Selects: The Disappearance of Flight MH370, Part I

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Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our two-part episode on the disappearance of MH370 from back in January 2020.

It is the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation history since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and poor Fred Noonan, which is really saying something.

It's astounding that with a decade of exhaustive time and attention, the plane still hasn't been found.

Maybe someday when we're mapping the entire seafloor of the Indian Ocean, we'll stumble across it.

Who knows?

But until then, enjoy this harrowing mystery episode of Stuff You Should Know.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry over there and this is Stuff You Should Know

about

one of the most interesting

mysteries in modern times.

Yeah.

Like it's really tough to get across what a mystery the missing airliner MH370 is.

Malaysian Airlines, Flight 370.

Yeah and this is

going to be a two-parter because it's pretty robust.

Yeah.

And boy hats off to the grabster.

He really put together a lot of great research for this one.

He did.

I also want to give a huge shout out to one of my journalistic heroes, William Langwash.

He wrote something, he writes in the Atlantic, but he's not just an Atlantic writer.

He wrote What Really Happened to Malaysia's Missing Airplane?

Big old long article on it.

Those are great.

And this guy is an aviation expert to begin with, but he's also,

have you ever read a Tom Wolfe book or article or whatever?

He has a really great knack for making you feel like you're there in the action.

Yeah.

But then he also has a knack for making you step back and think, how does Tom Wolf know all this?

Was he there?

William Langweis is the same way.

And

I will go ahead and recommend that you not, unless you are a very courageous person, read any of his work, especially the stuff about airline disasters.

anytime around when you're flying because he puts you in that plane when it's going down or whatever.

He's really, really good at it.

So I recommend basically anything Langweisch has written, go read.

It's worth it for sure.

Yeah, and I think this, coupled with the brief times that we've touched on this kind of thing in the past, whether it was DB Cooper or Bermuda Triangle, like there's something about aviation disasters and mysteries that are really intriguing to me.

And airline forensics, it's all Rick, just super, super interesting.

It is.

So you talked about airline forensics and that kind of stuff.

This is lousy with it.

But the reason I was saying why it's tough to overstate like what a mystery MH370 is, it's the only airliner that is considered disappeared, vanished.

They know where all the other ones are.

They know what happened to all the other ones.

It's the only major one that is just where the official investigation said we don't know.

Yeah, I mean, and, you know, in part two, we'll get to a pretty good,

well, actually, I think the leading theory comes in this episode, but we kind of think we know, but it's that thing where like you can't definitively say.

Yeah, you can't say where and you can't say why.

Right.

Yeah, then the why is and the where are both really confounding.

Yeah.

And the reason why air travel in the 21st century is way safer than auto travel is because anytime an airliner goes down, everyone in the international community comes together, investigates it.

They do so openly.

The airline,

the airplane manufacturer,

everyone involved is expected to tell the truth.

Right.

And you get it out there and you figure out what went wrong and then you make things safer.

And then that makes makes air travel safer for everybody.

They couldn't do this for all sorts of reasons with MH370.

And so it's a huge failing among the international community.

Not for lack of trying, but because it's just an asterisk out there.

It's the only one.

Yeah, and that's why airplanes don't crash as much anymore.

I mean, growing up, it's not like it was every other week or anything, but you used to hear about airline crashes enough to where it gave you pause.

Right.

And you just don't hear about it much anymore.

It's true.

I mean,

it's still out there for sure.

Yeah, but they're they seem much more rare than they used to be.

Kind of like skyjackings.

So we'll do our best to

put you in the in the plane.

In the passenger seat.

Yeah.

Can we at least be in business class?

Buckle uh sure.

Okay.

Sure.

Are you about to say buckle up?

Yeah.

Okay.

Buckle up because we're going to take off on March 8th, 2014 in Kuala Lumpur.

It's the very beginning of March 8th.

The takeoff scheduled for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was scheduled for 12.35 a.m.

That's right.

