Seabed Search Wrap-up [S2Ep50 video]

Armada 86 05 has left the Indian Ocean, leaving the future of the seabed search in doubt

It’s Sunday, February 8, and Armada 86 05 has set sail from Gage Roads near Perth Australia, and is not heading back out to the search area, as many had hoped, but is instead sailing for the Pacific, putting the search for MH370 back on ice. Some have speculated online that Ocean Infinity stopped looking because they found the wreckage; I’ll unpack why that is probably not the case, and will look at what lies ahead in the search for MH370. I’ll also unpack the mystery of a long telephone call that Captain Zaharie Ahmed Shah took part in before taking off on the fateful flight: Who was the call with, and was it tied to the plane’s disappearance?

In the last episode we talked about how Armada 86 05 had left the search area on January 23 and was heading back to Fremantle. And indeed, that’s what happened: it arrived on January 27. Once in port it did what it normally does, namely refuel, take on supplies and fresh crew.

It then turned around and later that same day sailed to the “Calibration Area,” an area of the seabed where some metal targets were deliberately sunk so that they can be used to test whether sidescan sonar equipment is working properly. This got some of us excited about the possibility that they were prepping for a return to the search area.

Five days later, Armada 86 05 sailed back into port. On February 2 Mike Exner, an eminence grise in the old Independent Group of MH370 experts, Tweeted “They will be going back to the search area.”

But they didn’t. The next day the ship’s AIS destination changed to Pago Pago, and the day after that, February 4, it set sail and headed south out of port, on a course that eventually took it around the southern coast of Australia on its way to American Samoa. Which left a lot of disappointment.

Kevin Rupp tweeted, “Well, the situation is truly bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like it. No notification from anyone about what’s going on.”

That’s still the case. Neither Ocean Infinity nor the Malaysian government has issued any statement. The MH370 Families group on. Facebook has no updates about it. We’re just in the dark.

But what I think it’s safe to conclude is that Armada 86 05 is out of the picture for now.

Up top I mentioned that there has been some speculation on social media that maybe the reason that Armada 85 05 isn’t going back to the search area is that it doesn’t have to because after looking at the sidescan sonar data that had been retrieved by the AUVs, Ocean Infinity realized that they had found the wreckage.

For instance Twitter user @ReginaBoy38 tweeted: “I lean towards OI finding something of significance that forced a pause, requiring further negotiation with Malaysian authorities. We’ll know the truth if OI scans the same area they searched in 2026, possibly for reasurance or additional positive identity of #MH370.”

This seems very far fetched to me, and it seemed that way to Kevin Rupp as well, who posted on February 6, “FWIW - I consider this talk of “maybe they found it” to be ridiculous bullshit. They spent over a week battling 6-meter waves out there before giving up and heading to port. While not satisfying, the correct answer for what has happened is - I don’t know.”

In response, I Tweeted, “They seem to still be following the plan laid out in December 2024: search 15K sq km, intermittently. I think they just ran out of time on this run.”

To which Kevin replied, “This is most likely.”

It would be nice if some other ship in Ocean Infinity’s fleet was steaming towards the search area to take up where 86 05 left off, but at the moment, the other Armada 86s are widely dispersed. Three are in the Western Hemisphere, one is at the shipyard in Vung Tau, Vietnam, and one is sailing to Mauritius, so I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see the search restarted anytime soon. And remember that last year the search was called off in early April due to winter weather coming in. So if I were a betting man I’d say it’s probably going to be a long time until we see the seabed search for MH370 to continue, might not be until 2027. Hope I’m wrong.

And now, as the saying goes, for something completely different: let’s talk about a mysterious 45-minute phone call that MH370’s captain, Zaharie Ahmed Shah, took part in a month before the plane’s disappearance.

The call came to light when a secret Malaysian police report, not intended to be released to the public, was leaked by a Twitter user called Nihonmama in 2017. It included the revelation that on February 2, 2014, Zaharie had engaged in a 45-minute phone conversation with an aircraft engineer named Zulhaimi bin Wahidin, who later tried three times to call Zaharie after the plane disappeared.

That raised a lot of eyebrows, because whoever took the plane did things that were so technically sophisticated that they were beyond the ability of a typical airline captain. Was this call the result of Zaharie’s attempts to figure out the technical details he needed for the hijacking?

At the time, Mike Exner, who I mentioned earlier, and Don Thompson, who I cite all the time, raised the issue with the press, saying: “What was the substance of that long conversation? And who made the three attempts to contact Captain Zaharie Shah later on the morning of the disappearance?”

The answer to that mystery came in 2019, when Zuihaimi came forward to Australian journalists and explained who he was and what he had been doing.

He told the Australian newspaper that Royal Malaysian Police had interviewed him “three or four” times after the plane disappeared because, the paper wrote, “of their suspicion he had provided his cousin with the technical advice to hijack the Boeing 777.”

“I was at police headquarters for three days. It spanned from morning to evening,” Mr Zulhaimi said. “I told them that Zaharie is a smart guy. He doesn’t need me to get all of the information.” Mr Zulhaimi noted that Zaharie was a highly experienced aviator who held licences to train and test other pilots. “So he knew a lot about the aircraft.”

Mr Zulhaimi, who now works for a different airline, feels “uneasy” about his cousin’s “name being tarnished”.

They’re trying to blame him for what happened and it’s very hard for me to swallow that because he’s not that kind of a person… He was a jovial person. He had a lot of money. He was enjoying his life. Why would he kill himself for no reason? He had a good family and a good life. Successful children. I don’t think people are crazy (enough) to kill themself for nothing. Of course (he is innocent).

While most staff at Malaysia Airlines knew the men were related, police initially did not.

I asked them to get all of the information from the telco company to see how many times he has been calling me. When they found that he had been calling me so many times for the last 10 years then they did not question me anymore. They knew it was a genuine relationship.

The father of three said Zaharie was actually “like a brother”.

He’s my father’s younger brother’s son. We share the same grandfather. So that was the reason why (we had that phone call). Nothing more than that.

So there you have it. One of MH370s many, many mysteries raised, and then resolved.

You know, eEach time a mystery gets solved it brings us a little closer to understanding what happened. In this case, we get an insight into Zaharie’s character and personality from someone who knows him really well. Lately I’ve been getting a fair number of comments that are very quick to portray Zaharie as a deranged lunatic, because that fits the narrative that MH370 could only have been a case of pilot mass murder-suicide.

For instance, @josephszot5545 wrote: “It’s simple Zahari was a pyscopath! It’s that the guy was evil from who knows what. The flight dept. has to examine how they missed this.”

What you see a lot in the discussion about Zaharie as the culprit is that people a) decide that he’s the only possible culprit b) observe that only a mentally ill person could do such a thing c) conclude that Zaharie was mentally ill d) paper over all the illogical motivations in the pilot-suicide hypothesis with the observation that it’s impossible to make sense of the behavior of mentally ill people.

But in fact there is no documented evidence or on-the-record testimony from friends or family members that would suggest that Zaharie had any kind of mental or emotional red flags. Everyone says he was a great, chill guy.

Because it doesn’t fit the narrative that people find compelling, though, they assume that there must be something there. But maybe there isn’t.

Recently I ran across a pretty neat quite from Marvin Minsky, the MIT artifical intelligence guru. He said,

When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.

That’s a pithier expression of an idea I’ve been pointing out for a long time about MH370. We know that this is a weird case. A lot of seemingly inexplicable things happened. We should brace ourselves for the possibility that the answer is going to turn out to be weirder than we had initially thought possible.