Restarting the Search, Again [S2Ep25]

Malaysia announces that Ocean Infinity will try again

Big news about MH370: yesterday the Malaysian government held a press conference at which it announced that it has okayed an agreement with seabed search firm Ocean Infinity to restart the search for the missing airliner.

This was something that Malaysia’s Transport Minister, Anthony Loke, has been hinting at for some time. But there were some important questions he didn’t answer, including where exactly they were planning to look. The search area will apparently only cover 15,000 square kilometers, a small fraction of what’s been searched so far. That suggests that Malaysia and Ocean Infinity believe they have compelling new information or a new form of analysis that gives them high confidence they’ll find the plane in a specific area.

But what is that new information or analysis? Nothing I’ve heard makes me think there’s a high probability of finding the plane. But maybe Malaysia and Ocean Infinity see it differently. I have two ideas about what they might be thinking.

The first has to do with work carried out by Victor Iannello and some other members of the Independent Group. In March of 2024 he wrote on his blog:

MH370 family member V.P.R. Nathan presented several slides highlighting Ocean Infinity’s willingness to conduct another subsea search for the debris field of the aircraft. The search area, which may be refined later, extends along the 7th arc from about 33°S to 36°S, and out to about 45 NM (83 km) on either side of the arc. Ocean Infinity also plans to “fill-in” areas that were previously searched that had low quality or missing data due to equipment failures or challenging terrain. The proposal is broadly consistent with the flight reconstruction and recommended search area that we presented in UGIB 2020 and the subsequent drift study.

Basically, if you look at the BTO data through the lens of Bayesian analysis, and also consider things like aircraft performace and drift modeling, this is a very reasonable place to look.

Here’s the thing, though. We’ve known that this is a reasonable place to look for a very long time. This area is searched in the orginal Fugro seabed scan, and it was searched further by Ocean Infinity.

So there’s no new reason to look here. The logic is just, look this is where the data says the plane went, if we didn’t find it it either went into a crevice or it glided further away from the 7th arc. If you’ll recall, this is the idea that the plane after it ran out of fuel and went into a steep and accelerating dive, the pilot changed his mind, put it into a glide, got far from the 7th arc, and then changed his mind again and slammed it into the ocean.

Why he would do this, we have no idea, but that’s what he would have to have done to get the plane far enough from the 7th arc that we wouldn’t have found it by now.

Remember, if it was Zaharie doing this, he would have had no idea about Inmarsat data or how the search area would later be calculated, he wasn’t trying to evade getting found, it was all just blind luck. If this is what happened at all.

This line of reasoning would give you a fairly specific area to search in, but the question is, you’ve known all this for years, why have you decided to look there now?

There’s an alternative explanation for why Malaysia is restarting the search, and this is for me a bit scarier.

As you’ll recall, in recent years a former IG member named Richard Godfrey has been spreading the claim that he has invented a new method for detecting airplanes in flight using historical ham-radio data called WSPR.

Godfrey and I go way back, we were both founding members in the Independent Group, and he was one of the leading voices demanding that I get kicked out for suggesting that the plane could have been hacked.

He remained very active in the group. He was among those thanked by name by the ATSB in their final accident report in 2017. And he was one of Victor Iannello’s coauthors on the 2020 report that I read about just now. So very much a guy who enjoys the respect of the establishment.

And yet, he’s really something of a loose cannon. Lately he has been promoting an idea that I consider incredibly bonkers and yet has been incredibly influential. It’s called WSPR. I talked about this in episode 28 of season 1. Godrey claims that by sifting through historical data he can trace the path of MH370 in minute detail, and that it looked like this:

I think it should be fairly intuitively obvious that jet planes do no fly like this. Also, from a Bayesian standpoint it is vanishingly unlikely that you could weave aroudn the sky like this and just by chance produce a set of ping rings that just happen to match those that would be produced by a jet flying straight and fast in the normal manner.

But what I think is really important to understand is that Godfrey’s claims, which he has laid out in very long and technically detailed white papers, is 100 percent pure poppycock. It is nonsense.

