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

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

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

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

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

We’ve talked about the reboot before, back in Episodes 4 and 6, so if you remember those or you want to check that out again, that will help.

Basically, we know that sometime around the turnback at IGARI, the satcom system got turned off again, and then around 18:23 power was restored and the system logged back on with the Inmarsat satellite.

It turns out that there are two ways to depower the satcom. The first is to go into the electronics bay and pull three circuit breakers. That just turns off that one piece of equipment, the satcom, or more specifically what’s called the satellite data unit.

The other way you can do from the cockpit, and that is to reach up to the overhead panel and turn off a whole chunk of the plane’s electrical circuitry. It’s like pulling the circuitbreaker for a whole floor of your house. It turns off a lot of stuff. So much stuff, in fact, you don’t even know what it’s turning off.

Then there’s an even more radical thing you could do, which is just turn everything off in the whole plane. It’s radical because, as you’ll recall, the 777 is an all-electric plane. You can’t even move the control surfaces without electricity, so if you depower everything you’re in a world of hurt. A little propellor thing called a RAT comes down and gives you just enough power to keep steering the plane, but that’s it — no lights, no AC, Autopilot, nothing. You’re basically hanging by your last thread.

Intuitively I think it makes sense that a pilot would not want to turn off huge chunks of his plane, let alone the whole thing. But I think what people don’t understand is just how very much a pilot would really balk at doing that. It’s just something they would ever do and if they did it would have to be for an extremely urgent reason, like if an emergency checklist told them to do it.

Yet this is exactly the hypothesis that two very popular MH370 videos on YouTube have proposed. One is by Green Dot Aviation, and the other is by MenTour Pilot; together they have racked up over 10 million views.

But the only people who really know how unlikely it would be for a 777 to do this are other 777 pilots. So that’s why I reached out to Juan and put it to him directly.

I think there are two main takeaways from our conversation. First, the instinct of a 777 is, you don’t mess with that electrical panel. You don’t step on superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, and you don’t start pulling circuit breakers. It goes against the grain.

Second, you just don’t know what’s going to happen. Even if the captain did enough research to figure out that he could depower the SDU by isolating the left AC bus, he wouldn’t really know what else would happen, what other systems he’d knock out by doing that.

In short, anyone proposing that the flight crew turned off all or part of MH370’s electrical system needs to be aware that they’re requiring the captain to do something really quite extraordinary. Not impossible, but extraordinary.

And this brings us to the second part of the big question: if they’re going to do this extraordinary thing, why? What is their motivation for taking this big risk?

At this point I should say that both Mentour Pilot and Green Dot, both of who made MH370 videos that got millions and millions of views, based their work at least in part on the work of two French pilots, Patrick Blelly and Jean-Luc Marchand, and this idea of turning off the entire electrical system is theirs. In their scenario, the captain wanted to escape detection by turning off all forms of communication, and he knew that if he turned off ACARS it would send a little message saying, “OK, turning off now,” instead of just going dark.

Now this seems funny to me because, as we know from AF447, there is no one sitting around an operations center somewhere in the middle of the night checking to see whether or not any given plane’s ACARS has been turned off or not and if so how it was turned off. It’s just not going to happen in real time.

So essentially the idea is that the captain did a very large, dangerous, cumbersome thing that was contrary to the nature of every 777 pilot, just for the sake of avoiding one tiny clue. And yet: He does a turnback and flies right over the top of a Malaysian Air Force base with all its primary radar. To me that doesn’t add up.

I want to make super clear, by the way, that I am not criticizing or making fun of Green Dot or MenTour Pilot. I think that they are both smart guys and talented communicators and they’ve made a good-faith effort to understand what happened to this plane.

But I do disagree with their conclusions, and I want to explain why as respectfully as possible, because I hope that they stay engaged with the project of keeping the public informed and interested in this mystery. I would like to encourage them both to keep trying to find answers.

As we know there are a lot of people who get mad at me for suggesting that the common sense theory of MH370, namely pilot suicide, might not be right. And I think that part of it is a widespread belief that the pilot suicide theory is simple, and everything else is incredibly needless complicated and arcane. But the point we’re making today, and which I think we’ve made over and over again in the course of this series, is that the pilot suicide theory is only simple if you overlook some really glaring holes.

In reality, the simple theory is really not so simple.

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

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

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

Why would Russia hijack a Malaysian airliner and lead the world on a wild goose chase?

It doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Unless you understand the man who makes the decisions in Russia, and how he sees the world.

Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer stationed in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Like many patriotic Russians, Putin experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union not as the blossoming of freedom, but as the humiliation of a once-great power. Territory that had once been considered the heartland of the empire split off into independent states. Putin later called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Under communism, all wealth belonged to the state, including Russia’s vast oil, timber, and mineral reserves. In the brave new world of capitalism, all that was up for grabs. Tremendous fortunes were amassed overnight by people connected enough and ruthless enough to grab them. Entrepreneurs with shady connections grew obscenely wealthy while the majority slid into poverty. Birth rates plunged and the life expectancy of the average Russian male fell from 64 in 1990 to 58 in 1994. The nation was literally dying.

A coalition of organized crime, robber barons, and the security forces emerged to hold the society together. In the West, these groups rarely intersect, but in Russia they’re a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap. “A mafia state as conceived by an advertising executive,” is how journalist Michael Weiss memorably described it.

Putin’s rise illustrates the interdependence of these elements. In 1999, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, was teetering. He and his coterie of oligarchs had looted the country and amassed great wealth, but there was a danger that once Yeltsin stepped down they would be prosecuted and jailed. To prevent that, Yeltsin selected Putin, then a little-known functionary from St. Petersburg, to be the new head of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. Soon after, he anointed Putin as his chosen successor.

When Putin took power, his first official act was a decree that Yeltsin and his family would not be prosecuted.

No one thought Putin would last. He was a political nobody, and headed up a wildly unpopular government that seemed doomed to fall. But in September of 1999 the country was galvanized by a series of deadly bombings that struck four apartment buildings in quick succession, first in Buynaksk, then Moscow and Volgodonsk. Nearly 300 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. The government blamed Chechen terrorists, and launched a war of reprisal in which as many as 200,000 civilians were killed. Putin’s popularity soared.

The blasts’ timing was unlikely the product of good luck on Putin’s part. Kremlinologists believe that Russian security forces carried out the apartment bombings as a pretext for a war that would boost Putin’s popularity and shift public attention away from government corruption. Among the evidence: unexploded explosives found in the basement of another apartment building that were determined to have been planted by members of the FSB. Arrested by local authorities, the FSB agents were ordered released by Moscow.

Putin ruthlessly consolidated power, jailing oligarchs who failed to toe the line and assassinating journalists who asked too many questions. He was determined to build a strong central idea around which to rally the population, but in the wake of communism’s disaster, no abstract ideology would do. Instead, Putin spun together a notion of national Russian-ness that combined a strong central state, patriotism, Orthodox Christianity, and a mythologized vision of Russian history. Putin positioned himself as a combination of tsar and echt-Russian everyman, riding horseback shirtless like a cossack, straddling a motorcycle, and flying an ultralight to guide the migration of endangered Siberian cranes.

Beneath the shiny new veneer of nationalism, the machinery of corruption rumbled along as before. After a spectacular run of growth from 1996 to 2008, the Russian economy stalled in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis.

In 2013, deteriorating conditions in neighboring Ukraine sparked a full-blown crisis. The country had been led by Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally. But a people power revolution in February 2014 toppled Yanukovych and replaced him with an interim government that sought closer ties with the West. From the Kremlin’s perspective, this represented not a popular yearning for freedom but an act of aggression by the United States and its allies against a country that lay within Russia’s proper sphere of influence. It could not be allowed.

Russia had the military might to simply roll its tanks over the border and take control of Ukraine. But it couldn’t afford to trigger a world war. Instead, it decided to act undercover by using a military doctrine that Russian forces have been developing since before the Second World War. Called maskirovka, it encompasses a broad range of techniques for multiplying the effectiveness of one’s forces by deceiving and distracting the enemy.