We're in a Boeing, 777-200ER.

Yep.

And there are 227 fellow passengers aboard, 12 flight crew.

Yep.

That's a lot of people.

Almost about two-thirds of the passengers are Chinese nationals, I believe.

There's a bunch of other people from other countries, but for the bulk of the people people on the plane were from China.

That's right.

And it's a late-night flight.

It's expected to arrive in Beijing at about 6 o'clock.

6.30.

6.30 in Beijing time.

And it's going to fly over the South China Sea,

over the Gulf of Thailand, through Laos, Vietnam, and then

into China to arrive at Beijing.

It didn't actually take off at 12.35.

They took off at 12.42.

Not too shabby.

Seven minutes, I'm not like sitting there rocking in my seat, like, let's go yet.

You know, I might not have even noticed.

And they take off and it flies up to 18,000 feet.

And the air traffic control center at Kuala Lumpur says, hey, you guys are cleared for

to go up to 35,000 feet, which is cruising altitude for this flight, I think.

That's right.

And at this point, at 18,000, they switched from the airport's air traffic to Kuala Lumpur Area Control Center.

Yeah.

And, you know, the way, the reason we're mentioning all these details is because it turns out they're very important.

Very important.

Yeah, so these are all key.

Keep rewinding 15, 30 seconds to get every single detail.

Okay.

Because you're going to need them for the big finish.

So four minutes later, like you said, they were cleared to go to 35,000.

It took them about 15 minutes.

And it's here where Captain Zahari

and there were two people on board flying this plane: Captain Zahari and what was the other gentleman's name?

First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid.

Right.

And Captain Zahari Ahmad Shah is piloting the plane.

First Officer Hamid, this is his last training flight.

After this, he'll be fully certified to fly Boeing 777s, which if you're a commercial airline pilot, that's...

Pretty much the peak right there.

Yeah, and that's important too, because one of them is a very experienced pilot in his 50s.

The other one is a brand new kind of greenhorn, and that's going to factor in for sure.

Yep.

So, like like I said, it took about 15 minutes to get to 35,000 feet.

And this is when

the lead pilot radios that Kuala Lumpur control center says, we're at 35,000 feet.

Then seven minutes later, he radios again and says, by the way, we're still, and this is not me doing him.

I don't know what he sounded like.

Kuala Lumpur.

There you go.

This is Captain Zahari.

Yeah, everybody sounds like Chuck Yeager.

Yeah, I guess so.

So he confirmed again that they were at 35,000 feet.

And this is where Ed points out that this wasn't some sort of big alarming thing.

But what usually happens is you radio in when you leave an altitude, not when you arrive.

And you also don't radio in seven minutes later and say, by the way, we're still at 35,000 feet.

Still here.

Like once you hit it, you're just sort of there.

That's your cruising altitude.

Right.

So it wasn't alarming or anything, but it was weird that he made those two radio transmissions.

But it was nothing compared to the weirdness that was about to take place.

That's right.

Shortly after that, I think at 1:1.19 a.m.,

Kuala Lumpur Area Control Center.

It's like 11 minutes later.

Yep.

Said, hey, MH370, you're about to leave our jurisdiction and enter Ho Chi Minh's jurisdiction.

Go ahead and contact Ho Chi Minh Air Traffic Control and let them know you are on with them on this frequency.

Yeah, I mean, if you remember our air traffic control podcast, you're handed off.

Like, you don't just stick with one air traffic control when you fly around the world.

No.

You're handed off all along the way whenever you enter the airspace of that whatever district.

Precisely.

And the way that it's set up is there's not supposed to be any time where you're just flying alone and then you move into the other one.

You're going right from one to the other.

You want a handoff.

So

Captain Zahari responded with: Good night, Malaysian 370.

Those are the last words anyone heard from Captain Zahari as far as we know.

And

that in and of itself was kind of an odd transmission because typically any airline captain would have replied with the frequency,

said the frequency back to confirm that that was the right one.

