February 26, 2025 • 54 mins
On March 8th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished during a routine flight from Kuala Lumpaur to Beijing. While public -- and, later, private -- entities from across the region searched for signs of the craft, no one was able to figure out what exactly happened. Join the guys as they delve into a mystery that remains largely unsolved three years later -- the disappearance of MH370, and why some people claim there's a conspiracy afoot.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist, Welcome back to tonight's classic episode. You
have probably heard a lot of scuttle but about aviation
in general over the past few months, especially recently with
the changes happening to the FAA here in the US,
and of course with the early controversies surrounding Bowie. The
(00:25):
America's answer to Airbus not.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
To mention the news that came through. I believe yesterday
there was a Delta flight in Toronto that crash landed
on the airstrip and was inverted completely. I was asking
Matt off Air if anyone was killed. I think it
was just like an emergency evacuation.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
After the fact.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
But it's kind of crazy times to be flying the
friendly skies guys.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, several people were critically injured, but nobody got killed
in that incident, thankfully. They were all hanging upside down
though inside the plane, which but hey, that didn't stop
the three of us from getting on planes.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah, I mean, what else are we going to do?
Run really fast? I can't swim all right, but I
can't swim across the Pacific yet. I'm trying to get
my reps in. This is the thing. Though, thankfully, no
one died in that recent aviation debacle, and the plane
was like everybody knew where the plane was the entire time.
(01:28):
And it may be immensely, profoundly disconcerting to realize that
even now, in these our modern years, an entire plane
can simply disappear. In November twenty nineteen, we explored something
a lot of our fellow conspiracy realists. We're asking us
about Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Let's hear about him.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events, and turn back now or learn
this stuff. They don't want you to know. A production
of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Noel is not with us today.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
They call me Ben. We are joined, as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control Deck and in spirit.
Today we are joined with our returning super producer Seth Johnson.
So say hello to Seth. Let us know if you
think there is a particularly compelling moniker or nickname or
appellation for Seth. That's appalation app e l l A
(02:45):
t io N, not the Mountain range. I think Seth.
You just said your favorite one was Seth Metal. In
the meantime, you are you, You are here, and that
makes this stuff they don't want you to to know. Matt,
I feel like it's been forever.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Yeah, you've been on an adventure.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
An adventure is a way to describe it. The last
time I saw you, we were in Los Angeles.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
That's correct. Yeah. Yeah, And by the time this comes out,
our episode with mister Dan Harmon will be out. But
maybe that's something we should discuss when all three of
us are in the room.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Sure. Yeah. We took planes to our respective destinations, you
and you and Noel went to Atlanta and I went
to a couple other places before coming back to Atlanta.
And the reality is that we are on the road
and in the air pretty often. And you know, many
(03:45):
of our fellow listeners tuning in today are part of
the one point seven million US residents on a plane,
like as we speak.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Yeah, there are a lot of us in the air
right now. Flyind this, guys.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, And let's be honest, planes are amazing, astonishing, even
it's this incredible thing that, for the majority of human
civilization was a wild fantasy.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Oh yeah, and it's who is I think it's Luisy Ka,
who has a bit about how amazing planes are. Maybe
you don't listen to it anymore. I don't know where
what the rules are, but you can he's got a
great bit on it. It exists. But here's the thing.
Sometimes traveling by a plane is that amazing experience, but
other times, I mean it's at least a frustrating thing,
(04:30):
or it can be. There are a lot of pros
and cons. So if you are going to get on
a plane, you'd know for sure you're going to get
to your destination a lot faster than by any other means.
If it's across a large body of water, then it's
insanely faster than taking a boat. If it's across land,
it's significantly faster in taking a car. But that is,
(04:50):
of course, if everything goes well. There are some issues.
Like we said, just getting through security now at this
point is a bother. And also, you know, like we said,
there are one point seven million people who are going
to be in the air flying. They're also at airports
hanging out and it gets really crowded. The planes themselves
(05:11):
get really crowded, and also you got to deal with
things like weather, because, let's face it, planes get delayed
and sometimes even canceled because of the way moisture acts
in the air.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Or even lightning right as well, so we hear in
stuff they don't want you to know, or no strangers
being stuck in airports. Longtime listeners will recall that our
current record was somewhere around sixteen eighteen hours in our
own airport in Atlanta, Georgia. Let's also add, of course,
(05:48):
the con that airplanes as they are designed now are
terrible for the environment. That's just true. It's true that
planes are often delayed, and while highly unlikely, plane sometimes crash.
