Avid listerner since the beginning and now a subsriber to the YouTube Channel... On a recent episode you disccsed Mentor Pilot's YT episode on MH370. I agree that the WSPR concept is far from being a proven reliable thing. But he did say something interesting about the last call from the pilot of MH370. He said the call was repeated a few minutes after the first call with exactly the same words but the second time in a distressed tone of voice. That seems like a big deal to me that I hadn't heard before. Did Mentor Pilot get that part correct? Thanks for the show and the effort.
I don't think he's wrong, but I think that it's a subjective call that really doesn't tell us anything determinative about the mystery, and it seems way out of proportion to spend time pondering it while spending no time at all on actual dispositive evidence like, say, the debris
Thanks for the quick response and I get he's way out of his element.
But as a pilot how many times do you make the same call twice? Probably not very often - could happen but rare. I don't know about the stress level part but they sounded different on the MP episode. Seems like it's a plausible argument that If the pilot were in the middle of being hijacked he could be trying to use the second call to alert someone. Seems to me that it HELPS solidify the scenario of a hijack. Certainly doesn't prove it either.
Has there been any legitimate voice stress analysis of the second call?
I think it's easy to overinterpret people's behavior. I'm sure we've all had the experience of, say, talking on with a friend, and you start to bring up a topic and they're like, "hey listen, I gotta go," and you think, "I must have offended them," and you start to process what you said and how you said it, and you remember some detail of their personal history that could explain why they might get offended, and you beat yourself up about it; then the next day they call you back and it turns out their cat had just knocked over a vase. There's just so many reasons why people might act in a certain way, it's really not productive to speculate on causes, let alone imagine that it has probative value. In this case, maybe he was making some point to the first officer (who remember was just coming off training) about how to conduct ATC calls. We'll probably never know. Point being, it has no value as evidence becaues it's far too ambiguous.
Wow! Bunch of people wound up getting murdered while looking into this... Kinda makes you wonder. What I don't understand is why Putin would care whether he was adopted or not. Steve Jobs was adopted and no one gave him grief for it. And given what a big fan of Stalin Putin is, you'd think he would be proud to be Georgian...
Why should Russia steel a B777 in such a complicated way? If eg. for any reason the FSB would have needed a B777 they could have gone to state-owned Aeroflot and tell them to give them one. the FSB has the power for it. According to Wikipedia, Aeroflot had two B777-200ER in service and still active 22 B777-300ER - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_777_operators - it's easy for Aeroflot to ground one maschine, put it into repair-hangar with mechanics who in fact are FSB-agents. much easier than the MH370-manouver, isn't it?
Well, presumably the goal was not to obtain a 777, but rather to create baffling mystery that would distract attention from Crimea and, as a secondary goal, demonstrate Russia's ability to carry out deadly attacks against soft targets with impunity. Of course this is just speculation; we have no direct evidence why Russia would do this, just indirect evidence that they did do it.
"no direct evidence why Russia would do this" - yes, there are many possible reasons. do you agree, that the aeroflot-b777s highly likely rule out the 1-out-of-1000-reason "optaining an b777" ? so that we eliminated one of many possible reasons?
I thought your attempt to contact the daughter of one of the three suspects was a path worth following. The problem is you’ll hit roadblocks in Russia as soon as you look in the right direction.
I sound like a broken record - 1MDB. Many lost millions in the Malaysian Sovereign Fund embezzlement, including Russian oligarchs. I believe MH370 was an attempted kidnapping with Malaysians exchanged for money while the rest of the passengers would be released. I think all the passengers died in flight due to oxygen miscalculations and so the flight needed to be covered up. MH17 was a second warning. Has anyone looked into Russians who lost money on 1MDB?
There may indeed be a link between 1MDB and MH370, but it's only useful as a hypothesis if it suggests a path forward by which one could clarify matters. This is the problem with focusing on motives, generally; they may offer some satisfying explanatory power but they rarely suggest what one can do to confirm or falsify the idea. Suppose you do find Russians who lost money on 1MDB; how to go from there to filling in the details of the incident?
While I'm with you on all of what you wrote about Putin and "maskirovka", the next question that needs to be answered is why was Malaysia airlines and MH370 selected as the target? Why not another airline any of the western ones, with more European or US citizens aboard? Why one headed for China with most passengers being Chinese citizens? What when the plan would have been compromised or the aircraft would have been found and the Chinese found out about the culprit, would they now be friends with each other or would the strategic political scene be quite different to the present one?