But instead all he said was good night, Malaysian 370.

And very shortly after that, two minutes later,

MH370 disappeared from the radar.

The moment it showed up on Ho Chi Minh Air Traffic Controls radar screens, it just vanished.

Right, without ever having made contact with them

via radio frequency.

This should have like set off alarms with Ho Chi Minh City.

And apparently they did notice.

Kuala Lumpur didn't notice.

The guy was they had all this other air traffic to deal with.

Yeah, and they were out of their zone at this point.

Yep.

And he'd said good night.

And, you know, everybody knows good night.

You can't go back on that.

You have to wait until tomorrow to make contact contact again.

So

Kuala Lumpur is, I don't know about blameless in this, but certainly less blameful than

Ho Chi Minh.

And Ho Chi Minh noticed that they just disappeared from the screen, but it took them a full 18 minutes before they called Kuala Lumpur and said, hey, do you know anything about where MH370 is?

Because they kind of vanished from our radar.

Yeah, like, I don't know the exact process.

In their defense, they were trying to get in touch.

It's not like they just said, well, we'll see what happens.

They got in touch with another pilot who was nearby in that airspace to contact them.

And

this pilot reported there was interference and static.

I heard mumbling on the other end, but that's the last we heard and we lost connection.

Right, we're not even sure if he was talking to the right people.

Yeah, so, I mean, they were trying to get in touch, but you're right.

I think, like, sooner than 18 minutes, they should have said, by the way, this plane that just left your airspace has disappeared.

Like, do you know what's going on?

Right, protocol, international protocol, is five minutes.

Okay, so they waited 13 minutes longer than protocol dictated.

And it was so much beyond when they should have called that the controller in Kuala Lumpur actually said on the record, Why didn't you call me sooner?

How are you just calling me about this?

Like, that may as well have been yesterday, right?

It's missing for 18 minutes, which, as we'll get to later on, stuff that came up in the investigation, that was just the first step in a series of missteps that led to the reason why MH370 may never be found.

Yeah.

So

should we take a little break and talk about radar?

Radar O'Reilly?

We'll be back right after this.

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Radar O'Reilly?

Not Radar O'Reilly.

Radar used by air traffic control.

It's different.

It is different than Radar O'Reilly.

This is called secondary radar, and it sends out a little beam that it's very narrow and it sweeps the area.

And on board the aircraft, they have a transponder that detects this beam and sends their own signal back that says, this is how fast we're going, this is where we're headed, and a code that says, and this is who I am.

Yeah, maybe even MH370, as simple as that, something like that.

That's right.

That's what's supposed to show up on air traffic control's radar screen.

So they can see, oh, here's MH370 coming toward DL 1722 or whatever.

At this speed.

Right.

They have all this information.

And that's called secondary radar.

Primary radar is what you think, where it's like you know it's a blip on a screen that this big

this big

radar ray is bouncing off of and receiving information back from but it's just you see it's physically there.

This has far more information and that's what air traffic control around the world uses.

Right and this is very key because just a few seconds after it made that switch over into Ho Chi Minh's airspace

the transponder stopped sending information.

That transponder that's supposed to say who you are, where you are, and how fast you're going, just stopped.

It vanished.

And this is when the ball was dropped by a little bit by Kuala Lampur not noticing, and definitely by Ho Chi Minh not doing anything immediately in response to Kuala Lampur.

Right.

So

primary radar, the radar that you typically think of when you think of radar, that's...

There are very few places in the world where you can't be tracked by someone on radar.

It's fairly old technology.

It's been around for a while.

But the places where you can't be tracked can be vast.

Over the ocean, in the desert, over extremely mountainous or wooded areas.

There are places where you can't really put a radar tower, and

you can disappear from radar, right?

I think what I'm trying to say here is if you

take your plane out of radar range and you turn off your transponder, you can make a modern airliner as big as a 777 vanish where people don't know where it is.

