Mindhunter MH370 [S2Ep37 video]

Using psychological profiling to understand the minds behind the crime

Detectives use physical clues like footprints and fingerprints to connect suspects to a crime. But there’s also another kind of evidence that criminals leave behind — psychological traces that an astute detective can pick up on and use to create a portrait of what the perp is like.

Yes, I’m talkin about a psychological profile made famous in The Silence of the Lambs and in the TV show Mindhunter, about the formation of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in the 1970s and the dawn of psychological profiling.

Today I want to try to apply that same idea to the disappearance of MH370.

Now, a lot of people feel that because they already know who the perpetrator is, this kind of exercise is unnecessary. Every aspect of the case can be explained by assuming that, well, if he did it, he must have had some reason for doing it, if it doesn’t really seem to make any sense, well then, I guess crazy people do crazy things, there’s no more to it than that.

However, there’s a big problem with assuming that the pilot did it; namely, that it’s the default scenario that we’ve been working under for the last 11 years, and it has quite notably failed to find the plane. We can’t assume that this theory is correct because thus far the theory’s predictions have failed to pan out.

Unless we’re going to shrug and passively accept failure, then we need to interrogate our assumptions.

So let’s start from a blank slate, throw away our preconceptions, and look at what we can tell about the psychology of the perpetrator solely from the nature of the actions that were taken.

Today we’re going to look at six key undisputed facts about the case and talk about what we can infer from them.

Fact #1: Going Dark

Let’s start at the beginning of the diversion.

17:19:30: Approaching the edge of Malaysia-controlled airspace, Zaharie Ahmed Shah says “Goodnight, Malaysia 370.”

17:20:31: The plane passes IGARI. Note that MH370 didn’t actually fly over the waypoint, it flew past it, as you can see in this image from Victor Iannello’s blog.

1720:33: MH370 is detected for the last time by Vietnamese secondary radar.

17:20:35: The last ADS-B transmission from MH370 is recorded.

1720:36: Malaysian air traffic control makes the last detection of the Mode S transponder.

So within two to five seconds of passing abeam IGARI, the plane’s ADS-B and Mode S transponder are turned off, causing the plane to disappear from air traffic controllers’ screens.

So what does this tell us about the perp?

Well, what’s worth noting here is that IGARI marks an important point in the airspace. It’s the last waypoint in the Malaysian-controlled sector, so beyond this point Kaula Lumpur is not going to be paying attention anymore. And the next controller, Ho Chi Minh, has not yet picked them up, so they’re not on Ho Chi Minh’s radar screen either.

The perp has entered an in-between phase where they weren’t expecting anyone to be paying attention to them. The 180 degree turn that they’re about to pull would be a very dramatic thing for an airliner flying to Beijing to do, but since no one’s paying attention, it will go unnoticed.

What is the implication of this? Well, we can say that a key attribute of the perp is that they are

• Evasive

What we’re seeing is a perp who wants to do something without being seen in the present tense.

An important part of evasion is that it requires an expectation of others, of the ones who you think are going to be watching you. In this case, air traffic controllers. When will they be looking, and when will they be looking away? Evasion requires expection of others, and an expectation of what those others are expecting of you.

And that requires two other things: that the perp be

• Perceptive

• Knowledgeable

Perceptive because, before they exploited this gap in ATC surveillance, they were clever enough to perceive that it existed. They had to had to have a model of the system that was watching them.

And they were knowledgeable enough about air traffic control procedure to know that this opportunity would exist. This is someone who knows about how the system works.

So as you can see there’s a lot we can tell about the psychology of the perpetrator just from that single first action. But let’s look at what happens next to see what else we can figure out.

Fact #2: The Turnback

Soon after the plane goes dark, it makes a hard left turn and flies back towards peninsular Malaysia. Whoever’s doing this is not someone who is torn with indecision, but rather has been waiting for the moment to come, and acted decisively when it did come.

