S2Ep2 The Russian in Business Class

A real-life McGyver was sitting 12 feet from the hatch to the electronics bay

To watch Deep Dive MH370 on YouTube, click the image above. To listen to an audio version of the podcast, click here.

Last week we talked about how Australian officials quickly became convinced that the plane must have been hijacked by its own pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah. The main reason for their sense of certainty was that at the time of its initial disappearance he and the copilot were locked in the cockpit, and the cockpit is the only place to control a plane from.

Or so they thought. Closer examination reveals that unlike most planes, a 777 can in principal be flown by sophisticated hackers who access the electronic bay through an unlocked hatch in the front section of the passenger cabin. Once inside, physical proximity to the 777’s ARINC 629 data bus would allow them root-level access to any electronic device on the system, including the flight controls and communications sytems.

If this hack was carried out, it would explain many of the puzzling aspects of the case, including the absence of the plane’s wreckage from the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean. Instead of south, the plane would have gone north, and wound up in Kazakhstan. As we described last season in Episode 13, this would imply that the perpetrator was Russia. Indeed, given the complexity and sophistication of the operation, it would have to be a state-level hack involving Russian intelligence services.

All of which raises the question: were there any Russians on board MH370?

It turns out that there was exactly one Russian national on board the plane, and his name was Nikolai Bentsionovich Brodsky (НИКОЛАЙ БЕНЦИОНОВИЧ БРОДСКИЙ). And today’s episode describes what I was able to find out about him.

When I started searching the internet for information, I found a fair bit about him. There were local news stories about him on Russian TV and new outlets.

Nikolai Brodsky was a 43-year-old businessman from Irkutsk sittin in business class seat 3K, approximately 12 feet from the E/E bay hatch.

By July of 2014 I’d realized that something might be afoot, so I reached out through my journalism contacts and was able to hire a very capable researcher in Irkutska named Masha.

She was able to interview one of Nikolai Brodsky’s friends and three of his relatives. From their accounts she was able to assemble a rough outline of his life.

Born in 1971 in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Brodsky moved with his family to the eastern province of Yakutia when he was eight. He then returned to Irkutsk when he was 16. He attended a local polytechnic but was a poor student. When he was 18, his girlfriend Nadia became pregnant, so they married and moved to Yakutia along with Brodsky’s parents. The marriage was unhappy, and Nadia returned to Irkutsk alone. Brodsky followed, but the marriage ended soon after.

Brodsky subsequently moved to a small town further north where he worked for a timber-products company. For a time he attempted to continue his education via correspondence course, but the school eventually expelled him for poor performance. Then he hooked up with a future oligarch, Vitaly Mashchitsky, and his fortunes improved dramatically. While still in his 20s, Brodsky founded a wood-products company whose operations ultimately extended to three cities in Siberia and the Far East.

Brodsky’s passion was technical scuba diving. He was proficient in the use of trimix gas breathing equipment, which allows dives to depths of 1,000 feet and is primarily used for commercial and military diving. Brodsky was active in a local scuba club and regularly made dives under the ice in nearby Lake Baikal. (A yearly club tradition is to brave subzero temperatures to hold an underwater party below the ice, complete with Christmas tree and a Santa who hands out gifts.)

He was an instructor in the club, and at the time of his disappearance was on his way back from an 11-day club trip to Bali.

Brodsky’s eldest son, 25-year-old Lyev, described his father as “a very strong and prepared person, both morally and physically… I’ve never known him to be afraid of anything.” He said that Nikolai had never been in the military, having received an exemption from the draft due to flat feet. Lyev had no firsthand knowledge of his father’s whereabouts between the age of 19 and 29, however, as Nikolai had left his mother soon after Lyev’s birth and only reconnected with him later.

One of Brodsky’s fellow dive club members also described Brodsky as fearless and exceptionally competent. When Brodsky first joined the club, the friend said, most of the members were ex-military who had learned to dive in the service. The first day Brodsky showed up, he went in the water with two instructors and another first-time diver. Conditions were tricky, and the other beginner nearly panicked. Brodsky kept his cool. “Nick felt very comfortable and did not look like a novice diver,” the friend said. Later, he got to know Brodsky as a man who “has a very good mentality, resistance to stress. In any situation it is collected, a sober assessment of what is happening can never be in vain to take risks.” Brodsky was adept at rigging up whatever gear or amenity might be needed, out of whatever materials might be at hand. “We often joked about him that he is a hamster—in his car always find all the necessary and useful.”

Brodsky most definitely enjoyed the challenge of diving under the ice, in poor visibility, at great depths, with special gases. But he did not enjoy diving in warm seas and tended to skip club trips to the tropics. “He took part almost in all dive-club activities except for long trips,” his friend said. “His decision to go to Bali with club was pretty unexpected. He didn’t love the warm water and this kind of activity.”

Brodsky was on MH370 because he had decided to cut his vacation short by three days. According to early press accounts, this was because he had promised his wife that he would have dinner with her on International Women’s Day, a kind of Soviet-era counterpart to Valentine’s Day. His family, however, said that wasn’t the reason, but rather that he had to make a business trip to Mongolia.

That’s all the information I was able to get about Nikolai Brodski. There was more I wanted to know, like whether Brodsky had played a role in planning the trip, but it didn’t seem like Masha was having any luck finding more answers.

Frankly I wasn’t sure what to think. It didn’t make sense that someone would cut a trip short after traveling all that distance. But on the other hand, did it make sense that this whole trip would have been organized just to give him an excuse to be on a plane from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing?

I wondered about the ten years that he’d been missing from his son’s and ex-wife’s life, and wondered if he might have been getting training.

I also was intrigued by his personality type, which seemed a lot like the kind of peronality a secret agent would have.

But ultimately, I wasn’t able to pin down anything definitive. He wasn’t a child or a frail old man who couldn’t have been a hijacker. But I found no evidence that he was a hijacker, either.

Like a lot of the evidence in MH370, it’s a puzzle piece that can fit different ways depending on what story you’re trying to tell.

One last thing: I’m excited that we’ve started a new segment this week called Community Radar, which involves social media director Emily Morgul-Phoenix keeping tabs on the comments section and monitoring the world wide web to see what what people are talking about in MH370 World so that we can respond. Hat tip this week to reader/viewer/listener Grace (@2gc4_ on Twitter) who asked about an alleged Cambodia sighting.