And that's a really, I think, hallmark point or trait to this mystery that kind of like gets people a little unnerved is, wait a minute, like this is the 21st century.

This happened in 2014.

Right.

What do you mean there's times and situations where an airliner can disappear and people don't know where it is?

And that was the situation.

And as Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur are starting to scramble to try try to figure out, you know, where this is, apparently they called Malaysian Airlines and said, Hey, do you know anything about MH370?

Malaysian Airlines said, Oh, yeah, they're flying over Cambodia right now.

And they're like, Where?

What are you?

How are you seeing this?

After an hour, finally, Malaysian Airlines is like, No, we're just referring to the flight plan.

Yeah, they should be over Cambodia right now.

What do you mean you can't find them?

What's going on?

Yeah, but because of that primary radar, the secondary radar wasn't functioning, like we said, because the transponder was off.

But the primary radar did track them for about an hour after those communications dropped

because of the Malaysian military was able to track it with the primary radar.

Yeah, apparently it flew through the primary radar of five different countries.

And the only one that bothered to track it was Malaysia's

Air Force.

Yeah.

But they didn't do anything about it.

They didn't follow up to see who it was.

They didn't scramble any jets to go see if everybody was okay.

They just knew that there was an unidentified plane flying through Malaysian airspace, and the Air Force didn't do anything about it.

This is embarrassing enough that the Air Force didn't reveal this to anybody for a while, which was a really important point because during this time,

about an hour,

about an hour and a half after the takeoff and an hour after the thing disappeared from transponders, the Malaysian Air Force was tracking MH370

and it saw that it seemed to have taken a turn.

Yeah, I mean, they know what happened at this point for a little while.

It made a sharp turn.

That was not part of the planned flight plan.

No, not at all.

This is where things definitely took a metaphorical and literal turn.

Yeah.

It headed southwest at that point, crossed over the Malay Peninsula, over Malaysia again, and then parts of Thailand.

Then it made a right turn.

This is very key, near the island of Penang.

Just put a pin in that.

Then headed west by northwest toward the Andaman Sea, and then at 2.22 a.m.

vanished from radar, from that primary radar as well.

Right.

So the Malaysian Air Force saw this happen on its radar.

It didn't tell anybody for a while.

The flight plan had it leaving Malaysia, crossing over the Strait of Malacca

into the

peninsula where Thailand is located, into China, right?

Just away from Malaysia.

And from what the Malaysian Air Force saw, this thing doubled back on itself and then went in some totally different directions, almost the opposite direction it was supposed to be going in.

And like you said, it dropped off of the radar.

And that was the last time anyone saw it on radar.

But

that's not the last time we were able to track

MH370.

And that's thanks to a satellite network that's run by an outfit called Inmarsat.

Yeah, so Inmarsat, if you've ever been on a plane and you've enjoyed the benefits of watching movies, streaming, or connected to your computer via Wi-Fi, that is because of satellite communication.

These

airplanes are equipped with a system and it transfers data and all their voice communications via satellite.

And some of this data from the plane is automatically shared with these ground tracking stations, which is a really big deal.

So not only are they letting you watch movies and doing all that, but it's sending this automatic data on a regular, on the reg, basically, from that satellite to these ground stations.

Right.

So

they think by this time,

actually, I believe they know by this time, MH370's navigational systems, entertainment systems,

a bunch of its systems have been turned off.

The only thing that was still operating was this satellite link,

I guess, beacon.

Yeah, it's called a satellite data unit.

Okay, so the satellite data unit, which was capable of contacting and receiving contact from the Inmarsat satellites.

Now, at the time, no one knows that this is happening, right?

Like, there's no sound being made.

There's nobody tracking this.

This all came out much later when Inmarsat realized they were sitting on a bunch of data.

But during different points, over the next six, seven hours, the satellite and the satellite data unit talk to each other under a few different circumstances.

And because of this, this company, Inmarsat, which is located in or headquartered in Great Britain, but literally

covers the globe, not just with airline stuff, but maritime thing, which I think where

they were originally

founded to do is to

enable maritime communications.