On February 27, 2014, men wearing military uniforms without insignias or badges seized key government buildings in Crimea, eventually annexing it. The operation was designed to look like an internal uprising, but the troops belonged to elite Russian military units, including the powerful and wide-ranging military intelligence agency known as the GRU.

Inside Russia, the move was wildly popular. Putin’s approval ratings skyrocketed. To ordinary Russians, he had stood up to foreign predation and burnished the nation’s greatness. Outside Russia, the reaction was outrage and fear. The crisis in Ukraine dominated headlines as Western politicians weighed sanctions.

With the deception phase underway, a distraction was needed.

Remember when Air France flight 447 disappeared en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, in 2009? It was a huge news story, eclipsing everything else at the time. I believe that Russian intelligence watched that story carefully—and learned that under certain circumstances, it would be possible to make a state-of-the-art airliner appear to vanish into thin air. At the cost of a few hundred civilian lives, you could create a worldwide news sensation, a kind of informational smoke screen to be deployed when you wanted to divert attention from something else.

In early March, international tensions rose as Russia tightened its grip on Crimea. European and American officials issued messages of condemnation. Then, on Thursday, March 6, President Obama took punitive action, signing an executive order imposing sanctions against “individuals and entities responsible for activities undermining democratic processes or institutions in Ukraine.”

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, declared that sanctions “would inevitably hit the United States like a boomerang.”

The following day, MH370 disappeared.

CNN went to its round-the-clock coverage of the missing plane. Media everywhere turned their attention away from the unrest in Ukraine. Western governments continued to exert diplomatic pressure on Russia to withdraw, but the public was not engaged.

Just about four months later, on Wednesday, July 16, Obama announced new sanctions against Russia. Putin responded with a public statement warning that sanctions “generally have a boomerang effect,” and added, “I am certain that this is harmful to the U.S. Administration and American people’s long-term strategic national interests.” The next day, during a phone call with Obama that had been scheduled the day before at the Russians’ request, Putin broke the news of the MH17 shoot-down.

Why did Russia destroy MH17? For many, the lack of an obvious motive made it hard to believe that the Kremlin was responsible. But they were missing the point. “In this kind of warfare,” writes U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Alex Grynkewich, “attribution and intent are challenging if not impossible for friendly forces to ascertain.”

It’s a special episode today: Andy is on vacation, so for the very first time I’m helming this podcast without him. Today’s topic is one that I’ve been fascinated by for a long time: the art of stage magic and what it can tell us about MH370.

When we’re trying to solve a problem, one of the first steps is to figure out what the correct tool to use for the job is. If your problem involves dripping water, you’re probably going to need plumbing tools. If you’re finding sawdust, you’re going to need insecticide to kill carpenter ants.

For the last ten years, the conversation about MH370 has been dominated by engineers and pilots, and the net result is that they haven’t found the plane. And they really can’t explain why. It sounds to me like they’re using the wrong set of mental tools. So what set of tools to use? Well, what kind of problem is this? What is it like?

Well, you have an object disappear into thin air, it sounds like a job for a magician. I’m thinking of that Penn and Teller show, “Fool Us,” where they watch a magic act and try to figure out how it’s done. I’d like to do something like that with MH370: find out what the puzzle of the disappearing plane look like to someone who makes things disappear for a living.

To that end I’m joined today by Ed Dentzel is the host of an excellent podcast Unfound, in which he’s examined hundreds of missing persons cases. In a previous life Ed was the stage manager for “The World’s Greatest Magic Show” at the Greek Isles in Las Vegas from 2005 to 2008. While there he worked with more than 50 magicians, helping them create and hone new tricks.

Ed wrote a guest post for my blog back in 2019 and I found what he said really fascinating and I’ve been wanting to have him on the show for a long time.

One of the many interesting insights he shared with me was the idea that often small, seemingly innocuous details can have crucial details in making a trick work. As an example, he cited a David Copperfield trick in which the celebrity magician seemed to walk through the Great Wall of China:

From Ed’s perspective, it’s notable that Copperfield uses a platform to “enter” the wall, then the platform is moved to the other side, where he then “comes out of” the wall via the same platform. Why did Copperfield use the same platform twice? Was he trying to economize on props?

MH370 has a number of features that could offer similar insight into how the disappearance was pulled off, most notably the reboot of the plane’s satcom system. This detail was sufficiently inconspicuous that for a long time many of the commenters who offered theories about what happened to the plane simply ignored it. But, like a platform that gets used twice, this subtle detail opens up all kinds of possibilities once its potential significance is recognized.

In the second half of the show, Ed and I discuss a technique called WSPR that supposedly can use archival ham radio data to figure out where MH370 flew with a great degree of accuracy. This idea has been promoted energetically by an Independent Group member named Richard Godfrey, who we’ve met before in the podcast. Godfrey has managed to get WSPR picked up by mainstream outlets such as 60 Minutes Australia. What really seems to have made a splash, though, is getting it featured in a recent video by the popular aviation YouTuber Mentour Pilot:

Quite a few viewers and listeners have reached out to me asking for my take on this video and about WSPR in general, so I wanted to talk about it a little bit in today’s episode. I didn’t want to get in great detail, though, because I think the verdict about the validity has been rendered pretty convincingly by Victor Iannello, who devoted an excellent blog post to the topic. Victor found the concept pretty suspect from the get-go, but nevertheless rolled up his sleeves to find out if he could get the math to work. The long and short of it: he couldn’t. Not even close.

But we don’t have to take Victor’s word for it. To get a second opinion, Victor reached out to the person who is pretty much the most reputable source on the topic imaginable: Nobel-prize winning physicist Joe Taylor, who invented WSPR. Taylor told Victor: “As I’ve written several times before, it’s crazy to think that historical WSPR data could be used to track the course of ill-fated flight MH370. Or, for that matter, any other aircraft flight… I don’t choose to waste my time arguing with pseudo-scientists who don’t understand what they are doing.”

I’d like to think that that would lay the matter to rest, but unfortunately that’s not how the information economy is growing. The three million people who have seen Mentour Pilot’s video as I write this is is no doubt many orders of magnitude larger than the number of readers who have read Victor’s much more carefully thought-out analysis.

As I’ve often said, the key to solving the mystery of MH370 is to assembling all of the evidence and seeking the expertise of a wide variety of experts to help us understand what it means. Equally important, though, is to avoid the distractions and deflections of people who use their soap box to promote misinformation.

Unless you understand the man who makes the decisions in Russia, and how he sees the world.

Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer stationed in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Like many patriotic Russians, Putin experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union not as the blossoming of freedom, but as the humiliation of a once-great power. Territory that had once been considered the heartland of the empire split off into independent states. Putin later called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” After he came to power, he was determined to return his country to its rightful place of greatness in the world. To do that, he would need to adopt a mode of warfare suited to Russia’s diminished resources — an approach called hybrid warfare. And that involves hurting your adversary in all sorts of ways, some blunt and obvious, others quite sophisticated and unexpected.

If the satcom was hacked and MH370 was taken north, the perpetrators presumably had a plan that ended with them alive, and this would have to involve landing the plane at an airport.

But is there an airport they could have landed at?

In Episode 13, we talked about how scientists at an Australian government organization called the Defense Science & Technology Group used Monte Carlo modeling to generate a large number of possible routes and see which ones matched the BTO data. They wound up with a probability distribution that looked like this:

Based on the BFO data, they concluded that the plane had gone south. But we’re proposing that the data was spoofed to make it seem like the plane went south when it really went north. So we’re interested in this part:

As you can see these paths all go across the Bay of Bengal, comes ashore west of Calcutta and the Ganges Delta, crosses Nepal and the Himalayas and then across Tibet and Xinjiang.

