been that the captain must have taken the plane. In the previous three episodes, we saw how the three pillars underlying that main theory turn out to be rickety. The implication — that the captain wasn’t the culprit — leaves us with only one plausible alternative explanation, that the hijacking was carried out by extremely ruthless and sophisticated outside actors. Namely, Russia.

But why would Russia want to do such a thing?

This is where Sean Wiswesser’s expertise comes in. He has studied their motives, and he has studied their mindset and their methodologies. Wiswesser’s main takeaway is that Putin has been waging a one-sided war against Western free-market societies for the better part to two decades, and he’s been largely able to get away with it because his main enemy has been distracted by other conflicts and threats, including the War on Terror and the more recent war in Iran.

But there is also a cultural element at play. Wiswesser makes the point in his book that the concept of conspiracy looks very different in Russia and the West. In Russia, “konspiratsiya” (конспирация) does not have the negative connotations that it does in English; it means more something like “espionage tradecraft.” It would be a compliment to say that someone has good konspiratsiya, whereas in the English-speaking world it’s considered absurd and delusional to think that conspiracies are afoot. What we have, then, is a culture that respects and admires conspiracy using it as a tool against a culture that sees acknowledging conspiracy as a sign of mental weakness and so refuses to acknowledge it.

Seems like a bad arrangement…

In the previous two episodes I talked about how search officials became convinced that the plane had to have gone into the southern Indian Ocean because they didn’t think that debris could be planted, and they didn’t think that Inmarsat data could be tampered with.

Today I discus a third belief: that the plane had to have been hijacked by the captain because that’s who was in the cockpit, and the plane can only be flown from there. It was a reasonable-sounding assumption, but it turns out to be wrong. There is a relatively simple way to fly the plane from the electronics bay, and I was able to figure it out in detail by looking at publicly available documents and talking to professors at aeronautical universities and retired control system engineers.

To help me explain it all, I’m honored to be joined today by John Waters, a former US Air Force fighter pilot who now flies 777s for a living, and is also the host of the excellent Afterburn Defence podcast.

As I told John, I was able to develop a sufficiently detailed description of how such a takeover could be accomplished that I was able to apply for a patent in Germany. My hope is that the issuance of the patent that might prod the search authorities to reconsider their sense of certainty.

Here, in a nutshell, is how the exploit works.

777 Control Architecture

First, let’s consider how 777 flight controls operate under normal circumstances.

On the flight deck are two sets of controls for use by the captain and first officer: a yoke and wheel to control pitch and roll, and foot pedals to control yaw. These are not mechanically linked to the flight surfaces, but are outfitted with transducers that convert the motion of the controls into analog electrical signals that are transmitted via direct wiring to a box in the electronics bay called the ACE, or Actuator Control Electronics.

The electronics bay is located directly under the flight deck. The ACE is housed inside a metal case that is seated on a rack at the front of the electronics bay. Pieces of equipment like the ACE that can be removed and replaced swiftly are called Line Replaceable Units, or LRUs. To swap out a faulty LRU for a new one, maintenance crew will depower the unit by pulling the circuit breaker dedicated to that particular LRU, disconnect the data cables and power plug, physically remove the box, replace it with the new box, reattach the cables, and reset the circuit breaker.

To maximize safety, the overall design of the 777 is characterized by a high degree of redundancy, so that the failure of a single piece of equipment will not jeopardize the aircraft as a whole. To that end, the two sets of flight controls on the flight deck send their analog signals not to one ACE, but to four: Center, Left1, Left2, and Right. These are located in the electronics bay on racks E1, E2, and E5.

Each ACE unit processes the incoming analog signals from the flight deck and outputs analog signals to the Power Control Units (PCUs) that move each of the flight control surfaces.

Each PCU is powered by a hydraulic system pressurized to 3000 psi by engine-driven pumps. It uses this hydraulic pressure to push pistons that move ailerons, flaperons and elevators up and down and the rudder side to side.

The rate at which the actuator piston moves is proportional to the voltage sent to the PCU from the ACE. The position of the piston is detected by a sensor called a Linear Variable Differential Transducer (LVDT) and transmitted via dedicated electrical wire to the ACE. This feedback allows the ACE to maintain closed servo loop control of the PCU.

Note that there are no electronics with the PCU; it simply generates a linear physical response in proportion to the current sent by the ACE.

In principle one PCU is sufficient to move each control surface, but in the interest of redundancy, multiple PCUs are tasked with moving each primary flight control surface so that if one fails the other will be able to do the job. There is one PCU on each spoiler; two PCUs on each aileron, flaperon, and elevator; and three PCUs on the rudder.

For the sake of redundancy, each ACE controls PCUs on a variety of flight control surfaces, so that if three ACEs fail, the last one remaining will still be able to turn the plane on all three axes.

For instance, in the figure below we see that ACE C provides command inputs to the left outboard aileron, left outboard spoiler #1, left inboard spoiler #7, right inboard spoiler #8, the right flaperon, right outboard spoiler #10 and #14, left elevator and the rudder.

In normal operation, the ACEs do not simply translate the control inputs from the flight deck into control outputs to the PCUs. Instead, the analog signals from the flight deck are digitised and sent via the ARINC 629 data bus to the Primary Flight Computers (PFCs), which interpret the pilot inputs and calculates what movements of the flight control surfaces will be necessary to achieve the desired state. For instance, if a pilot pulls back on the yoke, the PFC will interpret this as a desire to achieve a change in pitch at the specified rate, and will calculate the elevator deflection required to achieve this rate. The PFC then outputs digital commands to the ACEs, which translate them into the analog signals for the PCUs.

The high level of redundancy in the 777 flight control system makes it highly robust in the face of malfunction and maintenance issues, but does nothing to protect the system from malicious attack.

If a passenger were suitably equipped and motivated to do so, it would be possible to cut the flight deck out of the flight control feedback loop using a piece of equipment I will call the “override module.” This is functionally an ACE emulator that incorporates some additional functions. Though it replaces an LRU, it can be considerably smaller thanks to the ongoing miniaturization, perhaps no bigger than a Raspberry Pi.

To implement the takeover, the user would open the unlocked hatch at the front of the first-class cabin and descend via ladder into the electronics bay. And then:

1. Depower the Center ACE by pulling its circuit breaker.

2. Detach the 28 V DC power cable, ARINC 629 digital connector, and analog data connectors from the Center ACE, located in rack E2-5, as seen in Figure 1, and remove the LRU from the rack.

3. Plug in the Override Module to the electrical power and data plugs at the E2-5 rack slot. Reset the circuit breaker.

4. Pull circuit breakers to depower the L1, L2, and R ACEs. The flight instruments on the flight deck will no longer have any effect on the flight control surfaces. Essentially, the pilots have been locked out of the fly-by-wire flight control system.

Mechanical Linkage

As a final backup in the event of total electrical failure, the designers of the 777 provided a way for the flight crew to control a small subset of flight control surfaces via mechanical linkages.

The #4 and #11 spoilers, which in normal operation are controlled by the L2 ACE, are also linked to the flight deck controls via cables that run through the electronics bay. The flight crew could use these spoilers to achieve a modest amount of roll control.

Pitch trim in the 777 is accomplished by movement of the entire horizontal stabilizer via a jackscrew. According to author Gregg Bartley, “the stabilizer is commanded via the cables through the aisle stand levers only and otherwise is commanded through the ACEs.”

If one were to try to control a 777 from the electronics bay while an uncooperative flight crew was in the cockpit, they might try to use these mechanical linkages to thwart that effort.

However, as these cables down from the flight deck through the electronics bay, they could be physically severed by simple tool such as a bolt cutter.