Like, you know, satellite phone.

Sure.

You're calling through Inmarsat.

Yeah.

Right.

So they've got this whole constellation of satellites.

And

when Inmarsat heard about MH370, they were like, I'll bet our satellites were tracking this thing in some way, shape, or form.

And it turns out that they were right.

Yeah, and there's four, and this is important here.

There's four different ways or circumstances where that satellite data unit on the plane is communicating with the satellite.

in space.

Whenever you're making a data transmission or a voice transmission,

whenever someone on the ground tries to contact the plane, there's something that happens every hour.

If no one has made either one of these contacts for an hour, you get a check-in called a handshake.

It's just like, you're still here.

Shake hands, buddy.

Yeah, just want to make sure you're logged on.

It's kind of like

when you watch too much Netflix and Netflix sends a message saying you're still there.

Yeah.

Have you finished all the tub of cookie dough yet?

Yeah, and then it has a thing that says, go outside.

Right.

Or actually, it doesn't.

It says, watch another one.

Watch some more.

Why not have some more cookie dough?

It's the same thing.

It's sending a message to the plane's satellite data unit saying like, are you still logged on?

Right.

And then the final thing, and this is super key, is

whenever you first log on to the satellite system, that thing on the plane, whenever it kind of checks in and links up, That is very key because what can also happen if that thing goes down and then reboots, it treats that as a new login.

So it'll make another ping basically that it's logged onto the system.

Right.

So Marsat goes back and looks at their data and says, okay, so here's a couple of things.

Right now, this is, I think, within the first like few days.

Everybody is looking in the South China Sea for MH370 because that was what was along its flight plan.

The Malaysian Air Force hasn't revealed yet that it tracked MH370 turn around and go the opposite direction of what its flight plan

was scheduled to carry carry it.

And Inmarsat is now saying, wait a minute, this thing didn't crash like an hour and a half after takeoff.

This thing

turned around and flew into the Indian Ocean for six or seven more hours because our satellite was talking to the plane at various points

during this time.

Yeah, and we should point out, too, after Air France Flight 447,

which crashed in 2009, this is when Inmarsat really kind of beefed up their system.

They added more ground stations and they added a lot more capability to add storage for this data because they know that this can really help out in situations like this.

That was a big one too.

Do you remember that one?

Oh, yeah.

So that one was the first one that really opened people's eyes where it was like, wait a minute, when we're flying over the ocean, like no one knows where we are.

Yeah.

And they were like, no, actually not really.

And

I think that's why Inmarsat was like, we've got to build more ground stations.

We've got to bulk up our data storage, all that stuff.

We've got to add more satellite capabilities.

And in doing so, they made it so that you could be tracked when you're over the ocean, even if you didn't want to be, as seems to have been the case with MH370.

So it was a huge difference between 2004.

Was it 2004, 2009?

2009.

2009 and 2014, just five years.

The thing proved itself.

These upgrades they made were substantial.

But Air France Flight 447, in and of itself, another Langweisch gem that just puts you in the seat of this terrifying plane crash.

That one in particular, they knew where the plane was, and it still took two years to recover the black boxes and figure out what went wrong.

Yeah.

Which is terrifying.

And if you know what happened to that one,

basically the controls just got ripped away from the pilot and it just went right into the ocean.

Yeah.

And they're still down there, apparently.

There was a big debate over what to do with these people.

When they started raising them, they were perfectly preserved because they're they're so deep in the pressure and the anaerobic situation and the temperature just kept them perfectly preserved.

But as they were raised up into warmer waters, the decomposition over two years just happened immediately.

Oh man.

So they, I think the French government said they have to stay there.

It's now a memorial.

Do not try to raise anybody.

And they're still down there strapped to their seats.

Jeez.

Which, when you just do not think about that the next time you get on a plane.

I know.

It's a terrible thing to think about.