Let's emphasize this. You are much safer in an airplane
than you will ever be in a car. So anybody
afraid of flying, just think about that while you're driving
(06:11):
on the interstate.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Unless you're just in a car in a well yeah,
I was gonna say in a garage, but that can
be unsafe too.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
All right, if it's running in the interstate. When you're driving,
let's all be very conscious of the fact that the
only thing preventing other people from careening into you is
an honor system of painted lines. In most cases, there's
no physical barrier. A plane is much safer, but a
plane will still sometimes crash, and every once in a
(06:40):
while a plane will simply disappear. In today's episode, we're
exploring one of the most recent, most famous examples of
disappearing aircraft. Here's today's question, what happened to Malaysia Airlines
Flight three seventy. Here are the facts.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Okay, So there are a lot of numbers in here
that we're going to be going over. Some of them
are much more important than We'll kind of let you
know as we're going. So the flight in question, Malaysia
Airlines Flight three seventy, was the plane at least a
Boeing seven seven seven now is a specific kind of
seven seven seven. It was a two h six er. Now,
(07:17):
this just means that it was an extended range versions,
so it can travel further than the regular Boeing seven
seven seven. Now, this particular model of seven seven seven
has been in the air, been flying commercially since nineteen
ninety seven. And this model is it's huge. Its length
is over two hundred feet and it's designed to accommodate
(07:39):
upwards of two hundred and sixty passengers. So two hundred
and sixty plus. It can be basically changed slightly. How
how the seat structure is to accommodate more people.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah, here's a little conspiracy that we'll just add in
add in for free here on our free show, and
we'll confirm this Concer two airline leg room is getting
smaller with each successive iteration.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Why has that been because.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
They even put more people on the plane. Oh oh,
and then there's still sell more tickets than there are
seats in the plane. There's a there's a dark science
to it. This particular plane in question, the one that
the Boeing seven seven seven two h sixty R that
was flying on flight three seventy. It had the serial
(08:30):
number two eight four two zero. It had the registration
number nine m MRO. It was the four hundred and
fourth Boeing seven seventy seven produced. It was first flown
on May fourteenth, two thousand and two, and then after
that it was delivered to Malaysia Airlines on May thirty first,
two thousand and two. And you know, like we were
(08:52):
talking about with the confirmed conspiracy to rob you of
leg room, this plane was configured to fit two hundred
and eighty two passengers. Yeah, So luckily for the people
who are stuck in those middle rows, the plane wasn't
packed to the gills, right.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, Well, let's go ahead and talk about that, just
so most people understand in the if you're thinking about
maybe a plane that you've been on before, if you've
flown in a plane Malaysia, this one, Malaysia Airlines flight
three seventy, had three seats in the center aisle. Then
it had two seats, you know, a row of two
seats on the left and a row of two seats
(09:28):
on the right. If you were sitting economy. It was
much more spread out and sparse if you were sitting
first class or a business class.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
And during this flight there were twelve crew members. There
were two hundred and twenty seven passengers. One hundred and
fifty three of those passengers were Chinese nationals, the majority
thirty eight passengers were Malaysian, and the rest were from
a combination a mixtape of twelve different countries. You will
read different estimates of the total number of people aboard,
(09:56):
but we'll have more on that later. The plane itself
had had no major incidents in the past, and routine
maintenance inspections had been carried out, the most recent one
on February twenty third, twenty fourteen. They found no significant issues,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
So it's pretty good. Twelve years of service almost with
no major incidents. I would take those odds if I
was gonna get on that plane or be the captain
of that plane. So let's get to the day. On
March eighth, twenty fourteen, So it departed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
and it was headed to Beijing, China. So and oh,
(10:34):
so oh, it's really important to note here this was
a red eye flight. This was one of those early
early morning you're gonna fly basically through the night and
probably sleep on the plane if you're a passenger. The
wheels were up at twelve thirty five am, the local time.
And it should also be noted that this is the
same they're essentially flying north east a little bit to
(10:56):
Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, so they're in the same time zone.
So when we're talking about times here, it's going to
be the same thing. So leaves at twelve thirty five am,
it's scheduled to arrive in Beijing at six thirty five am.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
And this was a routine trip. It's one of two
daily flights the airline conducts along this route. That's pretty
common with a lot of airline destinations because you can
fly the plane from point A to point B and
then fly it from point B to point A, so
it ends up where it left and it still has
its home. It's HQ, but now you have two flights
(11:32):
instead of one. This flight takes about five hours and
thirty four minutes. This consumes a ballpark of eighty two
thousand pounds of jet fuel, which is normal, and in
another routine practice, the aircraft carries one hundred and eight thousand,
(11:53):
two hundred pounds of fuel, including its reserves. This gives
it an overall flight time endurance. It can be in
the air for seven hours and thirty one minutes. This
ensures that pilots can keep the craft aloft in case
they need to divert to another airport. Think of it
like a form of insurance, a margin of error. Again,
(12:16):
this is a pretty common thing. This is not in
any way unusual. We have to set the facts out there,
so we've established the following things as being normal and routine.
Right the roots, the passengers, the mountain fuel they had
and so on. But there was a very abnormal and
tragic thing that happened that made flight three seventy different
(12:38):
from all the other routine trips back and forth from
Beijing and Malaysia, and that was that this plane disappeared.
What exactly happened will answer the question after a word
from our sponsor. We're back a little bit of a
(12:59):
fake Matt, unfortunately, we will answer what we know about
this question.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
Yes, the official numbers and such times and what occurred.