Flying the Aircraft from the Override Module

The system described does not command engine power or landing gear, so does not provide the full functionality of aircraft control. As such would not be able to, for instance, bring the aircraft in for landing, but would allow the user to obtain enough control to fully command the plane’s movements while it is in the air.

To practically implement a takeover of the flight control system, one would need to not only move the plane’s flight control surfaces, but also to monitor the plane’s response to these movements. How to do that is outside the scope of the current exercise, but it is worth noting that flight data (attitude, airspeed, altitude, heading) is broadcast unencrypted by the ADIRS over the ARINC 629 data buses. One can envisage a simple hand-held device that collects and displays this information in a PFD-type display.

In conclusion, while it is true in almost every case that an airplane can only be controlled from the cockpit, that is not universally the case. Thanks to a unique combination of features incorporated into the design of the 777, this aircraft’s flight control surfaces can be commanded from the electronics bay.

Personally, I am not recommending that anyone to this. But I think it’s important for the authorities to recognize the possibility, both in order to better understand what might have happened to MH370, and to prevent similar events from occurring in the future.

Soon after MH370 vanished in 2014, investigators became convinced that there was only one possible explanation: that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmed Shah, had hijacked the plane and carried out an elaborate and technically sophisticated plan to commit mass murder-suicide by flying to a remote stretch of ocean and crashing there.

Underlying their sense of certainy were three core beliefs. In today’s episode we explore the second of those: the idea that the metadata that Inmarsat had received from the plane’s satellite communication system, and which scientists had analyzed to designate a search area, was 100 percent reliable and couldn’t have been tampered with.

But new research which finds that the 777 data bus is actually wide open to data tampering. By feeding falsified information into a program called the Doppler Precompensation Algorithm, sophisticated hijackers could create the impression that the plane had traveled south into the remote ocean when it actually flew north to Central Asia.

Let me explains.

As you’ll remember, MH370 went electronically dark 40 minutes into its flight to Beijing, did a 180, flew back over the Malayan Peninsula and was last seen on military radar at 18:22 universal time. Then, three minutes later, its satellite communications system was turned back on, for a reason that no one has ever been able to find a good explanation for.

After being turned on, the plane exchanged seven so-called handshakes or pings over the next six hours. These contained metadata that the satellite company Inmarsat stored on its servers in London.

There were two kinds of metadata that were important for the case. The first kind, called BTO or burst timing offset, was a measure of how far the plane was from the satellite at each of those seven moments. If you plot all the possible places the plane could be at that distance, you get a ring or an arc. Using a technique called Bayesian inference, Australian scientists were able to determine what route the plane most likely took.

Actually, the technique produced two routes, each a mirror image of the other. One goes into the southern ocean, and the other goes north, and ends up in Kazakhstan.

The reason that there are two mirrored routes is that the BTO data is symmetrically ambiguous. For any route you draw that matches the ping rings, there is going to be another one that’s exactly the same but going off in another direction.

This is where the second set of data comes in. It’s called Burst Frequency Offset, or BFO. This is a measure of how much the signal that the satellite receives from the plane is different in frequency from what the system is supposed to operate at.

This is important because if you’re a geosychronous satellite looking down from 22,000 miles at half the Earth stretched below you, there are going to be billions of devices operating on different parts of the radio spectrum, each of them allocated a very narrow slice of that to operate on so they don’t swamp each other out.

That’s tricky for the Inmarsat satellite, because thanks to a phenomenon called the Doppler effect, when a transmitter and a receiver are moving in relation to one another, that movement affects the frequency at which the signal is received. And a plane is moving at hundreds of miles per hour, so it has the potential to really screw up the frequency that the satellite receives its signal at.

To prevent that from happening, there’s a box on the plane called the Satellite Data Unit, or SDU, that carries out a procedure called Doppler Precompensation. Knowing what the relative velocity is, it changes the frequency it transmits at so that when the satellite gets it, it will be at the correct frequency.

If they system is working properly, then the BFO value should always be zero. But on the night in question, it wasn’t working properly. The satellite was old, past its planned retirement age, and so it wasn’t stationary relative to the earth. It was wobbling in its orbit, and the Doppler precompensation algorithm didn’t account for that extra motion.

As a result, the BFO would have looked different depending on whether the plane was flying south versus north, and this told investigators than the plane went into the ocean, not Kazakhstan.

Now, the way that the SDU knows how much to change the transmission frequency is by calculating where it is relative to the satellite using navigations information generated by a system called the IRS, or inertial reference system.

The SDU is located on the back of the aircraft, similar to where a shark’s dorsal fin would be. The IRS is in the electronics bay, which is in the front of the plane under the flight deck.

The two communicate over a data bus called the ARINC 629 bus. It’s kind of a like a hardwired internet. It consists of a braided cable that a whole bunch of devices can clamp onto, and any one one of them can send signals to any other. In this case, the IRS sends location and speed data to the SDU, which then calculates its relative velocity to the satellite and thence the Doppler precompensation value.

What this means is that if an attacker went up to the front of the business class cabin on flight 370, opened up the hatch to the electronics bay, and went down there, they would have access to the IRS and to the 629 bus that tells the SDU where it is. And because of that, a clever attacker could send signals that effectively lie to the SDU so it sends the signal at the wrong frequency and causes Inmarsat to record a misleading BFO value.

I’m not going to get into every detail right now, but the upshot is that if you’re sophisticated enough to know how this system works, and you can change the data that the IRS sends to the SDU, you can make it look like the plane went one way when it really went the other.

In a 2024 paper called “Air-Bus Hijacking: Silently Taking over Avionics Systems,” Martin Strohmeier and colleagues from the Information Security Lab in Zurich describe the vulnerabilties of the ARINC 429 bus, which is an earlier version of the 629 bus that MH370 used. They describe how it’s possible, by clamping onto the bus, to overwrite signals that one device on the bus is sending to another. Basically, you can falsify any data that you want. They write:

…attackers can not only monitor bus communications, but also actively disrupt them through bit flips, packet injections, and cancellation attacks. This research sheds light on the severe risks of undetected data tampering and packet manipulation, which pose a real threat of catastrophic outcomes.

They add that:

the prioritization of functionality and safety has often led to the neglect of security considerations. This oversight leaves critical systems exposed to sophisticated cyber-physical attacks.

I’d interviewed Martin Strohmeier before for an article for New York magazine, and I reached out to him to see if he’d come on the show. I also wanted to know if the vulnerability that he identified in the 429 bus would also apply to the 629. He wrote:

…our communications people at the DoD are very jittery about something like this for various Switzerland-internal reasons, so unfortunately I have to pass this time. I wouldn’t be able to say much beyond what is in the paper…

Yes, 629 should work similarly, as we allude to in the paper.

I think it would be really interesting to put together a paper that builds on Martin’s research to specfiically detail how exactly a spoofing attack on MH370’s Doppler precompensation could be carried out.

Somewhat surprisingly, no one has ever really contested the idea that the BFO value could be spoofed.

Followers of the podcast will know that over the years I’ve had a long-running beef with members of the so-called Independent Group of MH370 experts, who are really reluctant to engage with the idea that MH370 might have been hijacked by someone other than its captain, but even they are on board with the feasability of a BFO spoof. No less than Victor Iannello himself wrote a very detailed description of how such an attack could be carried out.

And back when MH370 disappeared, scientists at Inmarsat publicly wondered if the data might have been altered. In May of 2014 David Coiley, Inmarsat’s VP Aviation, appeared at an aviation industry conference in California where he said,

We are very confident that this data is correct assuming that there is no way this data has been spoofed in any way.

He then stressed that Inmarsat strongly believed that spoofing did not occur.

The reason that they don’t think that the attack was carried out is that they believe that the work that they did to decipher the Doppler precompensation riddle was so difficult that they couldn’t conceive that someone else might have cooked up this hack in order to deceive them on such a subtle piece of evidence.