Eyeballing the places that these routes crossed, I tried to recreate them on Google Earth and came up with this:

In Episode 13 we talked about the specifics of the countries these routes pass over and where various airbase are located, for now let’s focus on where these paths end up. Zooming in:

The red lines on the left and right are what I’ve eyeballed to be approximately the east and west edges of the DSTG’s probability distribution. The three colored lines represent routes that you get if you assume that the plane flew at speeds of 350 (blue), 400 (orange), and 450 knots (green). As you can see, the faster the plane flew, the further west it would have gotten.

One of our audience members, Keelie, looked at the map we put up with Episode 13 and decided to search around the area and see what runways there might be that a 777 could land on. She found four that I’ve marked on the chart above: Kyzylorda, Shymkent, Taraz, and Manas. Except for Kyzylorda, they’re all south of the 7th arc, which I feel is pretty much disqualifying, since I find it hard to imagine that a plane that would be on the edge of running out of fuel would fly further than it needed to go.

What about Kyzylorda? It’s pretty intriguing, as it’s very close to being right on the 7th arc. But it’s a bit too far to the west, so MH370 might have had trouble getting there. I’d put it on the ‘maybe’ list though. Because there are a lot of uncertainties. For instance, if whoever took the plane did something called “step climbs” the flight would have been more efficient and hence able to fly further.

Here’s something interesting. Just beyond Kyzylorda is a green oval 56 km across. This is a rather remarkable place called the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to reach orbit. Though it lies inside the borders of Kazakhstan, it is leased by Russia and functions as autonomous territory—a sort of Kremlin-controlled Guantanamo on the steppe, selected by the USSR at the dawn of the space age for its wide-open spaces and remote location.

Near the center of the oval lies a historically significant called airstrip called Yubileyniy, the Russian word for “Jubilee.”

Nearly 15,000 feet long, it’s the longest runway in Kazakhstan. It was built in the 70s as the landing site for the Buran space plane, the Soviet Union’s answer to the Space Shuttle. Constructed of special reinforced concrete twice as strong as that used in normal runways, and ground to exceptional flatness using special milling machines, Yubileyniy remains to my knowledge the only airstrip in the world that was built specifically for the use of self-landing aircraft. On November 15, 1988, after a successful three-hour trip in space, the unmanned Buran made its first and only landing at Yubileyniy, missing its landing mark by less than 50 feet. Soon after, the Soviet Union fell apart, and the project was cancelled. To this day, the area sits largely disused, far from the busy launch areas of Baikonur, surrounded by derelict buildings that haven’t been touched in decades.

Most large runways are located at airports near cities. Yubileyniy isn’t. And the fact that it was designed for a self-landing airplane is particularly apt considering that hijackers were chosen for their ability to steal a plane, not to fly it. Fortunately, the Boeing 777 flight management system is able to fly what’s known as an Instrument Landing System Category III “autoland” approach. Essentially, once the necessary information is plugged into the system, the plane is able to fly itself to any suitably equipped runway, with or without a trained pilot is at the controls.

After the shootdown of MH17 I was pretty convinced that Russia had had a hand in taking MH370, and Yubileyniy seemed a super-intriguing possibility for a landing spot. So I asked myself, could they have landed the plane there and hidden it?

As I scanned around in Google Earth, I didn’t see any building nearly big enough to park a 777 in. But then I stumbled on something interesting. About a mile from the airstrip was an abandoned building that had sat untouched for decades, just left to slowly crumble in the desert. Here’s how it looked in 2012:

Then I found a source of digital satellite imagery called Terraserver with more up-to-date imagery. Come to find that after decades of neglect someone suddenly took an interest in this area. This is what it looked like in October 2013, five months before the plane disappeared:

A number of trucks are lined up in the parking lot in the upper-right part of the image. The six-story building is being disassembled. And what looks like a large rectangle of dirt has been bulldozed to the left of the building. The image resolution is so good that you can make out what I take to be the stripes left by the bulldozer blade as it worked back and forth horizontally. At the northern end of the rectangle is a berm which casts a shadow to the north. At the far northeastern corner lies what appears to be a trench with a well-defined corner on the upper right, with treadmarks leading out of it toward the southeast. I’m not sure what this dirt rectangle represents — are they building a pile of dirt, or a hole? — but what really gets my attention is the size of the thing. To give you a sense of scale, I’ve superimposed an equivalently proportioned 777 silhouette onto the image:

I got more images. Here’s what the area looked like in December 2013:

The sun is low on the snow-dusted steppe; it’s almost winter. In a month and a half, workers have removed all but the bottom-most floors of the six-story building. You can make out the shadow of a crane projecting to the north from the middle of the remaining structure. A handful of trucks can still be seen in the parking lot. The dirt pile has been extended a few yards to the north; the berm at that end now overlies the what we saw as the sharp corner of the trench in the October image. Beyond the berm lies either a dark strip that could either be a long trench or just a shadow; to my eye the line of brightness at its northern edge implies the lip of a trench, but who knows. Work is clearly continuing. The next image, in black and white, is from three weeks later, January 9, 2014:

Here is two days before MH370 disappeared:

And eight days after:

This is what it looks like today:

I spent weeks in late summer 2014 downloading images, cropping them, rotating them, staring at them. For a while I was convinced that the images showed a large hole being dug, and then filled in after the plane disappeared. I looked into buying a plane ticket to Kazakhstan and getting a metal detector. But ultimately I decided that the images showed not a hole but a mound of dirt, and that it had not been disturbed after some time in February 2014.

I showed some of these images to construction experts and satellite imagery professionals, and received very little encouragement. Most likely, they told me, the work being performed was site remediation: a building was torn down, and construction debris thrown in a trench and covered up. As successive trenches are dug and filled in, a rectangular shape is formed. Simple as that.

And yet: the entire cosmodrome is littered with decades of abandoned equipment and derelict buildings, evincing a constitutional lack of interest in the concept of remediation. There is no commercial or residential activity for miles of Yubileyniy. Why, after decades, did the Russians suddenly need to clear this one lonely spot, in the heart of a frigid winter, finishing just before MH370 disappeared?

If you ask my opinion now, I think the construction of the Yubileyniy dirt pile is just one of those weird concidences. I don’t think that the Russians buried MH370 at Baikonur. For one thing, it would have been much simpler to just put more fuel in it, switch in a professional pilot, and fly it somewhere else, deep in the Russian interior.

For another thing, our old friend Victor Iannello spent a fair time puzzling overlanding places near the 7th arc and he focused on practical matters, like: where would the plane likely have enough fuel to go to?

What he found was that MH370 would have had a hard time reaching Kyzylorda, let alone Baikonur. However it would have had no problem reaching Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan. The international airport there has the second-longest runway in Kazakhstan.

He wrote, “For the path to Almaty Airport at 35,000 ft, the required speed is M=0.735 and the average headwind is 10 kn, with a peak of 23 kn. The predicted fuel remaining at Almaty would be about 3,837 kg, or about 7.8% of the initial fuel load. Even with the uncertainties (-3.8%/+3.2%) of the fuel flow model, I predict there was sufficient fuel to reach Almaty.”

It’s worth noting, though, that Almaty seems to lie east of the pathways delineated by the DSTG. Since we don’t exactly how they generated their calculations, it’s hard to know how big of a problem that was.

One thing I find very intriguing about Almaty is how close it lies to the 7th arc:

The distance is less than the length of the runway! It actually lies within the margin of error of the BTO data, so when it sent its final ping the plane could have been right there.

By the way: since I started working on this week’s episode, I noticed another interesting airstrip that also lies very close to the 7th arc, in this case just a few miles beyond it. And this one lies much closer to the DSTG’s high-probability zone. It’s called Moyynkum:

The upshot is that there are plausible places that MH370 could have landed in Kazakhstan, but we don’t really know where, and my suspicion is that if it did go north it was probably quickly refueled and then took off for a more secure location.

But is there an airport they could have landed at?