I’m not going to try to explain it because you can’t explain gibberish but let me once again quote Joe Taylor, the physicist who invented WSPR orginally, who wrote an email to Mike Exner:

I was not aware of these references to WSPR data. I have not read the papers on the Godfrey blog, and I am not going to waste my time on them. But yes, if you think a public quote could do any good, you may use this one: ‘I do not believe that historical data from the WSPR network can provide any information useful for aircraft tracking.’

He later told Victor Iannello:

As I’ve written several times before, it’s crazy to think that historical WSPR data could be used to track the course of ill-fated flight MH370. Or, for that matter, any other aircraft flight… I don’t choose to waste my time arguing with pseudo-scientists who don’t understand what they are doing.

Victor has published a rather long technical blog post debunking Godfrey’s WSPR claims.

Frankly I was amazed that the Independent Group kicked me out for suggesting that MH370 could have been cyberhijacked, which by now we know mulitple cybersecurity experts say is valid, but they had no problem with Godfrey making claims that are so outlandish that, FRANKLY, I think they can only be characterized as deliberate lies, because he must know better.

I went so far as to ask Mike Exner about it on Twitter, and he replied:

He hasn't been part of the IG for about 5 years now. Not only for the rediculous WSPR theory, but also the insane trunnion gear door theory and other disproven claims. He is mentally ill.

Now frankly I found this quite astonishing, because while my eviction from the IG was quite public, I’d never heard that the IG had kicked Godfrey out. In fact, as I said, Victor Iannello was collaborating with him as recently as 2020. And Godfrey retains a high degree of credibility in the public sphere because of the endorsement of not only the IG but also government officials. For instance, after he came out with his WSPR theory, journalists approached the ATSB for comment, they put out a statement that read in part:

The ATSB is aware of the work of Mr Richard Godfrey and acknowledges that he is a credible expert on the subject of MH370, but the ATSB does not have the technical expertise to, and has not been requested to, review his ‘MH370 Flight Path’ paper and workings. As such the ATSB cannot offer an assessment of the validity of Mr Godfrey’s work using WSPR data,” said ATSB Chief Commissioner Angus Mitchell.

I find this incredibly depressing. To be sure many people disagree about my analysis of MH370 evidence but I have tried to be careful and open minded, because I truly think that the only way that human beings can make collective sense of the world that they live in is by being careful, meticulous, and above all honest. My particular assessment of the case might not be right, but I firmly believe that this communal scientific approach is the only way forward.

And in the case of Richard Godfrey I see a person who has deliberately poisoned the discussion with lies, and no one has called him out for it. The Independent Group hasn’t, the ATSB hasn’t, not a single journalist has.

And so, to finally get where I was going with all this, my great fear is that Ocean Infinity and the Malaysian Government are going to put their reputations behind endorsingn Godfrey’s ideas, and search where his WSPR hoax says the plane went, which is considerably further north than what Victor Iannello has proposed and much more unlikely from a Bayesian standpoint.

But, if we’re talking about ideas that are new, it’s definitely newer than what Victor is proposing.

If the Malaysians decide to endorse this idea, all of the family members and the millions of members of the public who care about this case, will just be led further astray into misinformation and confusion. And we’ll collectively find ourselves that much further from figure out this mystery, which as I’ve said I think is absolutely crucial to do.

So that’s the depressing take. But there’s an optimistic take, too, and that’s that this renewal of the seabed search could reawaken the interest of the public and the media to take another look at this mystery. And I’m hoping that I can use this occasion to make a point. Which is that a seabed search can be thought of as a test of a hypthesis. Namely that the plane flew into the southern Indian Ocean. That hypothesis predicts that the plane will be found. Contrariwise, if the plane isn’t there, than by the principles of Bayesian Analysis that is evidence that the plane is not in the southern Indian Ocean.

And when we have those results in hand, it should be incumbent upon all officials and well-informed observers to ask themselves: how can we explain this evidence? How could it be possible that the plane isn’t in the southern Indian Ocean? What haven’t we considered?

Because as you know, once they start asking those questions, there is a lot that they will learn.