More so shooting down MH 17 shortly afterwords would have been a great risk to the "maskirovka' MH370 disappearance, basically telling the world "we did it again". Why not shooting down another airliner, on the same spot in the same hour?
If both events have been interconnected, they had to have a common planning and a common planning timeline, which I can't see at the moment. MH370 as we see it needed meticulous planning in advance, I go that far it was detailed down to the airline, the routing, the special flight and might be even to the crew, if we give the simulator stuff a grain of credibility. MH17 could not have been planned in detail, it was more like Putin calling his fried in the Donbass telling him " pick up a Sam, drive it across the border and shoot down an airliner. Make it look like it's the Ukrains, and get the system back out of there pronto."
To connect both events together is obvious, to construct a single common motive seems obvious too, but I' m not convinced about that. Playing devils advocate here, lets assume the Chinese were behind MH370 and some event in the search triggered them to believe that they'd need some outside help to cover up. So a call reaches Moskau to shoot down an Malaysian Flight airliner asap, they would get the favour back later. Would be a win-win situation for both, Russia gets an new ally, and can blame the Ukraines and the search and accident investigation are delayed and diverted.
One is fact, the Chinese played MH370 and MH17 way below the expected, unparalleled unemotional and today they are very good freinds.
These are great questions. Just speaking to the part about why MH370 was targeted, I think the important thing to understand is that the use of BFO and BTO to decipher where the plane went, in the absence of any other clues, could only be used with a small minority of flights. I've detailed this elsewhere in the podcast, but it would have to be a particular kind of plane with a particular kind of Inmarsat subscription flying in a particular part of the world, flying at a certain time of day--in short, the list of possible targets was not very large.
Avid listerner since the beginning and now a subsriber to the YouTube Channel... On a recent episode you disccsed Mentor Pilot's YT episode on MH370. I agree that the WSPR concept is far from being a proven reliable thing. But he did say something interesting about the last call from the pilot of MH370. He said the call was repeated a few minutes after the first call with exactly the same words but the second time in a distressed tone of voice. That seems like a big deal to me that I hadn't heard before. Did Mentor Pilot get that part correct? Thanks for the show and the effort.
I don't think he's wrong, but I think that it's a subjective call that really doesn't tell us anything determinative about the mystery, and it seems way out of proportion to spend time pondering it while spending no time at all on actual dispositive evidence like, say, the debris
Thanks for the quick response and I get he's way out of his element.
But as a pilot how many times do you make the same call twice? Probably not very often - could happen but rare. I don't know about the stress level part but they sounded different on the MP episode. Seems like it's a plausible argument that If the pilot were in the middle of being hijacked he could be trying to use the second call to alert someone. Seems to me that it HELPS solidify the scenario of a hijack. Certainly doesn't prove it either.
Has there been any legitimate voice stress analysis of the second call?
Thanks again for the quick response.
I think it's easy to overinterpret people's behavior. I'm sure we've all had the experience of, say, talking on with a friend, and you start to bring up a topic and they're like, "hey listen, I gotta go," and you think, "I must have offended them," and you start to process what you said and how you said it, and you remember some detail of their personal history that could explain why they might get offended, and you beat yourself up about it; then the next day they call you back and it turns out their cat had just knocked over a vase. There's just so many reasons why people might act in a certain way, it's really not productive to speculate on causes, let alone imagine that it has probative value. In this case, maybe he was making some point to the first officer (who remember was just coming off training) about how to conduct ATC calls. We'll probably never know. Point being, it has no value as evidence becaues it's far too ambiguous.
Yes, and we'll be talking more about this soon.
the Russophobia is dorky af
I’m dorky and proud
There's pretty strong evidence that Putin was born in Georgia, not Leningrad as he claims.
Hadn't heard that...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Putina#:~:text=Vera%20Nikolaevna%20Putina%20(Russian%3A%20%D0%92%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0,Vova%22)%20is%20her%20son.
Wow! Bunch of people wound up getting murdered while looking into this... Kinda makes you wonder. What I don't understand is why Putin would care whether he was adopted or not. Steve Jobs was adopted and no one gave him grief for it. And given what a big fan of Stalin Putin is, you'd think he would be proud to be Georgian...