If there are no airports near the part of the 7th arc where MH370’s flight would have terminated, then that would be a major blow to the cyber-hijack theory. As it turns out, though, there are a number of airports where the plane could plausibly have landed, and in today’s eposide we look at some of the more intriguing ones.

When Andy and I made the original version of this episode in March, 2024, Malaysia and the underwater search company Ocean Infinity were publicly discussing the idea of restarting the scan of the seabed. At the time it had been several years since Fugro and then Ocean Infinity had carried out searches that together had covered an area the size of Great Britain. In this episode Andy and I discuss how the original seabed search area had been defined and assessed whether expanding that area would likely result in success. It’s newly relevant because, while those discussions petered out without action, the parties have recently been discussing such a move once more.

To assess whether a third seabed search would be a good idea, it’s necessary to first understand how invesigators defined the first two.

As viewers will be well aware of by now, the search area was defined on the basis of meta received by Inmarsat from MH370 during its final six hours of flight. As we’ve discussed, the Inmarsat data doesn’t work like GPS; it doesn’t give you latitutude and longitude coordinates. Instead, there are a lot of possible routes the plane could have taken that would match the data; the trick to understanding where the plane went is to carry out what’s called a “Monte Carlo simulation” in which you generate a vast number of possible routes and then compare each one to the data to see how well it matches.

Each route has an endpoint; the universe of good-matching routes presents you a universe of endpoints, and these are distributed in a fried-egg pattern that will be familiar to viewers.

A corollary of this dynamic is that for every endpoint in the southern ocean, there is a route that ends there—a story of how fast it flew, how many turns it made, and so forth. What’s important to understand is that in broad terms, it’s physically possible for the plane to fly to any point on the 7th arc by the time of the final ping, but in order to get there in a probabilistially plausible manner you’re left with a much smaller universe of possible enpoints. Other end points are possible but require super unlikely combinations of turns and speed changes. We discussed this in some detail in Episode 11.

So it looks like a fairly straightforward task to search this universe of areas. But by 2016 it was found that the plane wasn’t there. So the obvious question was: why not?

Australian officials decided that the plane must be there, but it must be in a corner that they hadn’t looked in where something implausible but not impossible had happened. As they wrote in their after-action assessment, “There is a high degree of confidence that the previously identified underwater area searched to date does not contain the missing aircraft. Given the elimination of this area, the experts identified an area of approximately 25,000 km² as the area with the highest probability of containing the wreckage of the aircraft. The experts concluded that, if this area were to be searched, prospective areas for locating the aircraft wreckage, based on all the analysis to date, would be exhausted.”

So essentially the Australian position was, it’s there, but we ran out of money to find exactly where, sorry. Let’s pat ourselves on the back and move on.

And then something quite unexpected happened. A private company came forward and offered to re-start the search at its own expense, so long as it would be compensated in the event that it found the plane’s wreckage.

Malaysia announced on January 10, 2018, that it had contracted with Ocean Infinity, a US-registered company, to relaunch the seabed search for MH370. Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai stated that there was an 85 percent chance that the plane’s wreckage would be found within a 25,000 square kilometer search zone previously demarcated by the Australia National Transport Board.

Australia’s stated position at the time was that if the plane was not found in this area, which stretched from 36 degrees to 32.5 degrees south latitude, it could offer no rationale for looking anywhere else.

Ocean Infinity’s technology was different from Fugro’s, which had mostly pulled along a side-scan sonar behind a ship, and used robot subs for filling in gaps. Ocean Inifinity just used sophisticated AUVs, basically drones. It was more accurate and faster, and they did a bigger area in 1/9 the amount of time. But the result was the same; they didn’t find anything.

They even went way beyond the area that the Australians said was the limit of their analytical justification.

I had long ago hoped that the moment when the seabed search area was exhausted people would start to think that maybe it was time to question the conclusion that the plane must have gone south. But that did not happen.

By the way, when all this was happening, the identity of Ocean Infinity was mysterious. What was this mysterious company that wanted to risk so much money on a long-shot bid? I did some probing around but hit dead ends. Then, last November, Businessweek ran a long piece explaining just who the company was and what they were doing. Turns out, they were high-tech shipwreck hunters backed by some people who were so wealthy they didn’t mind taking an occasional longshot gamble.

From the mainstream perspective, there is still only one scenario that is respectable enough to consider: that the plane went into the southern Indian Ocean. Therefore, the only way to solve the mystery is to keep scanning the seabed, even if you have no analytical reason for doing so.

But even if one were to do this, where would one look?

You can’t just look randomly in the ocean. So you have to ask yourself: of all the unlikely things that might have happened, what is the least unlikely story that would leave the plane outside the area already searched?

One idea is that even though the plane was in a steep dive after running out of fuel (based on BFO data) and small pieces of the interior were found implying that the plane was torn apart in a high-speed crash, that it didn’t maintain a steep dive, but that the captain had a temprorary change of heart and pulled the plane into a shallow gliding descent which allowed him to soar past the limits of the area already searched, before chaning his mind again and putting the plane back into a high-speed dive.

Based on this idea, Victor Iannello and the rest of the independent group are recommending that Ocean Infinity search further awy from the 7th arc — up to 45 nautical miles.

Does this recommendation make sense? Or does it represent the inability to see behond a hypothesis that should already have been rejected?

In today’s episode, which aired in its original form on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of MH370, we discuss two major advances that we’ve made in the case. The first has to do with the age of the barnacles found on the pieces of debris, and hence how long they spent in the water, a topic that we laid the groundwork for in the previous episode. This is significant in understanding the fate of MH370 because this new data lends weight to the conclusion that the plane did not, in fact, crash into the southern ocean.

How could such a thing be possible? Doesn’t the Inmarsat data tell us that the plane definitely flew south into the ocean? Well, that brings us to today’s second big revelation. As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, there’s also evidence that the data could have been tampered with. This is a radical idea for many in the MH370 community, and some well-respected figures have declared it flatly impossible. But they are not experts in aviation cybersecurity. In today’s episode we’re joined by Todd Humphreys, a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the world’s experts on cybersecurity in avation. He’s been studying the spoofing of GPS signals for more than a decade. And he says that the time has come for search officials to take seriously the possibility that MH370 was hacked. “After a failed search, you have to recalibrate,” he says. “Sometimes you preclude the possibility of even looking for evidence because you have very strong priors against it. I think by this point, we’ve been pushed into a corner where we do need to revisit those priors.”

Simply put, the authorities and the conventional wisdom have proven themselves wrong. The analysis that they conducted lead them to believe that they knew where to find the plane, and they didn’t. So it’s time to grapple with the possibility that someone might have exploited the cybersecurity vulnerability that we described in Episode 22.

PART I.

Let’s start with the topic that we set you up for last week, with the idea of using Lepas barnacles as a clock for timing the age of things. We learned that researchers in the Maldives had found that Lepas in the tropical Indian Ocean can grow 35 millimeters long in 105 days. 

What we didn’t know was whether they would get that big and stop, meaning that we couldn’t use the flaperon barnacles as a clock, or if they did routinely grown bigger than that, in which case we could use barnacles as a clock.

This is what our first big reveal is about. It turns out that we found a Rosetta Stone – a piece of evidence that puts all of these questions in context. 

In May, 2013, an Australian boater named Stephen Knight sailed his twin-engine, 26-foot long motorboat, “an Xtreme Crowd,” from Perth up the western coast of Australia to the Exmouth peninsula for a fishing vacation. 

Knight was camping on an uninhabited island when a sudden storm ripped the boat from its anchorage, capsized it, and swept it out to sea. Eight months later, Knight received word that the boat had washed ashore on Mayotte, a French island near Madagascar. The boat had been carried westward by the prevailing currents, and pictures forwarded from Mayotte showed that it had picked up a healthy community of gooseneck barnacles of the species Lepas anatifera. The pictures were low-resolution but it was possible to see that they covered the entirety of the submerged portion of the boat.

