What the Government Doesn't Want You to Know [S2Ep51 video]

Search officials don't secretly know where the plane is. But there are clues they're keeping under wraps

With the latest round of seabed search suspended after a fairly miniscule of progress, there’s a lot of frustration right now about the search for MH370. A lot of people just can’t believe that, in this day and age, countries like the United States and Australia, which have some of the most advanced technology in the world available to them, can’t find a 200 foot long airplane with 239 people aboard.

One of the most frequent comments I get is, “I can’t believe that the government doesn’t know where the plane is,” or, put another way, “the government isn’t telling us the whole truth.” Well, over the years I’ve talked to a fair number of people inside the official investigation, and I think I have a fairly well grounded understanding of their mindset, and I will say that, while there isn’t a grand coverup going on, there are definitely things that the government — whether that be Malaysia, Australia, or the United States — isn’t telling us, and I’ll explain more about that in just a bit.

Before I do that, though, I want to draw a line under the idea that governments charged with finding the plane are only pretending to be baffled because they secretly know where it went, thanks to their spy satellites and hydrophone networks and all the rest.

The main reason I think this is that I have talked to peope inside the investigation and I understand why they believe what they believe. They are absolutely 100 percent convinced that the pilot hijacked the plane and that it flew south, and that their math tells them where it went. But they didn’t see it go somewhere exactly on a secret radar because if they did they would have found it by now.

In other words, they want to find this plane! It being missing does them no favors. It has been embarrassing and expensive and time-consuming to hunt for this plane. Australia is a democracy and it has spent a lot of its taxpayers’ money for no result, which has not made the taxpayers happy. Both on the record and off the record officials have said that they think they know where it went and they’re frustrated and baffled that they can’t find it.

But!

There are things that they know that they aren’t telling us. Here are three of them.

Number three. The French barnacles. When the first piece of debris came ashore on La Réunion in July 2015, it was thickly covered in marine fouling organisms called Lepas anatifera, or goose barnacles. These are the single most important physical clue ever collected in the case of MH370, because the chemical composition of their shells provides a record of the water temperature that these animals experienced. But the French never shared the largest barnacle shells that could allow the flaperon to be traced back to its point of origin — which presumably would be the crash site. Why? And why haven’t they allow other researchers to access the whole collection of shells that they recovered?

Number two. Zaharie’s flight sim data. I was the first mainstream journalist to reveal that investigators had found a record on Zaharie’s flight simulator hard drive that showed he had made a practice flight that in some ways eerily resembled the path the plane was believed to have taken on March 8, 2014. Some of the details of that data was published in the Malaysian final report. But no complete set of data has ever been published and no one has ever delved in and given a complete explanation of the data and what it means — and, in particular, why the computer connected to the internet a week after the disappearance.

Number one. The data that I would most like to have, and which remains bafflingly elusive for reasons I don’t understand, is the final set of radar pings that the Malaysian military radar recorded at 18:22 universal time. All that the Malaysians have officially released is the primary radar returns that ended at 18:02, twenty minutes earlier. Apparently the plane went dark at 18:02, and then reappeared at 18:22. Why? Where exactly was it, for how long was it seen, what direction was it headed in, and at what altitude? I suspect that if we knew the answer to those questions, we would have a significantly better understanding of what happened next, which is the crucial phase of the mystery: which way did it turn? Because that last radar return occurred just three minutes before the first ping, it could give us a strong indication of which way it had turned.

Also, while we’re at it, I’d love to get a statement from India about which of its air defense radars were on, if any, and whether or not they saw anything.

OK, so those are the things that I would like to know. I’m a little annoyed that we, the public, don’t know them already. But finding them out wouldn’t automatically mean we could solve the case, and not knowing them doesn’t mean that we can’t solve the case anyway.

The fact is that, at this point, the lack of information isn’t what’s making this case hard to solve. We have a lot of information. What’s the bigger problem is a failure to talk about it in a productive way, and a failure to fully grasp the full range of possibilities. That’s something I’ll be delving into more detail in the next three episodes.