It would basically mean that they were dealing with an adversary who is smarter than they are. Mark Dickinson, former Inmarsat VP of satellite operations, expressed his skepticism in the Netflix documentary series “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared”:

The idea that someone predicts that we would analyze this data in this way, when we’d never done it in the past before, doesn’t seem particularly credible at all.

What I actually find really interesting is that he’s not saying that this kind of attack is impossible. He’s saying that he couldn’t believe that someone else could have figured it out before they did.

I find that a very weak argument. Zero day hacks happen all the time. The definition of a zero day hack is that it occurs when an attacker figures out and exploits a vulnerability before the engineers who built a system realize that its there.

It is absolutely no defense to imagine that there are no bad guys in the world who are smarter than you are.

A really stunning example of this was the SolarWinds hack, in which Russian state hackers achieved an absolutely devastating penetration of a major American IT management company, effectively turning its own software updates into a Trojan horse. Wired did a great article about it that came out in 2023. This key paragraph describes the process by which investigators realized how the attack had been carried out:

One possibility was that the attackers had stolen the digital certificate… or, more alarmingly, they might have breached SolarWinds’ network and altered the legitimate Orion .dll source code before SolarWinds compiled it—converting the code into software—and signed it. The second scenario seemed so far-fetched that the Mandiant crew didn’t really consider it—until an investigator downloaded an Orion software update from the SolarWinds website. The backdoor was in it. The implications were staggering.

Just to draw a line under it, investigators could have missed figuring out how the attack had worked because it seemed too far-fetched that the attackers could have been that sophisticated.

When they did eventually realize what had happened, they were stunned by the caliber of their adversaries. They were world-class.

Really, it’s a testimony to the quality of the investigators that they had the humility to recognize and acknowledge the quality of their adversaries. It takes a certain amount of intellectual humility to do that.

Contrast that with Mark Dickinson who says he doesn’t find it plausible that someone could have figured something out before Inmarsat did, I find that naive and frankly a bit sad, because I don’t think a top-caliber institution would allow itself to be lulled into complacency in this way.

What is very apparent right now, in a way that wasn’t apparent in 2014, is that we are living in a world in which a powerful actor is on the world stage, using a wide variety of attacks to try to undermine the free-market democracies of the world.

These attacks have been going on and on, they have been incredibly damaging for the well-being of civilization as a whole, and the reason that more has not been done to stop them is that many of the powerful people who are in a position to stop them simply lack the imagination to understand that the world has entered a new and dangerous phase that does not play by the old rules anymore.

And even when danger is staring them directly in the face they don’t see it because they lack the imagination to understand that it could be possible.

In July of 2015, fifteen months after Malaysica Airlines Flight 370 disappeared into the night, a piece of its right wing washed ashore on La Réunion island in the western Indian Ocean. Investigators hoped that barnacles growing on the wing could offer a clue as to where the plane had crashed. But unfortunately, so little was known about these creatures at the time that no inferences could be drawn.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve been carrying out a project to collect scientific drifter buoys that have come ashore, in order to collect the barnacles growing on the and create a database to finally show in detail how these animals grow, so that we can at last understand what they’re trying to tell us. Now that we’ve collected more than a dozen buoys from all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans, a picture is starting to emerge that is quite at odds with what investigators expected -- and indeed, even thought possible -- at the time.

Today’s deep dive is the first of a three-part series, timed to coincide with the 12th anniversary of MH370’s disapperance, in which I discuss the three pillars of certainty that underpin investigators’ belief that the plane must be in the southern ocean, and why each of those three unquestioned beliefs could actually be wrong.

Also in this episode I respond to a critique from Paul Kennedy, the man who once headed up the seabed search conducted by the Australian government, and I explain why the seabed search for MH370 might be permanently over.

With the latest round of seabed search suspended after a fairly miniscule of progress, there’s a lot of frustration right now about the search for MH370. A lot of people just can’t believe that, in this day and age, countries like the United States and Australia, which have some of the most advanced technology in the world available to them, can’t find a 200 foot long airplane with 239 people aboard.

One of the most frequent comments I get is, “I can’t believe that the government doesn’t know where the plane is,” or, put another way, “the government isn’t telling us the whole truth.” Well, over the years I’ve talked to a fair number of people inside the official investigation, and I think I have a fairly well grounded understanding of their mindset, and I will say that, while there isn’t a grand coverup going on, there are definitely things that the government — whether that be Malaysia, Australia, or the United States — isn’t telling us, and I’ll explain more about that in just a bit.

Before I do that, though, I want to draw a line under the idea that governments charged with finding the plane are only pretending to be baffled because they secretly know where it went, thanks to their spy satellites and hydrophone networks and all the rest.

The main reason I think this is that I have talked to peope inside the investigation and I understand why they believe what they believe. They are absolutely 100 percent convinced that the pilot hijacked the plane and that it flew south, and that their math tells them where it went. But they didn’t see it go somewhere exactly on a secret radar because if they did they would have found it by now.

In other words, they want to find this plane! It being missing does them no favors. It has been embarrassing and expensive and time-consuming to hunt for this plane. Australia is a democracy and it has spent a lot of its taxpayers’ money for no result, which has not made the taxpayers happy. Both on the record and off the record officials have said that they think they know where it went and they’re frustrated and baffled that they can’t find it.

But!

There are things that they know that they aren’t telling us. Here are three of them.

Number three. The French barnacles. When the first piece of debris came ashore on La Réunion in July 2015, it was thickly covered in marine fouling organisms called Lepas anatifera, or goose barnacles. These are the single most important physical clue ever collected in the case of MH370, because the chemical composition of their shells provides a record of the water temperature that these animals experienced. But the French never shared the largest barnacle shells that could allow the flaperon to be traced back to its point of origin — which presumably would be the crash site. Why? And why haven’t they allow other researchers to access the whole collection of shells that they recovered?

Number two. Zaharie’s flight sim data. I was the first mainstream journalist to reveal that investigators had found a record on Zaharie’s flight simulator hard drive that showed he had made a practice flight that in some ways eerily resembled the path the plane was believed to have taken on March 8, 2014. Some of the details of that data was published in the Malaysian final report. But no complete set of data has ever been published and no one has ever delved in and given a complete explanation of the data and what it means — and, in particular, why the computer connected to the internet a week after the disappearance.

Number one. The data that I would most like to have, and which remains bafflingly elusive for reasons I don’t understand, is the final set of radar pings that the Malaysian military radar recorded at 18:22 universal time. All that the Malaysians have officially released is the primary radar returns that ended at 18:02, twenty minutes earlier. Apparently the plane went dark at 18:02, and then reappeared at 18:22. Why? Where exactly was it, for how long was it seen, what direction was it headed in, and at what altitude? I suspect that if we knew the answer to those questions, we would have a significantly better understanding of what happened next, which is the crucial phase of the mystery: which way did it turn? Because that last radar return occurred just three minutes before the first ping, it could give us a strong indication of which way it had turned.

Also, while we’re at it, I’d love to get a statement from India about which of its air defense radars were on, if any, and whether or not they saw anything.

OK, so those are the things that I would like to know. I’m a little annoyed that we, the public, don’t know them already. But finding them out wouldn’t automatically mean we could solve the case, and not knowing them doesn’t mean that we can’t solve the case anyway.

The fact is that, at this point, the lack of information isn’t what’s making this case hard to solve. We have a lot of information. What’s the bigger problem is a failure to talk about it in a productive way, and a failure to fully grasp the full range of possibilities. That’s something I’ll be delving into more detail in the next three episodes.