Only one of the images was high-res enough to show the barnacles in detail. It also showed the starboard-side registration numbers. Stephen Knight reached out to Kevin Horsley, the former general manager of LeisureCat, and he gave us the exact dimensions of the registration numbers. (Massive thank you to Stephen and Kevin).

Using those numbers, I did a homebrew image analysis to figure out the geometry of the boat. With my results I built a model in my living room to see if I could get an image that matched the picture of the registration numbers.

I think it worked out pretty well. 

The long and short of it is that, according to my analysis, the longest barnacles are over 40 millimeters, which is significantly larger than the largest barnacles on the flaperon, and what’s more, there are a number of barnacles even in this very small sample that are longer than the longest barnacle on the flaperon. Which means that Lepas barnacles do continue to grow after they get to 36 millimeters, which means that at this size they can still be used as a clock. Now, we could argue back and forth about growth rates, but the main thing to understand is that the Lepas growing on the flaperon were smaller and hence younger than the Lepas growing on an object that had been in the water eight months, which is half the amount of time that had elapsed between the plane disappearing and the flaperon washing up on La Réunion.

This suggests that there was a “debris gap” of about a year.

Now, if it was only the flaperon barnacles that were pointing in this direction, then that might be seen as weak tea. Understandably. But it isn’t just the flaperon that points to a one-year debris gap. The totality of the debris evidence does not match what we would expect to see if the material all entered the water when the plane crashed into the ocean on March 8, 2024.

Let’s review:

— As we discussed with Jim Carlton in Episode 20, the French authorities who examined the flaperon after it was retrieved from La Réunion were baffled to find that though the piece floated high in the water, it was completely covered in barnacles that only grow underwater. This paradox remains unresolved.

— The Australian officials charged with finding the plane tried to refine their drift models by putting replicas in the ocean and observing how their motion through the water was affected by wind and waves, as we discussed in Episode 19. When they fed this new data into their model they found that the flaperon only reached the vicinity of Réunion in the right time frame if it floated high in the water — which, as we’ve just seen, was impossible.

— In December, 2015, the “Roy piece,” a section of engine cowling, washed up in Mossel Bay in South Africa, hundreds of miles farther south than the models predicted it could have reached in its time afloat. That’s “something that is simply too hard for any present-day model to convincingly explain,” David Griffin, the principal research scientist at the Australian government’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, told Victor Iannello in 2017 and confirmed to me this week.

— Only a handful of the debris items that washed ashore have Lepas growing on them; most were bare, which implied that they had previously been washed ashore. At any rate, none of the pieces that do have Lepas have barnacles as big as those seen on Knight’s boat. A fragment of the cabin interior found on Mauritius was “heavily colonised by the Lepas anatifera barnacle,” according to an official report, but of the nearly 400 specimens recovered, the largest were just 20 millimeters long, implying an age of only “45 to 50 days.”

Search officials never attempted a visual analysis of the barnacles photographed on the Roy piece (which subsequently washed back out to sea and was later rediscovered after being stripped clean) but my own bootleg image analysis suggests they are smaller than those found on the flaperon. I invite readers with the requisite Photoshopping skills to have a go at the problem themselves.

I think all you’d have to do is to morph the image with barnacles into the image with the measuring tape.

— Finally, it’s puzzling that when biologists examined the “No Step” piece retrieved by Blaine Alan Gibson they discovered that the only marine organisms older than a few months belonged to species that don’t live out in the open ocean but close to shore. We also discussed this in Episode 20.

How do we make sense of this evidence? One approach is to simply ignore it. Certainly the media have, and have officials like David Griffin. When I recently asked him via email if he could explain any of these paradoxes and inconsistencies, Griffin replied that he didn’t perceive any. He was quite certain, for instance, that barnacles could thrive high above the waterline. “At sea, the flaperon flips over readily in moderate sea and wind states,” he wrote.

This is an attitude we see again and again with MH370: the mindset of, “We know what happened to the plane, and if there’s any evidence to the contrary, there must be a reasonable explanation.” I call this reasonableism. As in, all reasonable people believe in a reasonable theory of what happened, and if the data doesn’t fit, there must be reasonable explanation.

I also sometimes say that MH370 has magic fairy dust, meaning that we don’t expect it to follow the normal rules that normal things do. There are teams of researchers around the world who are using Lepas as timers for things like abandoned fishing nets, because they know from past experience that Lepas are a good gauge of how long things have been in the water. But when it comes to MH370 debris, well, there must be a reasonable explanation as to why those expectations don’t apply here. Something must have happened — and not just to one piece, but to every single one.

But if we take the evidence at face value and accept that what the Lepas are telling us here is the same as what they would tell us in any other circumstance, then we reach our big headline-worthy conclusion: that there was a year-long gap between the plane disappearing and the debris entering the ocean.

And that can only mean that the plane didn't crash into the southern ocean at all.

PART II.

If it didn’t go in the ocean, could it have gone somewhere else?

As we discussed in Episode 13, if the plane didn’t go south, it must have gone north. This is only possible if MH370’s satcom was hacked.  

Todd Humphreys, a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the world’s experts on cybersecurity in avation. He’s been studying the spoofing of GPS signals for more than a decade. And he says that the time has come for search officials to take seriously the possibility that MH370 was hacked. “After a failed search, you have to recalibrate,” he says. “Sometimes you preclude the possibility of even looking for evidence because you have very strong priors against it. I think by this point, we’ve been pushed into a corner where we do need to revisit those priors.”

Simply put, the authorities and the conventional wisdom have proven themselves wrong. The analysis that they conducted lead them to believe that they knew where to find the plane, and they didn’t. And in fact, if you look closer you see that the whole story that they’ve been taking for granted is full of holes.

This is something that a lot of people have a hard time accepting—I get it. Because I understand how the case looks to a lot of people. If you only know a little bit about the case, it sounds pretty simple. And a lot of people in positions of authority have assured the public that the case is simple. 

But it’s a bit like pond water: to the naked eye, it just looks like water. Put it under a microscope, though, and you see that reality is completely different. There’s a whole teeming world, a ridiculous profligacy of complexity, that you never would have imagined.

I think that after 10 years we’ve arrived at a point where we can say that there’s an absolute mass of evidence pointing to Russia as the culprit, and the only way you can make the evidence go away is by closing your eyes and pretending it isn’t there.

I think one of the reasons people are so prone to fall into reasonableism is that it lets them cling to a hypothesis that is so much less scary.

If Zaharie took the plane, then it was just one of those random quirks of human behavior that will happen once in a blue moon, but there’s really nothing you can do about it, and there’s no point in worrying about it. Shut the book and move on.

If the Russians took it, however, the implications are really quite terrifying. What we’re dealing with is not only a crime of absolute brutality, but a crime carried out with such skill and sophistication that we were utterly unable to perceive it as such.

The fear isn’t that someone perpetrated a terrible crime and got away with it; the fear is that we are at war with a ruthless enemy who has completely outwitted us to the extent that they have launched a worldwide war of aggression -– a cold war, but a war nonetheless, one specifically is aimed at destroying free-market liberal democracy -– and have to this day managed to evade full accountability for it because they are smarter than we are.

Or, to put it more charitably, because there is a sizeable and influential group of reasonableists in positions of authority, from opinion page editors to the Department of Justice to the transportation safety agencies, who are completely invested in the idea that everything is normal and fine and anyone who suggests otherwise is a little bit wacky.

But everything is not normal. As should be obvious by now, Russia has spent the last ten years waging a war against democracy around the world, and against democracy in the United States in particular. Just a few days ago a Russian man was arrested for spreading lies about Joe Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that Republicans in Congress planned to use to being impeachment proceedings against him.

Writes Aaron Blake in the Washington Post: “In one way, it’s shocking that a key person in the GOP’s efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens has been indicted and tells prosecutors he has extensive ties to Russian intelligence. In another way, it’s altogether familiar. This isn’t even the first time we’ve learned that a person has been indicted after the GOP cited his claims. Nor is it the first time a person has been linked to Russian intelligence after the GOP leaned on their version of events. The cast of characters Republicans have sought out to substantiate President Biden’s purported corruption over the years has come to include half a dozen convicted and accused criminals, as well as multiple people the U.S. government has linked to Russia, corruption and subverting American democracy.”

