So much of the MH370 disappearance was treated like a physics problem and did not consider how it actually played out in the plane. I think your discussions with the captains has made it much more real. I hope you develop a complete Zaharie timeline and then do the same for the hijackers. Also I am curious if there are any 777s in Russia, Aeroflot or otherwise. It appears if hijackers were involved someone would need an actual plane to reverse engineer.
Thanks, Trip! I like the idea of making a complete timeline--I'm going to touch on the sequence of events for a third-party hijack in an upcoming episode but could probably go into more detail in a separate episode. As for Russia having 777s, definitely. The country has quite a considerable aircraft industry with all the requisite engineers needed to understand these systems in detail.
Just catching up on the podcast/channel and have reached this point.
One thing that I feel needs examining is a less binary approach to the 'who' question.
Perhaps this has been raised elsewhere but all the solutions seems to be either 'murder suicide by Zaharie' OR 'hijacked by someone else'.
What appears to me to make most sense is that A pilot AND someone else worked together. This is my thought process...
1. The disconnection of SDU and the 'going dark' happened so soon after the final transmission to Malaysia ATC that it's unlikely to be anyone except one of the pilots who actioned it.
2. The subsequent activity in the plane, the management of passengers and the command of the hijack would need others to look after without the distraction of the handling of the aircraft. Perhaps the Russian in Business Class and/or the Ukrainian gentlemen in coach.
3. The pilot involved (which could be either) wouldn't need to know about the details of the left AC bus or the EE bay, they are simply there to play their part and provide pilot skills.
4. To me this surfaces a more likely motive for pilot involvement than murder-suicide. They did it for money. Perhaps Zaharie was looking to retire and was offered a life-changing amount of money and a change of identity to participate in the hijack. This may have been genuine or simply to get cooperation. If the lives if all the passengers were forfeit, what more the pilot who could potentially be a loose end later? If the hijackers are as ruthless as we have seen their assumed backer to be, this is not shock.
5. The possibility of laying a false trail by reactivating the SDU but not ACARS would be done by the partner hijackers, presumably from among the passengers.
6. This part is, perhaps, wilder speculation but I think the intention was to go north. If they did they succeeded. If they did not then something went wrong, perhaps a passenger or passengers or the other crew member intervened somehow and caused the plane to fly south and ditch.
7. I believe based on all this that the initial going dark was intentional, as was the reactivation of just the SDU later. I think the observation by radar over Butterworth was a calculated risk as was the cell tower ping to a mobile phone.
Up for discussion and questions, and thank you to you Jeff for the effort and approach you take on this mystery.
My theory is that it wasn't specifically MH370 that was wanted, it was any 777 of a specific configuration (so the spoofing would be possible) owned by Malaysian Airlines.
Why? Because the shooting down of MH17 was planned as an act to blame on Ukraine and they needed the parts to plant to bolster the theory. It just got botched on the MH17 side by the militia involved.
The southern Indian Ocean was chosen as the spot for the supposed endpoint of MH370 simply because it's so remote and the sea conditions and seabed so hard to search that even if a search failed there would still be uncertainty that they just missed it. Over time they would assume that it would just be forgotten in the wake of other news, which is true to some extent.
Interesting ideas, thanks, Rob. One thing I would point out is that if the plane did go south, there's no reason to suspect spoofing or Russian involvement at all.
its hard for me as a non-native speaker to follow precisely an podcast in english language, but i try. so i hope i got it right: in the last minutes of this episode the pilot talkes about the rareness of accessble documentations and direct contact to boeing engineers. but boeing has partners in mslaysia, spirit aerosystems, who build huge parts of boeing planes like whole fuselages. so the requiered know how is in malaysia. i can imagine that shah could have had personal contact to some if the spirit engineers. yes, thats a speculation, but… thank you again for your work here!
Spirit Aerosystems is headquartered in Kansas, USA. And they make structural components, like fuselages, so I don't think would have specialty knowledge of the electrical system. But even if one were a pilot based in Boeing's home city, it's very unlikely that Zaharie would have been able to gather the necessarily detailed knowledge that would allow him to isolate a large part of the electrical system with confidence. What's more, there is no benefit that makes sense, anyway, let alone one that requires tremendous difficulty and risk. It just doesn't make any sense.