One of the most frequent comments I get is, “I can’t believe that the government doesn’t know where the plane is,” or, put another way, “the government isn’t telling us the whole truth.” Well, over the years I’ve talked to a fair number of people inside the official investigation, and I think I have a fairly well grounded understanding of their mindset, and I will say that, while there isn’t a grand coverup going on, there are definitely things that the government — whether that be Malaysia, Australia, or the United States — isn’t telling us. In today’s episode I’m going to talk about what those are and why they matter.

It’s Sunday, February 8, and Armada 86 05 has set sail from Gage Roads near Perth Australia, and is not heading back out to the search area, as many had hoped, but is instead sailing for the Pacific, putting the search for MH370 back on ice. Some have speculated online that Ocean Infinity stopped looking because they found the wreckage; I’ll unpack why that is probably not the case, and will look at what lies ahead in the search for MH370. I’ll also unpack the mystery of a long telephone call that Captain Zaharie Ahmed Shah took part in before taking off on the fateful flight: Who was the call with, and was it tied to the plane’s disappearance?

In the last episode we talked about how Armada 86 05 had left the search area on January 23 and was heading back to Fremantle. And indeed, that’s what happened: it arrived on January 27. Once in port it did what it normally does, namely refuel, take on supplies and fresh crew.

It then turned around and later that same day sailed to the “Calibration Area,” an area of the seabed where some metal targets were deliberately sunk so that they can be used to test whether sidescan sonar equipment is working properly. This got some of us excited about the possibility that they were prepping for a return to the search area.

Five days later, Armada 86 05 sailed back into port. On February 2 Mike Exner, an eminence grise in the old Independent Group of MH370 experts, Tweeted “They will be going back to the search area.”

But they didn’t. The next day the ship’s AIS destination changed to Pago Pago, and the day after that, February 4, it set sail and headed south out of port, on a course that eventually took it around the southern coast of Australia on its way to American Samoa. Which left a lot of disappointment.

Kevin Rupp tweeted, “Well, the situation is truly bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like it. No notification from anyone about what’s going on.”

That’s still the case. Neither Ocean Infinity nor the Malaysian government has issued any statement. The MH370 Families group on. Facebook has no updates about it. We’re just in the dark.

But what I think it’s safe to conclude is that Armada 86 05 is out of the picture for now.

Up top I mentioned that there has been some speculation on social media that maybe the reason that Armada 85 05 isn’t going back to the search area is that it doesn’t have to because after looking at the sidescan sonar data that had been retrieved by the AUVs, Ocean Infinity realized that they had found the wreckage.

For instance Twitter user @ReginaBoy38 tweeted: “I lean towards OI finding something of significance that forced a pause, requiring further negotiation with Malaysian authorities. We’ll know the truth if OI scans the same area they searched in 2026, possibly for reasurance or additional positive identity of #MH370.”

This seems very far fetched to me, and it seemed that way to Kevin Rupp as well, who posted on February 6, “FWIW - I consider this talk of “maybe they found it” to be ridiculous bullshit. They spent over a week battling 6-meter waves out there before giving up and heading to port. While not satisfying, the correct answer for what has happened is - I don’t know.”

In response, I Tweeted, “They seem to still be following the plan laid out in December 2024: search 15K sq km, intermittently. I think they just ran out of time on this run.”

To which Kevin replied, “This is most likely.”

It would be nice if some other ship in Ocean Infinity’s fleet was steaming towards the search area to take up where 86 05 left off, but at the moment, the other Armada 86s are widely dispersed. Three are in the Western Hemisphere, one is at the shipyard in Vung Tau, Vietnam, and one is sailing to Mauritius, so I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see the search restarted anytime soon. And remember that last year the search was called off in early April due to winter weather coming in. So if I were a betting man I’d say it’s probably going to be a long time until we see the seabed search for MH370 to continue, might not be until 2027. Hope I’m wrong.

And now, as the saying goes, for something completely different: let’s talk about a mysterious 45-minute phone call that MH370’s captain, Zaharie Ahmed Shah, took part in a month before the plane’s disappearance.

The call came to light when a secret Malaysian police report, not intended to be released to the public, was leaked by a Twitter user called Nihonmama in 2017. It included the revelation that on February 2, 2014, Zaharie had engaged in a 45-minute phone conversation with an aircraft engineer named Zulhaimi bin Wahidin, who later tried three times to call Zaharie after the plane disappeared.

That raised a lot of eyebrows, because whoever took the plane did things that were so technically sophisticated that they were beyond the ability of a typical airline captain. Was this call the result of Zaharie’s attempts to figure out the technical details he needed for the hijacking?

At the time, Mike Exner, who I mentioned earlier, and Don Thompson, who I cite all the time, raised the issue with the press, saying: “What was the substance of that long conversation? And who made the three attempts to contact Captain Zaharie Shah later on the morning of the disappearance?”

The answer to that mystery came in 2019, when Zuihaimi came forward to Australian journalists and explained who he was and what he had been doing.

He told the Australian newspaper that Royal Malaysian Police had interviewed him “three or four” times after the plane disappeared because, the paper wrote, “of their suspicion he had provided his cousin with the technical advice to hijack the Boeing 777.”

“I was at police headquarters for three days. It spanned from morning to evening,” Mr Zulhaimi said. “I told them that Zaharie is a smart guy. He doesn’t need me to get all of the information.” Mr Zulhaimi noted that Zaharie was a highly experienced aviator who held licences to train and test other pilots. “So he knew a lot about the aircraft.”

Mr Zulhaimi, who now works for a different airline, feels “uneasy” about his cousin’s “name being tarnished”.

They’re trying to blame him for what happened and it’s very hard for me to swallow that because he’s not that kind of a person… He was a jovial person. He had a lot of money. He was enjoying his life. Why would he kill himself for no reason? He had a good family and a good life. Successful children. I don’t think people are crazy (enough) to kill themself for nothing. Of course (he is innocent).

While most staff at Malaysia Airlines knew the men were related, police initially did not.

I asked them to get all of the information from the telco company to see how many times he has been calling me. When they found that he had been calling me so many times for the last 10 years then they did not question me anymore. They knew it was a genuine relationship.

The father of three said Zaharie was actually “like a brother”.

He’s my father’s younger brother’s son. We share the same grandfather. So that was the reason why (we had that phone call). Nothing more than that.

So there you have it. One of MH370s many, many mysteries raised, and then resolved.

You know, eEach time a mystery gets solved it brings us a little closer to understanding what happened. In this case, we get an insight into Zaharie’s character and personality from someone who knows him really well. Lately I’ve been getting a fair number of comments that are very quick to portray Zaharie as a deranged lunatic, because that fits the narrative that MH370 could only have been a case of pilot mass murder-suicide.

For instance, @josephszot5545 wrote: “It’s simple Zahari was a pyscopath! It’s that the guy was evil from who knows what. The flight dept. has to examine how they missed this.”

What you see a lot in the discussion about Zaharie as the culprit is that people a) decide that he’s the only possible culprit b) observe that only a mentally ill person could do such a thing c) conclude that Zaharie was mentally ill d) paper over all the illogical motivations in the pilot-suicide hypothesis with the observation that it’s impossible to make sense of the behavior of mentally ill people.

But in fact there is no documented evidence or on-the-record testimony from friends or family members that would suggest that Zaharie had any kind of mental or emotional red flags. Everyone says he was a great, chill guy.

Because it doesn’t fit the narrative that people find compelling, though, they assume that there must be something there. But maybe there isn’t.

Recently I ran across a pretty neat quite from Marvin Minsky, the MIT artifical intelligence guru. He said,

When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.

That’s a pithier expression of an idea I’ve been pointing out for a long time about MH370. We know that this is a weird case. A lot of seemingly inexplicable things happened. We should brace ourselves for the possibility that the answer is going to turn out to be weirder than we had initially thought possible.