So, here is our message on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of MH370: what happened to the plane was unusual and weird. You might be tempted to tell yourself that there certainly must be simple, reasonable explanation for it. But there is no such explanation. And if your only response is to shrug and say that there must be a reasonable explanation, you just might be putting yourself and everything you care about in serious danger.

How could such a thing be possible? Doesn’t the Inmarsat data tell us that the plane definitely flew south into the ocean? Well, that brings us to today’s second big revelation. As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, there’s also evidence that the data could have been tampered with. This is a radical idea for many in the MH370 community, and some well-respected figures have declared it flatly impossible. But they are not experts in aviation cybersecurity. In today’s episode we’re joined by Todd Humphreys, a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the world’s experts on cybersecurity in avation. He’s been studying the spoofing of GPS signals for more than a decade. And he says that the time has come for search officials to take seriously the possibility that MH370 was hacked. “After a failed search, you have to recalibrate,” he says. “Sometimes you preclude the possibility of even looking for evidence because you have very strong priors against it. I think by this point, we’ve been pushed into a corner where we do need to revisit those priors.”

Simply put, the authorities and the conventional wisdom have proven themselves wrong. The analysis that they conducted lead them to believe that they knew where to find the plane, and they didn’t. So it’s time to grapple with the possibility that someone might have exploited the cybersecurity vulnerability that we described in Episode 22.

In Episode 19: The Impossible Drift we looked at some puzzling aspects of the debris, including the fact that marine biologists were stumped as to how Lepas could have grown on a part of the flaperon that stuck high up out of the water. We went more deeply into these issues in Episode 20: Lepas Don’t Lie with renowned invertebrate researcher Jim Carlton.

A uniting concept across these episodes is that Lepas barnacles can be used as a robust and reliable way to measure how long debris has been in the water. Combined with drift modeling, they can tell you when and where something went in the water. In the case of MH370, they can tell us what happened to the plane. In the next episode, we’ll reveal the new evidence that we’ve found.

In the months after the disappearance of MH370, Malaysian police searched for any clues that might suggest that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was the culprit. This would have been the simplest explanation for why the Boeing 777 suddenly went electronically dark and pulled a U-turn forty minutes into its flight, and scarcely a minute after Shah’s voice was heard over the radio calmly telling air traffic controllers “Good night, Malaysia 370.” But to their chagrin, the evidence was slim. Zaharie had left no note. His family and friends had noticed no sign of mental disturbance. There was no evidence of political or religious extremism or of marital discord. He was under no financial pressure. He just didn’t fit the profile of someone who would kill hundreds of innocent people and take his own life in the process.

The police did find,  however, a single piece of evidence pointing at Shah. In his home they found a hard drive that contained a flight simulation program as well as data points created when he saved simulated flights. Six data points recorded on February 2, 2014, were of particular interest. It looked like they came from a single 777 flight that took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, went up the Malacca Strait, passed the tip of Sumatra, then turned south and wound up with zero fuel over the remote southern Indian Ocean. This route so uncannily resembled the flight path deduced from MH370’s radar track and then satcom symbols that it was taken by many as smoking-gun evidence that Shah had practiced absconding with the plane. Some even believe that the flight-sim files could offer clues as to where to find the plane. (Indeed, the discovery of the flight sim files was one of the reasons that the authorities shifted the surface search area in mid-April 2014.)

The final two save points deserve special attention. They are located just 2 nautical miles apart in the far southern Indian Ocean. In both data files the plane has zero fuel and zero engine thrust. In the first, the plane is at 37,651 feet and flying at approximately 198 knots indicated airspeed, which is close to the speed recommended in the 777 Flight Crew Operating Manual in the event a plane loses both engines. In the second, the plane is flying much the same way but the altitude has manually adjusted to 4000 feet. In both cases the plane is actually in a climb. The fact that the plane is gaining altitude in both cases is consistent with a pilot who is hand-flying the airplane and so unable to prevent temporary departures from ideal speed and glideslope. In other words, as the plane gets going too fast he pulls the nose up, and if it starts going too slow he puts the nose down. It’s difficult and requires constant attention–the kind of thing that’s fun for a little while as recreation and dreadful if you have to do it for a long time as part of your job.

So, then, the heart of the matter: what was Shah trying to experience at the two final save points?

One theory is that he wanted to know what it would be like to point his plane into the remote ocean and just sit and wait for it to run out of fuel. But we know that he didn’t do this, because the distance traveled by the simulated flight doesn’t match the plane’s fuel load and burn rate. He got to these end points by manually moving the plane in map mode, not by laboriously flying there. His motivation must have involved doing something at those spots, rather than the process of getting there.

To me, one plausible explanation is that Shah wanted to practice responding to the loss of both engines. This is something that happens on occasion, not always with disastrous results.  On July 23, 1983, an Air Canada 767 en route from Montreal to Edmonton ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet due to an improperly calculated fuel load. Thanks to their amazing airmanship, the pilots managed to guide the plane to a safe landing onto the only possible landing spot, a disused air base near Gimli, Manitoba, that had been turned into a drag-racing strip. In the aviation world, this legendary feat has been memorialized as the “Gimli Glider.”

The second of these save points reminds me of “The Miracle on the Hudson,” the 2009 incident in which a US Airways A320 hit a flock of geese that destroyed both its engines and then glided to a safe ditching. That descent began at 3,060 feet, an altitude similar to the one selected in the simulator.

If it’s true that Shah was practicing emergency procedures on February 2, rather than planning his demise, it must be acknowledged as a freakish coincidence that the simulated flight’s end so eerily foreshadowed MH370’s presumed end. But there are mitigating factors. For one thing, Shah was a flight-sim enthusiast who flew many kinds of aircraft in many locations under many circumstances. Investigators found data files for more than 600 simulated flights on various hard drives in his home. Given that number, it would frankly be surprising if one or two of them didn’t resemble the accident flight in some way.

Also, bear in mind that Shah’s apparent suicide run into the southern Indian Ocean wasn’t his final simulation. On the same day that he practiced engine-out procedure on the 777, he also flew a historical propellor transport, the DC-3. And three weeks later, he played with a Boeing 737. This is hardly the behavior of a man with a monomaniacal obsession with his upcoming demise.

We’ll probably never know for sure why Shah decided to simulate an engine-out descent over the remote southern Indian Ocean scarcely a month before MH370 disappeared. But if we look at the entirety of the evidence collected by the police–and indeed even if we look only at the evidence contained on Shah’s various hard drives–then the flight sim data comes to seem an unconvincing smoking gun.

The police did find,  however, a single piece of evidence pointing at Shah. In his home they found a hard drive that contained a flight simulation program as well as data points created when he saved simulated flights. Six data points recorded on February 2, 2014, were of particular interest. It looked like they came from a single 777 flight that took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, went up the Malacca Strait, passed the tip of Sumatra, then turned south and wound up with zero fuel over the remote southern Indian Ocean. This route so uncannily resembled the flight path deduced from MH370’s radar track and then satcom symbols that it was taken by many as smoking-gun evidence that Shah had practiced absconding with the plane.

Today we revisit a topic that we explored in depth back in Episode 10, “The Vulnerability,” in which we talked about an idea that Victor Iannello and I have both worked on—namely, that MH370 had an unsual vulnerability that would have allowed a sophisticated attacker on board the plane alter the data in its satellite communications system so that when investigators looked at the data later they would think the plane went south when it really went north. (If you’re interested in learning the details of the theory, I’ve posted a précis here.)

I’ve been thinking about this idea for a long time. There was even a whole episode of the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” about it. But it’s taken this podcast to spur me to do something I wish I had done a long time ago, which is to seek out the opinion of cybersecurity professionals. From the perspective of someone whose job it is to assess potential hacking vulnerabilities, does it seem like MH370 had one?