So much of the MH370 disappearance was treated like a physics problem and did not consider how it actually played out in the plane. I think your discussions with the captains has made it much more real. I hope you develop a complete Zaharie timeline and then do the same for the hijackers. Also I am curious if there are any 777s in Russia, Aeroflot or otherwise. It appears if hijackers were involved someone would need an actual plane to reverse engineer.
Thanks, Trip! I like the idea of making a complete timeline--I'm going to touch on the sequence of events for a third-party hijack in an upcoming episode but could probably go into more detail in a separate episode. As for Russia having 777s, definitely. The country has quite a considerable aircraft industry with all the requisite engineers needed to understand these systems in detail.
Just catching up on the podcast/channel and have reached this point.
One thing that I feel needs examining is a less binary approach to the 'who' question.
Perhaps this has been raised elsewhere but all the solutions seems to be either 'murder suicide by Zaharie' OR 'hijacked by someone else'.
What appears to me to make most sense is that A pilot AND someone else worked together. This is my thought process...
1. The disconnection of SDU and the 'going dark' happened so soon after the final transmission to Malaysia ATC that it's unlikely to be anyone except one of the pilots who actioned it.
2. The subsequent activity in the plane, the management of passengers and the command of the hijack would need others to look after without the distraction of the handling of the aircraft. Perhaps the Russian in Business Class and/or the Ukrainian gentlemen in coach.
3. The pilot involved (which could be either) wouldn't need to know about the details of the left AC bus or the EE bay, they are simply there to play their part and provide pilot skills.
4. To me this surfaces a more likely motive for pilot involvement than murder-suicide. They did it for money. Perhaps Zaharie was looking to retire and was offered a life-changing amount of money and a change of identity to participate in the hijack. This may have been genuine or simply to get cooperation. If the lives if all the passengers were forfeit, what more the pilot who could potentially be a loose end later? If the hijackers are as ruthless as we have seen their assumed backer to be, this is not shock.
5. The possibility of laying a false trail by reactivating the SDU but not ACARS would be done by the partner hijackers, presumably from among the passengers.
6. This part is, perhaps, wilder speculation but I think the intention was to go north. If they did they succeeded. If they did not then something went wrong, perhaps a passenger or passengers or the other crew member intervened somehow and caused the plane to fly south and ditch.
7. I believe based on all this that the initial going dark was intentional, as was the reactivation of just the SDU later. I think the observation by radar over Butterworth was a calculated risk as was the cell tower ping to a mobile phone.
Up for discussion and questions, and thank you to you Jeff for the effort and approach you take on this mystery.
I forgot something!
Why choose MH370?
My theory is that it wasn't specifically MH370 that was wanted, it was any 777 of a specific configuration (so the spoofing would be possible) owned by Malaysian Airlines.
Why? Because the shooting down of MH17 was planned as an act to blame on Ukraine and they needed the parts to plant to bolster the theory. It just got botched on the MH17 side by the militia involved.
The southern Indian Ocean was chosen as the spot for the supposed endpoint of MH370 simply because it's so remote and the sea conditions and seabed so hard to search that even if a search failed there would still be uncertainty that they just missed it. Over time they would assume that it would just be forgotten in the wake of other news, which is true to some extent.
Interesting ideas, thanks, Rob. One thing I would point out is that if the plane did go south, there's no reason to suspect spoofing or Russian involvement at all.
Agreed, just trying not to show my bias for the northern route scenario :)
its hard for me as a non-native speaker to follow precisely an podcast in english language, but i try. so i hope i got it right: in the last minutes of this episode the pilot talkes about the rareness of accessble documentations and direct contact to boeing engineers. but boeing has partners in mslaysia, spirit aerosystems, who build huge parts of boeing planes like whole fuselages. so the requiered know how is in malaysia. i can imagine that shah could have had personal contact to some if the spirit engineers. yes, thats a speculation, but… thank you again for your work here!
Spirit Aerosystems is headquartered in Kansas, USA. And they make structural components, like fuselages, so I don't think would have specialty knowledge of the electrical system. But even if one were a pilot based in Boeing's home city, it's very unlikely that Zaharie would have been able to gather the necessarily detailed knowledge that would allow him to isolate a large part of the electrical system with confidence. What's more, there is no benefit that makes sense, anyway, let alone one that requires tremendous difficulty and risk. It just doesn't make any sense.