Phase 2 of the seabed search for MH370 has ended, as Ocean Infinity’s search ship pulls its robot subs from the water and heads for port. In today’s episode we’ll talk about what they accomplished in the fourth week of their seabed scan and what lies ahead for future searches. We’ll also solve a mystery that cropped up in last week’s episode and see what we can make of a new one — namely, what some entries in an Australian port schedule can tell us about Ocean Infinity’s plans.

Last episode dropped January 20; at the time Armada 86 05 was moving slowly, apparently just trying to deal with the huge waves that were making it impossible to deploy any AUVs and hence to make any progress in continuing the search of the seabed.

In the days that followed, the weather remained rough, and this is the path that Armada 86 05 did.

As you can see, it was laying down a track colored red, which means that it was going slowly. It wasn’t following the usual movement pattern that it makes when deploying and retrieving AUVs, as we can see in this earlier part of the track (on the bottom, at left), where it’s moving fast and straight in green, then slowing and turning in the red sections in the corners (that’s where it’s retrieving and deploying), and then going straight and fast again to the next retrieval or deployment point.

It was kind of meandering around slowly in curves, and then it started to do some straight segments. That made some people speculate that, if it wasn’t doing its full normal deployment of AUVs, then maybe it was deploying one or two. As Kevin Rupp wrote on Twitter on January 23, “We’re thinking Armada 86 05 has had an AUV or two in the water since yesterday. The weather has improved, and currently the Wave Heights are under 3 meters.”

Well, if so, the operation didn’t last long, because later that same day Kevin wrote, “Armada 86 05 appears to be departing the search area and is headed to Fremantle.”

So that was it. The current phase of the seabed search appears to be over. Probably very little, if any, scanning took place since last week thanks to all that stormy weather, so for now the total for the whole 2025-to-2026 search effort remains at 7236.4 square kilometers, less than half of what they’ve said they plan to complete. Compared to the blistering pace they managed in 2018, this is very slow rate of progress indeed.

According to the Fremantle port registry, the ship is slated to arrive on January 28 at 5am and then depart on January 30 at 18:00 hours or 6pm. This is a longer stay than the ship had on its last visit there, so probably going to do more serious reprovisioning and get a change of crew.

Now, up top I mentioned that I would solve a mystery from last episode, so let’s get to that. I pointed out that viewer @glenn354023 had made an intriguing observation, namely that if you divide the area that the Malaysian government was reporting searched each day by the linear distance that the AUVs had traveled, it appeared that each AUV was scanning a strip that was 1.8 kilometers wide, or 900 meters on each side.

That seemed like further than the AUVs are supposed to be able to see, so I went to the website of Kongsburg, the company that makes the AUvs, and found the brochure for the HISAS 1030 sidescan sonar system that the AUVs use. It states that “Maximum range (each side of vehicle): 200 m @ 2 m/s and 260 m @ 1.5 m/s AUV speed.”

This just made the mystery deeper, because if the maximum range was 260 meters, then that implied that there was more than a kilometer of each search strip that wasn’t properly getting imaged. Worse case scenario, the AUV could go right past the airplane’s wreckage and not even see it.

I reached out to my usual sources for things like this, Kevin Rupp and Don Thompson, and they both said that they thought that the 1.8 km figure was correct, that the AUVs really can see out that far.

Don pointed out that there are two systems at play here, side scan sonar, or SSS, and sythetic aperture sonar, or SAS. Don said that synthetic aperture sonar can see objects in great detail, but in only works at relatively short distances, whereas SSS can see further, up to and beyond that 900 meter range, but at lower resolution.

Now, Kevin and Don are both smart guys, and in my experience they tend to get things right. But to be really sure I wanted to go to certified specialists in that particular technology.

So I reached out to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. These are the people who found the last airliner that went missing over the middle of a ocean, Air France 447, using REMUS AUVs equipped with side scan sonar technology.

They put me in touch with Captain J. Carl Hartsfield, the director and Senior Program Manager at the Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, and he agreed to answer my questions.

Naturally I asked him to join me on video but he wasn’t able to get permission from the media relations people on time so I had to settle for written answer via email.

I first asked him about his background. He wrote:

I am a retired U.S. Navy submarine Captain and Commodore that also, somewhat uniquely, specialized in rapid fielding of advanced technology for defense and industrial applications. At WHOI, I direct the Oceanographic Systems Lab (OSL) that designs, builds, and operates cutting edge unmanned REMUS vehicles that advance both science and defense work. OSL operates these deep-sea vehicles world-wide for science, defense, and industry – folding experience back into our designs.

So this was definitely my guy. I asked him about difference between sidescan and synthetic aperture sonar. He wrote:

Synthetic Aperture Sonar and traditional side scan sonar use the same basic first principles – you send active pings near horizontally in the water to get a pixel return of what the bottom looks like. Synthetic Aperture combines those pings over time to get multiple returns on the same target and build an even better picture. They do this by mathematically correcting each transmission for the geometric movement of the collection vehicle providing a very clear, multi-faceted picture of the target. Just like with an antenna, the bigger you build it, the more gain you have to image the target. SAS makes a bigger sound receiver by artificially stitching together the motion of the much smaller physical array that is pinging over time. All that tech talk boils down to this – you can build a big virtual sonar array that “sees with sound” much, much better if you can keep up with the geometric picture accurately over time and sum up the results with a lot of math. The cost for this extra clarity is significant – the autonomous vehicle must be very stable with accurate navigation, and the swatch coverage goes down significantly. This all translates into expense and complexity that is often only warranted if you need super clear resolution on smaller, discrete objects in one pass.

The physics of side scan requires you to balance how far you can see in each swath with the size of target you can detect. In other words, if you are looking for a ship, you can use much lower resolution with bigger swath coverage. If you are looking for something as small as a teacup, the resolution must be very high and the corresponding swath width low. …if your target is something large, like a plane engine in a debris field, you do not need a SAS because the wreckage will have many returns that tend to stand out on the deep-sea floor even at low resolution.

I then asked him about Woods Hole’s discovery of Air France 447’s wreckage.

The wreckage was discovered and mapped by three REMUS 6000 deep survey vehicles used from the deck of a single ship. Each had traditional 120 KHz side scan sonars with swath widths on the order of 700 meters on each pass. … The debris field was found at a depth of 3,900-meters in high geology relief portions of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Once found with sonar, the wreckage was optically imaged providing a photo mosaic road map used to identify the location of the recorder. Subsequent recovery of that device with a tethered ROV.

I want to thank Captain Hartsfield very much for taking the time to answer my questions, and I hope that I can have him on in person for a future episode of the podcast.

For point of reference, the depth that AF 447 was found at was nearly four kilometers, the area that Armada 86 05 has been scanning is roughly the same, so it’s roughly a similar degree of technical challenge.

As I was discussing this with Kevin Rupp he referred me to the report that the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) published after their original seabed search, it details the tests that the investigators performed on objects that had deliberately been sunk off the coast of Perth to see the range at which they could be picked up by the sidescan sonar.

They were in the shape of a cube and a cross.

Here’s an image of a scanning run, as you can see the cross shape was visible at a greater than 1 km range.

Kevin went back to look at the ship tracks that the search vessel laid down during the seabed scan funded by the ATSB, he found that they ship tracks were 2 km apart, so even further than Ocean Infinity’s AUV scans.

I want to point out that that earlier search used a slightly different technology, the sonars were carrried on underwater sleds towed behind the ships, so the surface vessels traveled in straight lines, rather than following a zigzag pattern, picking up and and deploying AUVs, like Armada 86 05 has been doing. So it was much easier for those of us playing along at home to see exacty where they were scanning.

So this is the answer to that first mystery I mentioned: the reason that the scanning runs are so wide is that they’re using a lower-resolution version of sonar imaging that can see farther, they’re counting on the ability to pick up big fields of debris, and potentially large objects like engine cores and landing gear, that will alert them to the fact that something is there. Then if they spot something they’ll then go and take a closer look to confirm that it is indeed the aircraft.