• Decisive.

What else?

• Ruthless.

The perp has just stolen an airliner with 238 other people on board. This is kidnapping at best and mass murder at worst, so it’s safe to say that this not a person or group of people who are filled with qualms about hurting their fellow human beings.

Fact #3: Acceleration

Based on primary radar, after pulling that U-turn, the plane accelerates as it overflies the Malayan Peninsula, so that it was flying significantly faster than 777s normally do. That meant that it was burning more fuel and limiting its long-term options. Why?

To me, it means that the hijacker was:

• Motivated.

They had a goal that they cared deeply about, and that they had to go somewhere to accomplish it. That gave them a sense of urgency.

What is that goal? What do they want to achieve that is time sensitive?

To be clear the goal is not “to commit suicide.” That’s something that can be done quite easily without all these shenanigans. There is some other goal.

Fact #4: Butterworth

As it overflew the Malayan Peninsula, the plane passed over Butterworth Air Force Base, which is home not only to the Royal Malaysian Air Force but also the Royal Australian Air Force. In fact, it’s the only permanent Australian Air Force base outside of Australia. So quite a significant spot in military terms.

This is home to Malaysia’s No 18 Squadron which is equipped with F/A-18 Hornet aircraft, a very capable fighter plane which is also in front line service with the US Navy.

Personnel at the base also controlled a modern RAT-31DL air defense radar located on Penang, which is where the plane flew next.

The radar is made by the defense congomerate Leonardo. Its brochure declares that “The RAT 31DL is an advanced L-band solid state active phased array, 3D surveillance radar, effective to a range of over 500km. The RAT 31DL is operational all over the world and is a standing point for the Air Defence in many countries, including a large number of NATO member nations.”

Flying over an air force base stocked with fighter planes, and then over a modern air defense radar installation, is a very different kind of move from going electronically dark.

In this case whoever took the plane was not being evasive. Not worried about being detected. In fact, at this phase of the operation it’s more like they want to make sure that they’re being detected.

And this is really remarkable.

Why would you want to hide one moment, and then flaunt your location the next?

I think it suggests that the perp wanted to not be observed in real time, by someone who could potentially raise the alarm and bring scrutiny to what they were doing in the present tense, maybe even do something to stop it; but that they actually wanted what they were doing to be recorded in a way that would be discovered later.

OK, now here comes a biggy:

Fact #5: The Reboot.

The perp waits until after last primary radar return, then reboots the Satellite Data Unit.

Again, we have what appears to be a tight synchronicity. Only about a minute elapses from leaving primary radar coverage to restoring power to the SDU.

And this in turn creates the signals that will later indicate to investigators where the plane went.

If that timing isn’t coincidental, it reinforces what we observed from Fact #1, that this is a tightly planned and executed attack, so the perp is perceptive, knowledgeable, and aggressive.

Now, I’ve done whole episodes on the reboot of the SDU and how it could have been done, but the two key facts to know from a Mindhunter perspective is that rebooting the SDU is something that means the perp is:

• Technically sophisticated.

I’ve talked to many pilots about this, and rebooting the SDU is not something that any 777 pilot that I’ve talked to knows how to do. The documentaiton is out there in the world that a motived perp could find and read in order to figure out how to do it, but it would require aquiring knowledge, hence sophistication, that the vast majoriy of 777 pilots do not have.

• Non-pilot mindset.

Another thing I’ve asked a lot of 777 pilots about, including Juan Brown and Ron Rogers, is whether they would do something like isolate the left AC bus for any reason. The answer has always been an unequivocal no. Whoever carried out this act was operating far outside the realm of how a 777 pilot thinks.

• Motivated.

Rebooting the SDU is difficult and it is dangerous, in the sense that anyone who does it and is not a Boeing engineer is going to face consequences that they may not have anticipated. So whoever rebooted the SDU must have done it for a reason.

