Gathering New Evidence [S2Ep12]
Guest Andy Sybrandy assesses a project to clarify key mysteries
It’s been years since anyone’s reported finding a new piece of MH370 debris, and even longer since anyone has come up with any other evidence of what happened to the plane.
But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to collect new evidence. In today’s podcast, I describe a way to do just that—in effect, to open a new front in the struggle to understand what happened to the missing plane. What I find particularly exciting is that this is can be a community effort. There are lots of ways that listeners and viewers pitch in to make the effort as a success, as I’ll be describing in future episodes. If you have ideas, questions or suggestions, I’d love to hear them — please leave a comment here or at the YouTube page.
For today’s discussion I’m joined by Andy Sybrandy, the founder and president of Pacific Gyre Inc., a company that makes sensors and telemetry for ocean data collection. He helped develop the SVP drifters that are the mainstay of NOAA’s Global Drifter Program, which has dispatched thousands of buoys to constantly circulate throughout the world’s oceans so scientists can develop models of global currents.
Andy and I discuss a plan that I’ve been developing to shed light on some key mysteries surrounding crucial pieces of evidence in the case — namely, why the pieces of debris collected in the western Indian Ocean floated the way they did and why the marine life growing on them was so unexpected.
By outfitting a 777 flaperon with the kind of sensors that Andy makes, we could determine whether the debris evidence is truly paradoxical, or there is a perfectly good reason for why it looks the way it does.
In today’s episode we also revive a feature we haven’t done in a while, Community Radar. Today we’re discussing a comment from reader collinsm999 suggesting that an accident I mentioned in last week’s episode, TWA 800, was not due to an accidental electrical fault but to a shootdown by a missile.
@jeffwise : « By outfitting a 777 flaperon with the kind of sensors that Andy makes, we could determine whether the debris evidence is truly paradoxical, or there is a perfectly good reason for why it looks the way it does. »
It would be awesome to outfit a B777 flaperon with a GPS locator beacon and throw it into the water at the IG hotspot, and see what happens (what route, when does it beach, barnacles, etc.).
Hi Jeff, I really appreciate your open look into MH370. I’m just wondering if you would comment on how you decide what direction to follow. At each choice point you have probabilities and have to decide one way and leave the others behind. There are so many possibilities. At Igari there were 3 possibilities, either the plane went straight, the plane turned left or the plane went down. You devoted a whole segment to hacking. How do we really know what is real and what is a hack? For the big turn how do we know that all the flight data after that wasn’t hacked? If the hijackers were that sophisticated why not leave the satellite link down and dump false data into Inmarsat. That might explain the missing flight identifier. If that’s true the plane could literally be anywhere. You have a unique opportunity to look where no one else has looked, why continue looking in the same place. I think your Russian direction is such a compelling case. I’ll look forward to your continuing investigation. Trip