All right, and let’s now wrap up by talking about the new mystery that’s emerged, namely: where will Armada 86 05 go next? Will it return to the search area after repositioning, or move on to a paying project somewhere else and leave us sitting on our hands once more?

The Fremantle port schedule shows that at the moment the field for “Next Port” is Pago Pago, in American Samoa. That sounds like bad news.

However, Twitter user Felix Toennessen replied to Kevin, “I took a look at some of your old screenshots in 2018. In March 2018 it said TO SEA and NEXT PORT Durban. However, Seabed Constructor still conducted two search phases after this Fremantle pit stop.”

I mean, it is definitely the case that these port entries are not a perfect predictor of what actually happens next. So while I wouldn’t take it as a given that the seabed search will continue, I wouldn’t give up hope just yet, either. Remember, last year it was in April when Ocean Infinity decided to give up for the season because winter weather was coming. So we still have a couple of months left for the search to go on. Fingers crossed…

Last week we expected that the scan of the seabed was about to take a short-term break, as Ocean Infinity’s research ship, Armada 86 05, was scheduled to return to port the very next day. Well, right after that episode dropped Ocean Infinity changed its plans: its arrival data in Fremantle was switched from January 20 to January 29. This was definitely a welcome development; it’s always a good thing if Ocean Infinity spends more time than expected scanning the seabed. But unfortunately, the weather did not play along. A storm hit the area, forcing Armada 86 05 to retrieve the AUVs and wait out the strong winds and massive waves.

Usually we have to deduce this kind of thing from the movement of the ship on marine tracking websites, but on Monday the Malaysian government took the unusual step of releasing an update, basically summarizing what Ocean Infinity had been up to. The statement was posted by MH370 Families on their Facebook page:

Between 06 and 15 January 2026, search operations onboard Armada 8605 were conducted in the designated search area on the southern side of the 7th arc, primarily utilising up to 3 x Hugin Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). Operations resumed on 06 January following prior activities and proceeded steadily through the reporting period, subject to technical and environmental conditions.

From 06 to 14 January, search activities were largely uninterrupted. The AUVs were deployed on planned missions, regularly monitored by the vessel and recovered as required, for data download, battery replacement and preparation for subsequent launches. A brief technical issue on 07 January required the early recovery of one AUV; however, this did not significantly impact overall progress and full three-AUV operations resumed thereafter. Intermittent handshakes were observed during several missions but did not impede data acquisition or mission continuity.”

On 12 January, all 3 x AUVs completed their respective missions and were sequentially recovered to enable data handling and redeployment, ensuring continuity of survey coverage. Weather conditions remained favorable for operations until 14 January, allowing sustained surveying efforts. On 15 January 2026, search operations were halted due to inclement weather, and all 3 x Hugin AUVs were safely recovered onboard Armada 8605. Operations are planned to resume once conditions improve and it is deemed safe to do so.

Last week’s episode dropped on Tuesday, January 13. That means that they had only another day and a bit to search before the bad weather came in, to they made very little progress. At the end, you see the squiggly red track on the upper right, that means they’re moving slowly as they wander from the search area.

The ship is probably just trying to keep the bow pointing into the waves and trying to endure the ups and downs of the waves as best ity can. The folks aboard that ship are probably not having a lot of fun out there right now. Kevin Rupp reports on Twitter that they’ve had to deal with waves as high as 5.7 meters, or 18.7 feet.

So what lies ahead? The current plan is for Armada 86 05 to leave the search area on the 24th, local time (i.e., three days from now) in order to get into port at Fremantle on the 29th.

Kevin says that the weather is not looking good for the continuation of the seabed scan between now and then. He wrote on Twitter earlier today, “After a brief respite, conditions are about to get pretty rough for Armada 86 05 again…I still don’t know why they didn’t run for Fremantle.”

If he’s right, it’s unlikely they’ll get any more scanning done on this phase of the search. That extra week that they added will turn out to have been a long walk for a short drink.

Another interesting tidbit from the Malaysian report is this table showing the amount of seabed scanned in recent days:

Between January 6th and 15th the AUVs were deployed for 10 days and they scanned between 30 and 870 square kilometers per day. In total they added 4,336 square kilometers to the previous total of 2900 square kilometers for a total of 7,236 square kilometers. That’s just shy of halfway to the 15,000 square kilometers Ocean Infinity has said it plans to search.

Viewer @glenn354023 made in interesting observation. In the second column of the table you can see the “daily line distance” that the AUVs carried out each day. That presumably means how far the AUVs traveled over the seabed as they sent out their sidescan sonar beams. Well, if you divide that figure into the total area searched that day, you get the width of the area scanned.

Glenn writes: “By this math they are saying that they are covering 1.8km in a single pass (900m per side of the vehicle). The stated range of the HiSAS is 260m max. How are they outperforming the specs of the equipment by a factor of 3? It’s a valid question to be asked.”

That is interesting. Maybe it’s that the line range is how far each of the AUVs traveled, not all of them collectively, so that’s why they’re multiplying by three? Or do they have some new technology that lets that scan three times further? I think the former is more likely than the latter but if anyone has some insight from the company, please do let me know.

For the rest of the episode I’m delighted to be joined by a very esteemed guest, Dr Nigel Packham, who spent decades at NASA studying safety and risk in manned spaceflight and was involved in the investigation into the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. NASA spared no expense to make sure that it understood what had caused the deaths of seven astronauts and the destruction of the space vehicle, and I think MH370 deserves to be treated with the same degree of seriousness. Dr Packham was generous in sharing his expertise in conducting a successful investigation. One tip that has stuck with me in particular was his advice about what to do when you’ve exhausted all the possibilities you can think of and still can’t find the answer: “Just keep going.”

In today’s episode we break down how the seabed search progressed, and I have deep conversation with NASA’s Dr Nigel Packham, who spent decades at NASA studying safety and risk in manned spaceflight and was involved in the investigation into the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Unlike MH370, that was a case that officials were determined to pursue relentlessly until they had all the answers the needed to make sure that the same tragedy wouldn’t happen twice. I asked Dr. Packham how that kind of implacable attitude could be applied to MH370.

Ocean Infinity has completed its second week of searching the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean for the wreckage of the missing Malaysian airliner, MH370, and it’s making good progress. But Armada 86 05, while a modern ship with state-of-the-art technology, isn’t really equipped to keep a substantial crew of mariners out at sea for very long, and the word on the street is that it will have to return to port very soon.

Last week, you’ll remember, Armada 86 05 managed to do just three days of searching before their efforts got cut short due to bad weather. To make matters worse, only two of the AUVs were actually been operational during that time due to mechanical problems with the third.

Well, the good news is that the AUVs are back in the water. Based on the movement of the mothership, work has been proceeding smootlhy, with no delays caused by weather.

Here you can see where the ship had been traveling up to January 6:

And here’s that same image with Armada 86 05’s track from the past week pasted in:

As you can see it has made considerable progress working up along a 40-kilometer wide strip outside the 7th arc. Once this is completed, they will have searched an area extending up to 90 kilometers, or 50 nautical miles outward, from the 7th arc. Armada 86 05 is getting pretty close to the end of the strip that Victor Iannello recommended back in 2023. What happens when they get to it? Will they keep searching to the north, or will they call it good and switch their efforts to the similar rectangular area on the inside of the 7th arc?

Personally I hope that they keep going, because I think they should search as much as possible. Even though they’ve said they’re only going to search 15,000 square kilometers, we have a precedent for them going beyond their stated goals, that’s what happened back in 2018 when they said that they were going to search 25,000 square kilometers and they wound up searching over 100,000 square kilometers.