I was able to tap the expertise of someone who really knows his stuff, Ken Munro, the founder of Pen Test Partners in the UK. As the name implies, Ken’s company specializes in penetration testing, which means that they probe a client’s computer network for vulnerabilities to see if they can get inside the system. The idea is by imagining all the ways a bad guy could hurt you, you can take steps to prevent them from happening. Though his skills are applicable in every corner of IT, Ken specializes in aviation. Recently he and his team were able to a real 747 that wasn’t being used and borrow it for a bit to test it for security vulnerabilities (and found some interesting ones).

I figured if anyone could tell whether a proposed vulnerability is plausible or not, it would be Ken.

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

He quickly became a central feature of the MH370 story, ubiquitous in media coverage the crash.

After receiving a whirlwind of press attention for “No Step,” his first find, Gibson traveled to Ile Ste Marie, Madagascar, in June accompanied by a crew from France 2 TV. There, accompanied by a film crew, he found yet another piece of aicraft debris.

If it’s remarkable to find a piece of MH370 with TV cameras rolling, imagine doing it twice.

Later that year Gibson was back on Ile Ste Marie, this time with a delegation of MH370 family members and a documentary crew. On the morning of December 8, the group split up and spent the day combing separate areas. The camera crew followed Blaine. Having driven along one stretch of shore on an ATV and found nothing, he turned around and was making his way back when he came upon a piece of debris at the edge of the wet sand. A wave had evidently deposited it within the few minutes since he had passed. “Appears to be Malaysia 370 interior cabin debris,” he declared.

I found it quite extraordinary that a purported piece of MH370 apparently washed up on the shore within half an hour of Blaine’s passing by the spot. The ocean is vast, the number of pieces of MH370 necessarily limited. Bear in mind that Madagascar alone has a coastline of 2300 miles. Consider mainland Africa, the other islands dotted around the region.

The odds of finding a piece of the plane on any given stretch of sand is very small; the odds of finding something that washed ashore within the last half hour must be infinitesmal.

Consider also the other people were looking for pieces of MH370, as well. We’ve talked before about how tens of thousands of people were looking for debris as part of the annual beach cleanup project in Western Australia. A similar project was going on at the same time in South Africa, where the 17,000 and 24,000 people taking part had been given an instruction sheet asking them to turn in anything that looked like a piece of an airplane.

Nothing was turned in.

Ordinary individuals were looking, too. In earlier episodes we’ve talked about how pieces were found on La Réunion, Rodrigues and in Mossel Bay, South Africa, by ordinary people who’d stumbled on stuff and thought it might be something. Blaine himself played a big role in alerting the public and encouraging people to turn stuff in.

As the excitement over his initial finds faded, Blaine kept powering on. By the end of 2016 he had found most of the pieces that had been turned in.

It wasn’t just how much he was finding that I found odd, but how he was finding it. In a seaside village on mainland Madagascar he happened to spot a nine-year-old girl using a scrap of MH370 debris to fan a kitchen fire. “It was light and it was solid and it was part of the plane,” Gibson told The Guardian. “When I put the word out around the village, another guy turned up with another piece he had been using as a washing board for clothes.”

I found it implausible that one might happen upon someone fanning a fire with a flat object that just happened to be a piece of MH370. I became even more suspicious after I found that Gibson had given a different account of how he’d collected the piece in a posting to a closed Facebook group: “We combed the beach ourselves and found one piece of aircraft debris, a hexagonal rubber torque coupling seal… We showed pictures of debris to local people and asked if they had found any, and over the next two days different people brought us the remaining three pieces.” No mention of the girl.

Later he told a different story, that he’d been eating breakfast when the girl, Lendra opened up a bag of toys and there it was.

Flummoxed by Gibson’s claims, and by his eccentricities as a person, I naturally wanted to find out more about who this person was. And there was quite a lot to find.

Born in San Francisco on April 21, 1957 Gibson was raised in Carmel, California. His father, Phil Gibson, was a figure of historic significance, having served as Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court from 1940 to 1964. He was known for his opposition to the emprisonment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps. “He… made friends with the Japanese American community,” Blaine later recounted in a speech to the California Supreme Court Historical Society. “They never forgot that Phil Gibson was the only state official in California to speak out publicly against the internment of Japanese Americans and residents during World War II.” Gibson’s mother was much younger than his father, who was 69 when his son was born. When Blaine got older he and his mother went on international trips together while his father , too old at that point to join them, stayed at home.

Gibson studied political science at the University of Oregon, then moved to Seattle and got a job at Seafirst Bank.

According to Seattle Met “For the next 25 years, Gibson lived a life that could be described as unconventionally adventurous. After a short stint at Seafirst, he moved to Olympia and worked for three years in the office of Washington state senator Ray Moore. Then he joined the U.S. Department of State.”

The State Dept told me he worked there between September 1986 and September 1990, from age 29 to 33. The person I spoke to couldn’t confirm what he did except that it was in “political affairs.” According to a detailed profile in Seattle Met, he spent time with rebels in Afghanistan and was photographed there holding an assault rifle.

In many articles, like this New York Times profile, he portrays himself as a footloose wanderer who’s obsessed with visiting every part of the world. But for a while he focussed on the Soviet Union and its successor states. The Seattle Met article describes him as “in the late ’80s he could see that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and decided to capitalize on it. For 10 years he lived off and on in the newly capitalist Russia, serving as a consultant to new business owners and fattening a bank account that would later fund his globe-trotting.”

I don't know when Gibson first went to Russia, but in 1992 he established a company called Siberia-Pacific Co, domiciled in his Seattle condo, with two co-founders from the Kemerovo Oblast, a coal-mining region of central Russia.

I’ve tried without success to reach either of these men.

Blaine was apparently very immersed in Russian culture. When I spoke to him on the phone shortly after his discovery of “No Step,” he told me that he had been only the second American to ever visit the epicenter of the Tunguska meteorite impact: “I speak Russian fluently, I have access to Russian scientists, drinking vodka with them, they told me what they really thought.”

In 2002, Gibson took part in a conference held in the western Russian city of Obninsk called “Successes and Difficulties of Small Innovative Firms in Russian Nuclear Cities: Proceedings of a Russian-American Workshop.” Gibson gave a talk about navigating the ambiguities between privately and publicly held companies in cities that were home to nuclear power plants, which at that time foreigners were still restricted from visiting. This suggests a deep level of knowledge on Gibson’s part about the workings of Russian business at the ground level.

Glenn Schweitzer, who organized the conference, told me that it was hard to find Americans who had experience doing business in these kinds of cities and so was grateful that he had found Gibson. When he spoke to me it had been a few years since the event, and Schweitzer said he couldn’t recollect much about Gibson but that he recalled that he had traveled all over Russia, even to small, obscure places that few Americans ever went: “I found him to be an interesting guy, because he wasn’t like most of the Americans there.”

On June 10, 2004, Gibson took part in a conference held at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, entitled “International Travel to the U.S.: Dialogue on the Current State of Play.” He doesn’t appear to have given a talk, and no one at Commerce could remember him when I made inquiries years later.

Between 2005 and 2008 Gibson was involved in a now inactive Tajikistan travel company called Naison, where he was listed as “supervisor and consultant” of ecological tours in the Tajik National Park.

When investigating Gibson’s ties to Russia, I was particularly intrigued by his relationship with Vladimir A. Gololobov, who is quoted in several profiles of Gibson. An Associated Press article describes him as a “friend” who “met Gibson nearly two decades ago while the American was in Siberia on business trips.”