I can tell you firsthand.

Yeah.

You've gotten so much better over the years, but I'm sure this is going to be a setback.

No, I'm hanging in there.

All right, good.

Yeah.

If it happens, it happens.

Like, that's the way I kind of view it.

Well, there's certainly nothing you can do about it.

This isn't something that

you guys are going to play in my memorial, my funeral, my last words.

But

if I go down in a plane crash, my number was up.

Right.

And everyone else will be like, that's so weird.

He always talked about it.

Yeah, right.

This was his worst news here.

He's such a freak.

There was actually, I had a tweet once that said, if I ever go down on a plane crash, I'm going to shout, I wish I were to spent more time at work.

I'm not sure I get that.

Well, you know, it's like no one ever says in their deathbed they wish they'd spent more time at work.

Well, I got it.

Then an ironic funny on the way down.

Yeah, I'll make people laugh.

Good for you.

Give them their last laugh.

So this,

where they're getting all this information was from a ground station in Perth, Australia, a place we have been to.

It was quite lovely.

Lovely town.

That's right, it was great.

Anyone ever tells you don't go to Western Australia, you tell them that's BS.

Because Josh and Chuck said it's great.

Yep.

All right.

Barry stupid.

So BS stands for.

So they had a lot of data, like we said, because they had beefed up their storage capabilities over the past five or six years.

Right.

And they have a couple of types of data, something called burst timing offset and burst frequency offset.

BTO is, it measures how long that a signal takes to reach a satellite.

You know the speed of the signal, so you know exactly how far that plane is from the satellite at that exact moment.

It's very easy to kind of understand.

Right.

And first taken into account, MRSAT has...

Oh,

here was a ping, here was a ping, here was a ping, here's a ping.

Right.

Now they're digging in to analyze these pings and just the quality of them, the timing of them, all this stuff, because they are like, I'm pretty sure we can figure out where this plane was and maybe where it went if we really drill in and do some incredible math and figure out

just kind of the nature of these pings.

Yeah, and what they're trying to do here is to narrow it down into an arc instead of a circle.

Well, I think that's just naturally what happened.

Oh, yeah, you're right.

You're right.

I'm sorry.

Because Ed explained it in a very easy way.

If you tell someone, hey, I'm 100 miles from Atlanta,

then you draw a circle around Atlanta that's 100 miles, and you could be at any point along that circle.

Right.

But if that phone call was from Athens,

which is not 100 miles from Atlanta, but it's, you know,

65 or so.

Okay.

But if you said you're from some other city in Georgia, then you would know where you were, and if you knew how fast they were going, then you could really, it doesn't become a circle, then it becomes an arc.

Right.

The number of points on that circle where that person could possibly be.

Yes, is smaller.

Yeah, much smaller, maybe by half, maybe by two-thirds.

And yet, so the circle becomes an arc.

And because of that burst timing offset,

they could establish those arcs.

And there were seven of them, I believe.

Yes.

No, they could establish the circles and the circle.

Because of the other one, the BFO, the BFO, the burst frequency offset, those are more complicated.

They involve the Doppler effect.

Yes.

And basically

tell

the satellite or the satellite data tells Inmarsat, we're going in this direction.

Because

the Doppler effect when an ambulance siren is coming to you

and then

passes you.

Right.

It changes in pitch because of the relative distance and the direction that it's traveling.

They could tell from this ping, the satellite ping, not even a data transmission, just a ping,

which direction the thing was headed and roughly how fast it was going.

And so they were able to create seven arcs.

And after the seven arcs, the seventh arc was created by a ping that took place at 8.19 a.m.

And after that, there was another

there was a logon request, a handshake request that the SDU failed to respond to.

And they think that in between 8.19 a.m.

and that last logon request at 9:15 a.m., the plane finally crashed, probably from running out of fuel.

Yeah, and they think the 8.19 was from one of those reboots that I was talking about when that system comes back on

after

power failure.