Now for the bad news. According the ever-reliable Kevin Rupp, Armada 86 05 is probably going to pack it in for the being some time on January 14. It will sail back to Freemantle, arrive there on January 19 at 21Z, which will be 7am Tuesday January 20 local time, and then will set sail again the next day January 20 at 22Z, or 8am local time on Wednesday January 21. Best case scenario, it sails back to the search area at the same speed, and gets there around January 25, and spends at least two more weeks searching. Worst case, it sails off somewhere else to go do something else, and we find ourselves sitting on our hands again waiting for them to come back and get down to business again.

You’ll remember that around the New Year, Ocean Infinity sent the MH370 family members a couple of detailed updates that included those details about how much they were searching, what the weather was like, mechanical issues, and so forth. Well unfortunately, the MH370 Families group is now reporting that Ocean Infinity has told them it will no longer provide those updates:

No new updates have been provided to family members since the last update on 5th January 2026. We have been made to understand that there will be no daily or weekly updates. Rather, we would be notified via periodic updates as and when available.

So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, at the end of today’s episode I share a video from 2010 that purports to be a Malaysia Airlines flight from 2010 which was conducted by the same aircraft that was operating as MH370 when it disappeared in 2014. It includes a PA announcement by the captain, and some people say he’s saying that his name is “Zaharie Shah,” but I’m not convinced. You can check out the whole thing here.

The marine survey vessel Armada 86 05 has been back out at the 7th arc, resuming the search for MH370 that was paused last March. Things haven’t gone entirely smoothly. The ship did a couple days’ worth of scanning, had to go on standby for a couple of days due to bad weather before deploying its deep-scanning robot subs once more. We happen to know more about the details of the search than we usually do because lately the company doing the search, Ocean Infinity, has been been unusually communicative with the families of the missing passengers and crew.

In a message to family members of the missing on New Year’s Eve, Ocean Infinity reported the following:

Armada 86 05 has arrived at the search location at approximately 0400 hours on 31 December 2025.

Two Hugin AUVs were successfully deployed and are currently on mission surveying the southern sector of the search area.

The search area covered today 1655.66 km².

I think that figure is a typo; I think what they meant to say is that that’s the total area searched so far during the current renewed search, including this past March.

As I’ve discussed in earlier episodes of this podcast, it was widely expected that when Ocean Infinity picked up the seabed scan again, the would resume searching along a strip outside the 7th arc, continuing work that a sister ship had begun back in March. And that’s exactly what it did. In the image below, the blue track represents the area searched in March, and the green area is where the strip to the southeast is now being extended to the northeast:

On January 5 the Facebook group MH370 Families posted an update from Ocean Infinity that read:

Between 2 and 4 January 2026, search operations for MH370 continued aboard Armada 86 05 in the southern sector of the 7th arc, with sustained deployment of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) despite intermittent technical and weather-related challenges.

2 January 2026 (Day 3):

Mission 2 survey activities were concluded early in the morning. Two Hugin AUVs were successfully redeployed and continued executing planned survey missions under active vessel monitoring. A third Hugin AUV was launched but experienced a technical fault shortly after deployment. Fault-finding procedures were completed by the AUV team, and the vehicle was declared ready for redeployment when operational conditions allow.

3 January 2026 (Day 4):

Search operations progressed with two Hugin AUVs deployed and operating in accordance with mission plans. Vessel-to-AUV communications remained stable through routine system handshakes. Deployment of the third AUV was deferred due to unfavourable sea conditions, with redeployment planned once conditions improve.

4 January 2026 (Day 5):

Both deployed Hugin AUVs successfully completed their assigned missions and were safely recovered onboard Armada 86 05. While all three AUVs were confirmed to be technically ready for subsequent missions, persistent adverse sea conditions throughout the day prevented any further launches. Search operations were therefore temporarily paused and remain weather-dependent.

So obviously the work was proceeding at a suboptimal speed because one of the AUVs could not be deployed, and the bad weather in the area forced them to take a hiatus. Based on Marine Tracking data provided by Kevin Rupp, Armada 86 05 spent a couple of days cooling its jets, hanging out in a small area and waiting for the bad weather to pass.

But the week was not wasted. In the last three days of active searching the team managed to cover between 113 and 534 square kilometers per day, achieving a total search area of 2900 square kilometers searched during the current project.

Now the weather is improving. According to the weather forecast, the week ahead is looking just fine and dandy, with winds between 10 and 20 knots. According to Kevin Rupp’s latest reports, the ship is back to making the kind of movement patterns that we typically see when it’s deploying AUVs.

On to another topic: I wish I didn’t have to do this, but I feel like it’s necessary to address some misinformation that’s been circulating on the internet, there have been claims that the ship had stopped because it was deploying ROVs to take a closer look at something on the seabed.

I understand the desire to wish for the best but as we’ve just stated the reason for the ship holding tight as stated by Ocean Infinity itself is that it was waiting out bad weather. Also we know that the ship does not have ROVs on board, ill-informed claims to the contrary. As Don Thompson has taken great pains to point out the boxes seen on the deck of Armada 86 05 are not ROVs; they are refrigeration units that can store food for the crew.

Another thing I’d like to address is the claim that the seabed that they’re searching is incredible rugged and mountainous and if they don’t succeed it’s because this terrain is so complicated it’s virtually impossible to search. And that’s just not right.

Sure, there are some rugged areas within the broader search area, notably Broken Ridge and the Diamantina Trench. But it’s important to note that Ocean Infinity has searched here before, back in 2018, and didn’t report that they found the task in surmountable.

At any rate the current area is considerably flatter. There are a few low ridges here and there, one of which Victor singled out in his 2023 paper as deserving a second look, thinking that the wreckage could be hiding in a shadow there, but the area was looked at in March and it turned out there was nothing there.

After the end of the 2017 seabed search the Australian government released images from the scan, some of which were taken near the current search area. They were easily able to see something on the seabed:

When they looked closer it turned out to be a geological formation:

It’s interesting to compare what they saw there with the wreckage of the missing Air France jet, Air France 447, that was found on the seabed of the Atlantic after its disappearance in 2009.

These are pictures that Kevin Rupp posted recently. The first one shows the image returned from the side-scan sonar. As you can see it’s fairly low resolution but all the same it’s clear that there’s something there.

So investigators went back to take a closer look and this is what they saw in a higher resolution image. They could clearly make out distinct, identifiable fragments of the plane, especially large parts like the landing gear and engine cores.

This particular crash was fairly low speed as far as these things go, we don’t really know how fast MH370 would have been going if it hit the water, so the pieces might be smaller, but regardless, there should still be an identifiable debris field.

A question that I’ve gotten a lot is whether the sediment on the seabed is so thick that maybe the debris just sank into it, and so won’t be visible.

The answer is that no, it won’t sink in, and the reason that we can say that confidently is that in the course of earlier scans along the 7th arc in this vicinity, search crews have found smallish objects there were quite plainly just sitting atop the ocean floor, for example a steel drum:

So, to recap, the search is well underway, and after a brief hiatus the AUVs appear to be going back in the water. In the weeks ahead, I’ll be keeping a close eye on developments as they unfold, and will be back with you in short order to keep you apprised of how it is all going.

Earlier this month the Malaysian government announced that the seabed search for MH370 would restart on December 30, and it looks looks like that is exactly what is happening. Right about now, as I’m putting together today’s episode on December 30, 2025, the Ocean Infinity marine survey vessel Armada 86 05 is pulling up to the search area, where it will deploy its three underwater robots to acoustically scan the seabed.

The area that they’re planning to search is relatively small — just 10,000 square kilometers, compared to about 250,000 square kilometers during earlier searches between 2014 and 2018. That implies that they think they have a pretty specific idea of where to look.