Why should Russia steel a B777 in such a complicated way? If eg. for any reason the FSB would have needed a B777 they could have gone to state-owned Aeroflot and tell them to give them one. the FSB has the power for it. According to Wikipedia, Aeroflot had two B777-200ER in service and still active 22 B777-300ER - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_777_operators - it's easy for Aeroflot to ground one maschine, put it into repair-hangar with mechanics who in fact are FSB-agents. much easier than the MH370-manouver, isn't it?
Well, presumably the goal was not to obtain a 777, but rather to create baffling mystery that would distract attention from Crimea and, as a secondary goal, demonstrate Russia's ability to carry out deadly attacks against soft targets with impunity. Of course this is just speculation; we have no direct evidence why Russia would do this, just indirect evidence that they did do it.
"no direct evidence why Russia would do this" - yes, there are many possible reasons. do you agree, that the aeroflot-b777s highly likely rule out the 1-out-of-1000-reason "optaining an b777" ? so that we eliminated one of many possible reasons?
I don't think anyone's ever suggested that MH370 was hijacked because somebody wanted to obtain a 777! /JW
okaaay. i thought i had read this POSSIBILITY between the lines. and a friend of mine had this idea, probably inspired by the unsolved vanishing of boeing b727 N844AA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Angola_Boeing_727_disappearance
I thought your attempt to contact the daughter of one of the three suspects was a path worth following. The problem is you’ll hit roadblocks in Russia as soon as you look in the right direction.
I thought your attempt
I sound like a broken record - 1MDB. Many lost millions in the Malaysian Sovereign Fund embezzlement, including Russian oligarchs. I believe MH370 was an attempted kidnapping with Malaysians exchanged for money while the rest of the passengers would be released. I think all the passengers died in flight due to oxygen miscalculations and so the flight needed to be covered up. MH17 was a second warning. Has anyone looked into Russians who lost money on 1MDB?
There may indeed be a link between 1MDB and MH370, but it's only useful as a hypothesis if it suggests a path forward by which one could clarify matters. This is the problem with focusing on motives, generally; they may offer some satisfying explanatory power but they rarely suggest what one can do to confirm or falsify the idea. Suppose you do find Russians who lost money on 1MDB; how to go from there to filling in the details of the incident?
While I'm with you on all of what you wrote about Putin and "maskirovka", the next question that needs to be answered is why was Malaysia airlines and MH370 selected as the target? Why not another airline any of the western ones, with more European or US citizens aboard? Why one headed for China with most passengers being Chinese citizens? What when the plan would have been compromised or the aircraft would have been found and the Chinese found out about the culprit, would they now be friends with each other or would the strategic political scene be quite different to the present one?
More so shooting down MH 17 shortly afterwords would have been a great risk to the "maskirovka' MH370 disappearance, basically telling the world "we did it again". Why not shooting down another airliner, on the same spot in the same hour?
If both events have been interconnected, they had to have a common planning and a common planning timeline, which I can't see at the moment. MH370 as we see it needed meticulous planning in advance, I go that far it was detailed down to the airline, the routing, the special flight and might be even to the crew, if we give the simulator stuff a grain of credibility. MH17 could not have been planned in detail, it was more like Putin calling his fried in the Donbass telling him " pick up a Sam, drive it across the border and shoot down an airliner. Make it look like it's the Ukrains, and get the system back out of there pronto."
To connect both events together is obvious, to construct a single common motive seems obvious too, but I' m not convinced about that. Playing devils advocate here, lets assume the Chinese were behind MH370 and some event in the search triggered them to believe that they'd need some outside help to cover up. So a call reaches Moskau to shoot down an Malaysian Flight airliner asap, they would get the favour back later. Would be a win-win situation for both, Russia gets an new ally, and can blame the Ukraines and the search and accident investigation are delayed and diverted.
One is fact, the Chinese played MH370 and MH17 way below the expected, unparalleled unemotional and today they are very good freinds.
These are great questions. Just speaking to the part about why MH370 was targeted, I think the important thing to understand is that the use of BFO and BTO to decipher where the plane went, in the absence of any other clues, could only be used with a small minority of flights. I've detailed this elsewhere in the podcast, but it would have to be a particular kind of plane with a particular kind of Inmarsat subscription flying in a particular part of the world, flying at a certain time of day--in short, the list of possible targets was not very large.
That is a very interesting theory- the possibility of Chinese involvement. There was much speculation regarding how they reacted/responded to crisis.