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.