Right, which will come into play pretty soon.

All right, so let's take another break here.

Okay.

All right, and we'll be back with the leading theory right after this.

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All right.

So the leading theory,

and this is

the more I read this, the more it was Occam's razor kind of staring you in the face.

Yeah.

Because we'll get into some of the kind of kakamami theories, and there are many of them.

but this one is the simplest and

it's probably what happened it's the one i believe it is that

uh someone on board

and should we should we tease this out yeah okay someone on board uh took control of the plane uh disabled that transponder and then started flying in the other direction uh back across malaysia then put it on autopilot until it ran out of gas and it crashed into the ocean yeah about the southern indian ocean which is where the southern seventh arc was.

Right.

One of the reasons this makes a lot of sense is because that transponder going off at the exact moment when the plane transitioned from Kuala Lampur's airspace into Ho Chi Minh's, it would be an incredible coincidence if that was just an incredible coincidence.

That in and of itself says

that there was a human factor involved.

Like someone knew what that meant.

Right, exactly.

So somebody who knew how to do that, when to do it,

and the timing of it was just too spectacular for it to have been an accident.

Yeah, because what they probably counted on is exactly what happened: there was a period of time they might have figured five minutes, which is what you said the standard was.

But what they got was 18 minutes of confusion.

Yeah.

I mean,

it tripled what they were counting on.

Exactly.

Best case scenario.

Yeah.

The other thing was that the turn that the MH370 made was so

abrupt

that

an autopilot wouldn't have done that.

If you put a plane on autopilot and have it, and it turns, it would make a much wider turn.

This is a hard kind of backtracking turn that it made to its left to the southwest from the north, traveling the northeast, the turn was to the southwest.

So just the turn alone, which came after the transponder was turned off,

shows that it was under human control.

It was a person piloting the plane, making it turn.

Right.

And that rules out things like mechanical failure or fire.

Everything from meteor strike to a squall line to any kind of weather.

It was all that was ruled out by the fact that this turn took place clearly under human control.

Right.

That also rules out hypoxia.

If you remember the

very eerie crash with golfer

Payne Stewart on that private jet.

I don't really remember that.

Can you kind of refresh my memory?

That was in 1999.

And I think

the post-mortem on that one was that this private plane, essentially everyone on board died of hypoxia, including the pilots.

And it flew for a number of hours

on autopilot.

It was a ghost plane, essentially.

Wow.

Yeah.

So they don't think that hypoxia affected whoever was in control of the plane.

Because it made that turn.

Yeah.

It was a very deliberate turn, and then it followed an even more deliberate flight pattern after that.

This was not random movements of a plane where somebody who was suffering from hypoxia but still alive would make.

These weren't confused decisions.

They were un they were difficult to understand decisions, but they weren't random and confused behavior.

They were deliberate.

That's right.

So

one of the pilots or both of the pilots suffering from hypoxia is ruled out.

And the fact that they were deliberate turns also rules out the idea that both of the pilots were dead.

Right.

That again, it was just the plane flying itself.

Right.

These logon requests by that STU unit on the plane

it was another big clue there, because there was a logon request made at 1.43 a.m.

And that basically says that the power on the plane's electrical system was shut off for a period of time in between that transponder disappearing and that time of that logon request.

Right.

So someone like

purposefully disabled these systems.

Right.

So 1.43 a.m.

would have been

about an hour after takeoff, just over an hour after takeoff.

After the transponder was turned off with perfect timing between Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh, but also

before

the turn that the Malaysian Air Force tracked.

That's right.

Or at about the same time.

Right.

The other thing that could have happened when

the transponder and the STU were shut off, it could have depressurized the plane.

If that happens, then hypoxia is the fear.

Those oxygen masks are going to drop down, but you only get about 10 minutes of oxygen as a passenger.

The cockpit is going to have a lot more oxygen than that.

But we do know for a fact from that logon request that the systems were off for an hour.