When I made the last episode two weeks ago, Armada 86 05 had just set sail from Benoa Port on the island of Bali, it had conducted some sea trials, and it was heading directly towards the search area. Given its speed and the distance involved, it looked like it was on track to get to the search area early. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, the ship changed course and sailed down to Fremantle, Australia. We don’t know exactly why they had a change of plan—it might have to do with weather—but it’s worth noting that Fremantle is a port that Ocean Infinity has used in the past as a place for resupplying its MH370 search operations, because it’s the nearest port to the 7th arc.

The ship arrived in Fremantle on December 23. It didn’t actually go into the port but remained offshore before heading back out to sea again a few hours later. So literally a pit stop. It might have been taking on more fuel in order to extend its time out in the search area. It spent some time conducting more sea trials over an area where test targets had been deployed on the deep sea bed, then set out at a good clip for the search zone.

Here’s an image that Kevin Rupp posted showing how the ship is approaching the area:

(Kevin, by the way, is an excellent source of information about the seabed search. He has a good relationship with Ocean Infinity and his guesses and intutions about what’s going to happen next very often turn out to be correct. You can find his stuff on Facebook and Twitter accounts. I also recommend Don Thompson and Jay Lowe.)

Now this track is very interesting because it provides ay powerful clue as to what Ocean Infinity is going to do next. As you can see, it’s heading right for a spot north of the lower set of squiggles. These squiggles show where another Ocean Infinity ship, Armada 78 06, left off searching a long rectangular area that lies outward from the 7th arc. My guess is that Armada 86 05 will continue that project, working its way northward along this strip. This area was originally suggested by Victor Iannello on his blog a few years ago, and if Ocean Infinity follows Victor’s recommendation, they’ll go for another 170 kilometers in this direction, meaning they’ll cover an additional 5000 square miles or so.

Remember that the Malaysia government said that Ocean Infinity will spend 55 days carrying out this search, but those 55 days will not be continuous, so we shouldn’t expect that this plan is going to be carried out in the next two months, it could be stretch out over the whole of 2026 or maybe even beyond.

So that’s where we are right now. For the rest of the podcast I discuss the case with my guest John Waters, a former F-16 pilot who now flies 777s for a freight carrier and has excellent knowledge of the aircraft and its systems. John has his own aviation podcast, so it’s really a two-way interview; he’s posting an edit on his YouTube channel and I’m posting one on mine.

I was particularly fascinated by his response to my question about whether he thought it would be plausible for a hijacker to infiltrated the electronics bay without being detected.

The area that they’re planning to search is relatively small — just 10,000 square kilometers, compared to about 250,000 square kilometers during earlier searches between 2014 and 2018. That implies that they think they have a pretty specific idea of where to look.

In today’s episode I discuss about how they got to the search area, where exactly they’ll be looking, and what likely comes next. I also talk with 777 pilot and podcaster John Waters about the seabed search and about his perspective on the mystery.

It’s December 7, 2025, and Armada 86 05 has set sail from Benoa Port on the island of Bali, Indonesia. After spending a brief period conducting sea trials, it is now making a beeline for the area where it left off searching the seabed in March. If it maintains its current speed, it should arrive a day or two before the date previously given by the Malaysian government as the start of the new phase. In today’s episode, we discuss the capabilities as well as the limitation of the technology that Ocean Infinity will deploy once it arrives.

To recap: in the last episode, we talked about how the ship that everyone suspected was going to be tasked with looking for the plane, Armada 86 05, had been working on a project in the Philippines looking for historical shipwrecks.

It wrapped up that job on December 3, docked at the port of Legazpi in southern Luzon for refuelling and resupply. From there it headed south on December 6, threading its way through the islands en route to Bali, Indonesia, where it arrived December 14.

It spent less than 24 hours in port there, implying that it didn’t do a further full resupply but probably just took on a key member of the crew or perhaps some crucial pieces of equipment, and then headed out for sea.

But it didn’t get very far. On December 16, when still only about 200 nautical miles offshore, it stopped and then began moving in a manner characteristic of launching AUVs. Now, to be clear, there is nothing particularly of interest in this area. But we’ve seen this behavior before. As Kevin Rupp pointed out in a recent Tweet, we saw this exact thing after the ship that conducted the last phase of the search Armada 78 06, left port in Mauritius on its way to carry out the search this past March.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that the crew wants to be absolutely sure that everything is in good working order before they sail thousands of miles out into the middle of the empty ocean. Once you’re out there, if you realize you left your only screwdriver back in port you’ve got a big problem on your hands.

Earlier today Kevin Rupp reported that the ship has started moving again. According to Big Ocean Data the ship is moving on a heading of 210 degrees at around 7 knots. That’s pretty much a beeline for the area where they left off searching in March. It’s a distance of 1800 nautical miles, so 258 hours or just under 11 days. Assuming they keep at it, they’ll arrive on the 28th, so actually a bit early for the announced resumption of the search on December 30.

OK, we’ve talked in previous episodes about where exactly on the seabed they’re likely to scan, today I want to discuss what exactly they’re going to do when they arrive on station.

The technology that they’re going to use is the Hugin 6000 Autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, a robot sub that can dive to a depth of 6000 meters or 3.7 miles. The Armada 86 series of ships is a state-of-the-art technology that is designed to work very efficiently and can even operate without a human crew, but it is not really optimize for working with AUVs.

Unlike the ship that carried out the original Ocean Infinity search in 2018, it doesn’t have dedicated equipment for launching and retrieving AUVs. Instead it has detachable garages called containerized sheds that go on the back of the ship. Three of these have been attached to A86 05.

There are three sheds, to house the three AUVs, and even though these all look the same they have different technology. To quote Don Thompson, who’s been following developments closely:

I am quite confident to state that one of the Hugin AUVs is equipped with a Kongsberg HiSAS system while the other two AUVs will use Edgetech (real aperture) side scan sonar. The HiSAS provides higher & consistent resolution across its swath but the swath width is maybe only 25% of the Edgetech in SAS mode.

These AUVs can operate up to up to 50 hours before they have to return to the surface, where a detachable nose cone comes off, it’s connected to the main body with a cable, the crew on board the ship either throws a grappling hook or shoots it out of a compressed-air gun, the trick is to snag that cable so that the AUV can then be hauled nose-first onto what’s called a stinger, basically a retractable ramp, and raised into the shed where a cable can be attached to download the data.

So what if they find the wreckage? That will be exciting, but the mystery won’t be solved yet. In order to figure out exactly what happened to the plane, investigators will have to retrieve the black boxes. And that’s not something that the search vessel has the cabability to do.

The AUVs it deploys can look, but they can’t touch. To actually get in there and grapple with the debris, investigators will have to deploy an ROV, or remotely operated vehicle, that has lights and cameras and claws and so forth. And A86 05 doesn’t have any ROVs. Here’s Don Thompson again:

The Armada fleet has only two deep ocean capable ROVs and both continue to be used in UK North Sea projects (A78-01, TotalEnergies offshore asset inspections, and A78-06, gas pipeline inspections of Bacton, Norfolk).

So what this means is that in the event that they do spot wreckage that looks like MH370, there will definitely be celebration, but also a lot of anxious anticipation as Ocean Infinity decides how it’s going to reposition its assets in order to get the job done.

Right now, we’re about two weeks out from the start of the seabed scan. In the meantime I wanted to wrap up by bringing something else to your attention.

Earlier this month a Chinese state television channel reported that a Chinese court ahd ordered Malaysia Airlines to pay $3.3 million in compensation to family members of eight missing passengers. The report said that another 47 cases have been settled and withdrawn, and 23 cases remain underway.

A reminder that the disappearance of MH370 is not ancient history, this is a story that is still developing and still affecting people today. The human suffering continues.