What that reason could be is far from clear. Some YouTubers have speculated that Zaharie took the plane and wanted to be really, really sure that he didn’t send out any kind of electronic clue as to what he was doing, and so he turned off the plane’s entire electrical system in order to prevent the satcom sending out any signal at all.

I don’t think that explanation holds any water, because remember: at the time the SDU was turned off, MH370 was flying right over a major Malaysia Air Force Base.

Again, let’s talk about expectation. What would the perp expect, in flying over an Air Force Base? Were they trying to not be seen, or were they trying to make sure they were seen, to remove any doubt that their presence would be noticed after the mission had already been accomplished and investigators were trying to figure out what happenened?

Finally, let’s look at one last aspect of this case that tells us something about the psychology of the perp. Namely:

Fact #6: The Long Flight

After the SDU rebooted, the plane flew on for another six hours. Again, this is motivated behavior. There was evidently something that the perp wanted to achieve, or a place that they were trying to get to, that required a long flight.

In order to achieve that goal they had to be able to exert self-control. They were

• Patient.

You might say that patience is the opposite of decisiveness. One means acting quickly, and the other slowly. But really I think they are allies. They are both reflections of a perp who has a plan and is willing to do what it takes to carry it out. They both signify motivation and self-control.

Now, someone could say, “maybe the perp wasn’t patient, maybe they just committed suicide and let the plane fly on as a ghost flight.” but we know that wasn’t the case, because they had to have engaged in maneuvers at the end of the flight.

So at least one person was alive and capable of functioning for the duration, and then took active control of the plane at the very end.

OK, I think that’s the bulk of what we can deduce about the psychology of the perps, assuming nothing at all about the identity of who the perp was.

• Evasive.

• Perceptive.

• Knowledgeable.

• Decisive.

• Motivated.

• Technically sophisticated.

• Non-pilot mindset.

• Patient.

When I look at all of these characteristics together, I see an actor who is highly motivated and capable and who wants to achieve something.

And part of the plan involved engaging in deception and evasion.

The perp deceived the air traffic controllers in the present tense by going dark at IGARI during the brief window when no one was looking at them.

Deception is a game of expectation: what does the perp expect the victim to expect?

The deceiver wants the victim to believe A, when reality is B. The discrepency is the essence of deception, and the deceiver creates it in order to fulfill his own purpose.

At IGARI, air traffic controllers expected the plane to keep flying along its assigned path through Ho Chi Minh’s airspace. When it didn’t appear, they assumed that it must have been delayed. They had an understandable expectation that things were unfolding exactly as they had ever single flight of every single day for years and years. And the perps understood this expectation and were able to exploit it, in order to fulfill their purpose.

Of course, deception is very common in crime. Criminals often want to do things that other people do not when them to do, like steal their stuff.

The incident that this most resembles to me is 9-11. You had very clever, ruthless, sophisticated, determined attackers who were able to surprise their victims because they acutely perceived what their targets’ expectations were and how those expectations could be subverted.

Until that time hijackers had never gone through the trouble of taking over planes and then killed themselves as part of the plan. Up to that point, both hijackers and law-enforcement authorities assumed that it would not be worth it to go through the effort of carrying out a hijacking if you were going to die in the process.

That turned out to be wrong because there were some people whose worldview and motivation was so strong that they were willing to die for the sake of attaining their goals.

These outside attackers had to be clever and deceptive because they needed to take over a plane that was previously under someone else’s control. And once their plan was complete, it was absolutely shocking. I remember it vividly, how incomprehensible it was that such a thing had happened, it lay so far outside the expectations. For day after day, Americans wandered around in a daze, asking ourselves, how could this happen? It didn’t seem possible.

In contrast, when pilots hijack their own planes to commit suicide, they don’t have to be particularly clever because they start out in control. They can do whatever they want, whenever they want. At most they have to overcome their copilot, which Andreas Lubitz did by simply locking the cockpit door after the captain went for a bathroom break.