So even if that were the case, then

the masks run out 10 minutes later and the people die of hypoxia, the passengers shortly after that.

The thing is, is they believe that not only was MH370 still at cruising altitude, it probably actually climbed to 40,000, maybe a little over 40,000 feet.

It's basically the maximum that a 777 could stay aloft at.

Yeah, so the the drop-down masks would have been totally useless to begin with.

There's not enough oxygen coming through them to offset that kind of height in the depressurized cabin.

That's meant for a much lower altitude.

And the reason why I find it very disconcerting to learn that there's only like 10 or 15 minutes worth of oxygen coming out of those masks.

I mean, there's the idea there that the plane crash doesn't take longer than that?

The idea is that it's used for an emergency transition down to a much lower altitude where you could breathe without a pressurized cabin.

Yeah, yeah.

And that that takes less than 10 or 15 minutes.

You can do that much more quickly, a few minutes.

So basically, you're going to start flying with your own oxygen tank?

Basically.

I'll be like, try to take it away from me, T.

You can't do it.

Here's another thing: that SDU logon request

at the end, it suggests that it was turned back on.

And the thinking here is that whoever did this

probably didn't care at that point because it was too late because everyone on board was dead.

Right.

So the idea behind all this is that the power was shut off and they know that the power was turned off because the logon request came at a certain point, right?

So that means that the power had been shut off and it was coming back on.

And they think that it was to depressurize the cabin and be a very easy way to depressurize the cabin, just turn off all of the power.

And then maybe whoever did this, and we'll get to that, was like, I want to get back down to normal cruising altitude here so I can fly this plane without wearing a mask maybe, or just in a less stressful environment.

Right, exactly.

Maybe go get a bite to eat or something like that.

There's a lot that can be done in a pressurized cabin.

And then there was that final arc, the seventh one, that logon request was probably the plane running out of fuel.

And this I thought was super interesting.

So the plane runs out of fuel, those engines shut down, but there's still air pumping through those turbines and that's going to spin the turbine and that's certainly not going to be enough to fly your plane, but it could be enough to act as a generator and power up the auxiliary power system.

That's right.

Super, super interesting.

Yeah.

So in

the running out of fuel, electrical goes down, those air ram jets.

come on and the auxiliary power system comes on the thing logs back on just enough to get that going again right exactly so let's just, before we stop for this episode, Chuck, let's just kind of recap what MRSAT has been able to figure out from seven pings between its satellite and the satellite data unit.

Seven pings.

They dove into these things so deeply that they were able to figure out that the flight did not crash, that

there was probably a hypoxia event among the cabin, that it was deliberate, and that the plane kept flying.

Not that it did not crash, but that it kept flying for at least six more hours and finally did probably crash in the southern Indian Ocean, all from seven little pings between the plane and the satellite.

That's right.

And then the final little clue here from the satellite is the ELT emergency transmitter failed.

It's emergency location transmitter.

And that's linked to a different satellite system.

And

one person, if you're conspiracy-minded, might say, well, you know what?

This means it didn't actually crash into the ocean.

But these ELTs apparently have a pretty low success rate.

And when you dive into the ocean with no power, it's at tremendous speed.

And that would have been enough probably to destroy the plane instantly and this ELT.

There's another, so there's four, I think, on the plane.

Did you say that?

I didn't say four.

So I believe there is four on the plane.

One of them, like, they can be disabled.

It's not a black box, by the way.

No, no, no.

This is just a beacon.

It pings a satellite, but isn't even, it's a different satellite from Marsat.

So it's like an extra fail-safe.

And this means that all four of them failed, which, again, some people think

that's evidence right there that this thing didn't actually crash.

We'll talk about that in the next episode.

How about that?

All right.

I think we don't do listener mails on a part one.

No.

So just strap in and I hope you can hold off from researching for a couple of days on this one.

Maybe have a Bloody Mary while you're waiting.

Agreed.

Well, anyway, in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to stuffyushouldknow.com and check out our social links.

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