Indeed, Gololobov attended university in the same region of Siberia that Gibson’s business partners hailed from. He was born in 1977 and earned a master’s degree in English and German Languages from Russia’s Kemerovo State University in 1999, and a master's degree in International Trade Policy Studies/Commercial Diplomacy from the Monterey (Calif.) Institute of International Studies in 2001. In the first 20 years that Gololobov was in the US, he lived at three addresses—all of them are addresses that Gibson shared. One of them is in Carmel, in Monterey County, so it’s likely they were living together at the time. Note that Gololobov was 22 years old in 1999, and Gibson was 42.

In 2002 Gololobov moved to Washington, DC and started working as a lobbying at CSI, (Coalition of Service Industries) handling its Russian WTO accession project. That same year Gibson bought a condo in DC that became Gololobov’s residence. In 2013 Gibson sold the condo to Gololobov for about $100,000 less than its market value.

Looking at all the publicly available evidence, it seems clear that Blaine Gibson has extensive, longstanding business and personal ties to Russia. He seemed pretty open about it when I first talked to him. But after I started raising questions —questions motivated by evidence that Russia could have hijacked the plane and flown it to Kazakhstan, in which case the pieces of debris would have been sourced out of Russian and planted to mislead investigators—he started denying those ties.

When the journalist William Langewiesche visited him for a story that later ran in the Atlantic, Gibson told him that the only business he’d ever done in Russia was to dabble briefly in tourism in the Russian Far East.

This is clearly contradicted by publicly available information, but far from concede the weakness of his claims Blaine has gone on the counterattack. He has even claimed that he has received death threats as a result of my reporting.

“I very much doubt that Jeff Wise would go on Netflix and accuse me of being a Russian Spy,” he says during the third episode of MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. “He has absolutely no basis for that and he knows that it would be very very serious defamation.”

Later, following a segment in which the husband and father of a missing French family expresses his incredulity at Gibson’s incredible aptitude for finding pieces of the plane, Gibson says: “I’ve been accused of absolutely horrible things that are just so ridiculous, they’re laughable. I’ve been accused of being an American spy, a Russian spy, a Chinese spy, an international organ trafficker, an international sex trafficker. I mean, you name it. It is just patently ridiculous.”

In all of my research into Blaine Alan Gibson and his role in the search for MH370, I am not aware of anyone ever having accused him of being an American spy, a Chinese spy, or an international organ trafficker.

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

Last episode we talked about the surge of MH370 debris that started turning up in the western Indian Ocean in early 2016, and how search officials were optimistic that all this new data would help them understand where the plane went down. We focussed on drift modeling, and how the timing and location of the finds could have helped pin down the location of the crash through a process called reverse drift modeling. But to their surprise, Australian scientists couldn’t get their drift models to explain how the flaperon went all the way from the 7th arc to La Réunion Island in just 16 months. Then they obtained a real flaperon from their American counterparts, cut it down to match the damage found on the real MH370 flaperon, and put it in the ocean. They found that it floated high in the water, and the wind pushed it so effectively that when they plugged the new data into their models they found the flaperon now indeed was able to reach La Réunion on time.

Today, we’re talking about other clues that the authorities were able to derive from the collected debris, namely the marine fauna found living on them. And to help us understand, we’re bringing in Jim Carlton, the world’s leading expert in marine invertebrates.

Jim spent years researching how debris that was washed into the sea during the 2011 tsunami in Japan collected organisms as it drifted across the Pacific before coming ashore in the western United States and Canada. By examining the organisms growing on each piece Jim was able to figure out the path the piece had taken. He coined the term “bioforensics” to describe this kind of detective work.

As you’ll recall from last episode, one of the great puzzles that search officials had to grapple with in running their drift models was, how did the flaperon float? From the get-go, French investigators noticed that the piece seemed to have floated fully submerged because it was totally covered by barnacles.

Let’s do a quick review of the basics. Lepas barnacles attach themselves to floating objects below the waterline. They don’t grow on the part above the waterline, where they would dry out and die.

When the flaperon washed ashore on La Réunion, it was hard for investigators to figure out where the waterline was, because it was covered with Lepas all over, including on the trailing edge:

Yet when the French put the real flaperon in a test tank, and the Australians put a replica flaperon in the ocean, both floated with the trailing edge sticking high out of the water:

In the first part of my interview with Jim, I ask him how he can resolve this discrepency. It’s simple, he says. The piece didn’t float with the trailing edge sticking up out of the water. ATSB drift modeling be damned, barnacles don’t grow in the air, so the flaperon must have floated so low in the water that it was at least awash. If it was as buoyant as the float tests suggest, something must have been holding it down. Maybe it was attached to another piece of the airplane, or maybe it got tangled in a heavy fishing net, but somehow something must have been holding it down. “Lepas don’t lie,” he says.

Next I asked him about the organisms found growing on the other pieces of debris. After Australian authorities collected these pieces they gave them to marine biologists to identify the createres living on them. Hopefully, they would be able to use bioforensics to narrow down what part of the ocean the plane had crashed in. Yet it was not to be, because what the scientists found was quite odd. None of the pieces had any marine life that matched what you’d expect for an object that had been floating for a year and a half from the 7th arc on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Especially puzzling was what they found living on the piece that Blain Alan Gibson found, which was called No Step. Most of the things they found don’t live in the open ocean, they live close to shore. And the things that they found that do live in the open ocean were all really young, like less than two months old. The only things that were even moderately old, like 8 months old, were animals that only live close to shore.

One was called  Petaloconchus renisectus, a kind of sea snail.

The other was a tube worm of the serpulid family called Vermiliopsis.

So how did they get on this piece that was floating across the middle of the Indian Ocean?

There’s no mystery, Jim says: Eight months before coming ashore, the flaperon must have drifted close to a shoreline. But where? The map below shows the Indian Ocean where the flaperon is presumed to have drifted. The white lines show the paths of individual bits of simulated debris. The whiteness is densest in the southeastern part of the ocean, where the paths all begin. As you can see, a few of these paths pass near Cocos Islands, the green circle on the right, but most pass far to the south. Fewer still drift past Diego Garcia, the green circle on the left. Vilanculos, where No Step was found, is the yellow circle on the far left. It’s possible that this kind of scenario could have occurred. But it raises the question: how come no species that live in the open ocean were found? And if pieces floated close to the Cocos Islands, why did no debris come ashore there?

Another problem we touched on last time was the strange Mossel Bay piece, aka Roy, that washed ashore at the southern tip of South Africa several months after the flaperon was discovered.

Based on my own rough-and-ready visual analysis, it seems like the barnacles are smaller than the ones on the flaperon — but since they’ve been at sea longer, so should be older and bigger. This is another puzzle.

Likewise, the biggest barnacle on the piece found on Rodrigues was only 20 mm which means it was probably no older than 105 days.

Indeed, it looks like all the pieces that washed ashore started growing when the piece was already halfway across the ocean. How to explain this? One idea is that there used to be older ones but they all got eaten or scraped off somehow, but scientists who study Lepas have told me that that doesn’t really happen out in the open ocean.

The enigmatic, self-contradicting nature of the MH370 debris is so different from the clarity provided by the tsunami debris, where you can clearly see the progress of each object’s drift reflected in the sea creatures that got picked up at each stage of the journey.

It all seems pretty baffling — unless you put in the context of everything else we know about the mystery of MH370, which is that if you take everything at face value then paradoxes abound.

PS:

A viewer asked in the comments to the YouTube page for this episode “Can the gooseneck barnacles survive if the surface on which they are attached gets splashed frequently with ocean water, even if the substrate is not 100% submerged under the surface?”

The answer is that if a floating surface is frequently awash with ocean water it seems that some meager Lepas populations can survive. A few years ago a marine researcher shared with me some images of a capsized boat that was recovered after drifting for some time.

The bottom and sides were super heavily encrusted with marine organisms:

The top had far fewer — but not none, except maybe in the very middle:

It’s worth noting, I think, that the Lepas growing on the trailing edge of the flaperon aren’t stragglers struggling to survive in the harsh barnacle-unfriendly region near the waterline, but one of the denser and robust populations on the whole object. Which I interpret to mean that they they were consistently underwater.