So in all the other cases of pilot suicide, we don’t see anything like this degree of careful, meticulous planning for a complicated undertaking. The one case where we see a bit of effort is Silkair, where it seems the pilot pulled the circuit breakers on the black boxes before diving into the surface. Apparently there was some deception here, because he apparently didn’t want to be identified as the culprit. And indeed there is still some debate about what really happened on that flight. But Silkair doesn’t show anything like the care, and discipline, and patience that we saw in both MH370 or 9/11.

Let’s stipulate that Zaharie was just as motivated as the 9-11 hijackers were. If so, you have to ask yourself: What was he motivated for?

I have to say, it’s been 11 years and I have yet to hear a coherent explanation of why Zaharie would be motivated to do the things he supposedly did.

One theory is that he wanted to send a message to the Malaysian government. OK, but what is the message? A plane vanished; no one can say why or what happened. It’s very unclear what that message is supposed to mean. And by the way, he could have left a note and he didn’t.

Another theory is that he wanted to go down in history as a great criminal mastermind. OK, but a mastermind of what? That he wanted to make the plane disappear so completely that the crime would be unsolvable? Well, if the crime was unsolvable, then the authorities wouldn’t have been able to finger him, therefore he wouldn’t be famous.

Let me read you something one of the YouTube commenters, @DRKMSC, wrote:

“I also think that while it would be a prolonged sucicide at that high of altitude when he would take his oxygen mask off would be a peaceful death like falling asleep and his efforts to conceal what truly happened to the plane could have made him feel it was way less likely the finger would be pointed at him thus saving his family shame. He would also go out doing the thing he was passionate about, flying a plane.”

This is an idea that gets floated a lot, that he wanted to commit suicide but he didn’t want to take the blame for it. I see two big problems with this theory:

1. If he wanted to do that he could have kept going straight at IGARI, and just done a nosedive into the ocean. Or depressurized and done a ghost flight. Much, much simpler.

2. As a result of everything happening the way it did, Zaharie is far and away the number one suspect. In fact, as far as official investigators are concerned, he’s the only suspect. Because where do you fly the plane from? The cockpit. And who was in the cockpit? Zaharie.

Case closed.

So going through a super elaborate, complicated, difficult and dangerous scheme in order to get away scot-free simply does not make sense.

Everything that night pointed to Zaharie as the culprit. A sophisticated and daring culprit, yes. But he certainly did not pull off the perfect crime. He cast a pall of suspicion over himself that his family that they are still living under today. So if he did it, he was super successful in every regard except in achieving anything that could reasonably be construed as a goal.

To which some people have responded, okay, But he was crazy, he was suicidal, he didn’t care about anything, we shouldn’t expect him to be pursuing goals rationally.

OK, but look at this list again. Perceptive. Knowledgeable. Decisive. Motivated. Technically sophisticated.

This is not someone flailing about. This is someone crafting and meticulously carrying out a plan. A plan with a goal different from just killing yourself.

That is a real, non-trivial mystery.

Let’s take a run at this from another direction. Here are two facts from what we’ve learned today:

1. The operation was carried out by means of deception.

2. The operation left the authorities with the unshakable impression that Zaharie was the culprit.

What I want to leave you with today is a suggestion that we combine these two ideas.

That the operation relied on deception to create the impression that Zaharie was the culprit.

And that, consequently, Zaharie was not the culprit but was merely framed by means of deception.

And that all of these attributes:

• Evasive

• Perceptive

• Knowledgeable

• Aggressive

• Decisive

• Ruthless

• Motivated

• Technically sophisticated

• Non-pilot minded

• Patient

Actually best describe not a suicidal pilot but well-equipped, trained and motivated third-party hijackers.

So if there’s any possibility, any vulnerability that could have been exploited to make such an operation possible, I think it makes a lot more sense from a Mindhunter perspective.