S2Ep1 The Greatest Lie of MH370

Officials promised they'd never give up. So why did they?

To watch Deep Dive MH370 on YouTube, click the image above.

A month and a half after MH370 disappeared, the Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, made what I consider to be the most egregiously false statements in a case that had already become famous for official obfuscation and misdirection. Standing in front of a press conference, he said: “We will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery. We owe it to the families of the 239 people on board, we owe it to the hundreds of millions - indeed billions - of people who travel by air to try to get to the bottom of this.”

Abbott was right — solving the mystery of MH370 would be crucial to ensuring the safety of the worldwide air transport system. He was right that the Australian government should be committed to doing whatever it would take to make sure that the answer would be found.

Unfortunately, he didn’t live up to that promise. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and scanning thousands of square miles of ocean three miles deep, search officials threw up their hands and gave up. In the final report issued the following year, they said that there was one more area that they would have searched if they hadn’t run out of time and money and that the plane was most likely there. If it wasn’t, they didn’t have any good ideas of where to look.

Soon after, a private company called Ocean Infinity announced that they would pick up the search on their own dime. They searched the area the Australians had pinpointed (and far beyond). There was no sign of the plane.

When Abbott made his promise in the early months after the search, neither he nor the rest of the officials running the search could have guessed that their efforts would be so fruitless. But here’s the question they never asked: Did the fact that their search failed mean that maybe their theory of the case was wrong?

By all accounts, the Australians sense of certainty has never wavered. As Abbott explained in an interview a few years later, the Malaysians had told him very early on that they were almost positive that the culprit had to have been the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah. The reason? Only a minute had elapsed between Zaharie saying, “Good night, Malaysia 370” and the plane going electronically dark. That wouldn’t be enough time for hijackers to storm the cockpit. It had to be Zaharie.

The other day I had an interesting conversation with a prominent Australian journalist. He told me that two weeks before he’d had a drink with Tony Abbott, who his no longer in office. The journalist, a fellow MH370 obsessive, had asked Abbott what exactly it was that the Malaysians had told him about Zaharie. Abbott said that they hadn’t given him have any smoking-gun evidence; they simple felt that since the only place you can control an airplane is from the cockpit, Zaharie was the only conceivable culprit. Case closed.

I shook my head. This keeps happening with MH370: Time and time again, people leap to conclusions based on an erroneous understanding of the facts. Yes, as a general principle, airplanes can only be controlled from the cockpit. But the 777 is an exception. This particular aircraft can be controlled from another place—namely, the electronics bay, which is accessible through an unlocked hatch in the passenger cabin. As we learned last season in Episode 25, if a hacker gets into the electronics bay, they will have root-level access to the whole system. They will be able to control everything.

So if Abbott was 100% certain that MH370 could only have been abducted by someone in the cockpit, he simply didn’t know enough about the 777.

This story demonstrates why a new approach to MH370 is so urgently needed. The only way to solve his mystery is by carefully sorting through every piece of evidence, understanding it as completely as we can, and figuring out how all the pieces fit together. Last season, we spent 31 episodes peering through the microscope at everything from Doppler precompensation to Lepas anatifera cyprids. Now, in the second season, we’re going to continue poring into the tiny details on which so much hinges, but also will be pulling back the lens to explore how society forms consensus opinions and how the truth-finding process can go astray.

In each episode going forward, we’re going to try to do a little bit of both. In Season 2, we’re going to be taking a somewhat different approach from Season 1. Last time, the show was structured as a conversation between me and my excellent co-host, Andy Tarnoff. Only occasionally did we bring in outside voices. Now that Andy and I have laid so much of the fundamental groundwork, it seems a more productive approach will be to foreground those outside voices, in order to access as wide a range of domain expertise as possible.

In keeping with that principle, in today’s episode I interview a friend of the show who knows a great deal about 777s and recently gained access to a Category D simulator, which offers the highest level of fidelity available. Used to train professional airline pilots, Cat D simulators should respond to every button push and lever pull exactly as a real plane would. My friend wished to remain anonymous, fearing that someone could get in trouble if he revealed how he’d gotten access, so I only used his voice and altered it using an AI.

The goal of the exercise was to investigate what happens if you turn off large chunks of the 777 electrical system, or even all of it, as some have hypothesized Zaharie must have done. What he found was quite interesting!