And again, it may be a little bit confusing as
we're going through this because there are a lot of
times and kind of numbers that are occurring here. Just
we'll try and keep you as focused as possible as
we're getting through this. But this stuff is important. So
(13:25):
you've probably been on a plane before, and you've watched
movies hopefully maybe okay, So if you've ever seen a
movie before where a pilot is involved, or you get
to spend time in a cockpit of a pilot, or
maybe you've ever flown a plane, or you have any
working knowledge of this, maybe you've just used Microsoft's flight
simulator like I have, so you know that there are
(13:47):
important transmissions that occur between air traffic control and the
person who is in control of a flight an aircraft
flying vehicle in the sky. And a lot of this
is actually transmissions that are done by voice, where two
human beings are talking to each other. But a lot
(14:08):
of other really important stuff occurs just through the systems
within the airplane itself and the radar that exists at
air traffic control at varying places throughout the world. As
a plane is flying over certain areas, and there are
these handoffs that occur between the varying air traffic control systems.
(14:29):
So let's say in this case they're flying from Kuala
Lumpur up to Beijing. There are several places they're going
to go over Vietnam, right, So as they're going into Vietnam,
they have to then begin communicating rather than the Kuala
Lumpur air Traffic Control to then begin communicating with the
Vietnam Air traffic Control or whichever local air traffic controllers
(14:52):
are there. So just keep that in mind as we're
going through here. Communications are key. So the last automated
transmission that came from the plane that was sent out
to air traffic controllers was this automated position report, and
it's something that was sent through a cars ACARS, the
(15:13):
aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting system, and this occurred at
one six Malaysian time, so that came that's what twelve
thirty five wheels up to one oh six. That's where
that signal went out.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
And this signal, this message, this transmission does not contain
a multiple plot twist or anything. It's sort of the
metadata of the flight. How much gas do we have left?
Where are we is it where we're supposed to be
and the answers to all these questions at the time
where yes, we have ninety six six hundred pounds of gas,
(15:50):
where we're ready to go. We're doing the right thing.
The final verbal signal to air traffic control occurs just
a bit after. It's a one nineteen one twenty in
the morning. Captain Zahari Ahmad Shah acknowledges the transition from
the Kuala Lumpur radar to the ho Chi Min Area
Control Center. And that's just as you said earlier, Matt.
(16:14):
Let's think of it kind of like an audio radar
version of a handshake or a pass off, So that
despite no longer being in Malaysia's airspace, the plane is
still under the watchful eye of some sort of authority.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, and that's gonna come. It's going to be important
later on in the story because there's a very specific
thing you have to do within the airplane to change
your transponder to then it's called squawk, to then change
that to send out to the new air traffic controllers.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Just so. The crew was expected to signal air traffic
control in Ho Chi Min City as the aircraft passed
into Vietnamese airspace, and that was Vietnamese airspace was just
north of the point where contact was lost. Interesting part
about that last verbal signal. We have the We have
(17:11):
the quote of what they said. The controller Kuala Lumpur
Center radioed Malaysian three seven zero contact Ho Chi Minh
one two zero decimal nine. Good night. The captain Zahari
answers good night Malaysia three seven zero. But he doesn't
read back the frequency the way he should have according
to protocol. Otherwise that transmission is normal. He didn't say anything,
(17:36):
you know, like the elder gods rise, the stars are right,
the rivers run red with blood. He just said what
he was supposed to say. And when we get into
the pinging the science of the radar here, we just
have to understand a few basic things. Radar relies on
just simple raw pingsing thing thing off different objects in
(17:58):
the sky, but air traffic control systems use what's known
as secondary radar. Secondary radar needs a transponder signal that
is transmitted by each airplane and contains more information than
the primary radar does. Secondary radar comes from the plane
has the airplane's identity and altitude. A few seconds after
(18:21):
MH three seventy crosses into Vietnamese airspace, the symbol showing
its transponder its secondary radar stuff drops from the screens.
It disappears at least as far as Malaysian Air Traffic
Control can see, and then sorry, in their primary radar,
it disappears from Malaysian Air traffic control. Thirty seven seconds later,
(18:45):
the whole thing disappears from secondary radar. And that time
occurs that's around one twenty one thirty nine minutes after takeoff.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
And that's really weird because that would possibly signal that
someone within the aircraft in the cockpit turned their transponder
to stand by, which is like I'm trying to imagine
what an equivalent of that would be it's like a Bluetooth.
Imagine a Bluetooth machine that you've got somewhere in your
(19:15):
house and it's connected up. Let's say to your phone, right,
You've got let's say it's a Google Home speaker in
your phone. The phone is the airplane and the Google
Home is the air traffic controller, and they're connected via
this Bluetooth signal because both are sending out signals, right,
and they're talking to each other. In this scenario, it
(19:36):
appears that somebody just turned the Bluetooth off on that
phone or the airplane to where Now that Google Home
is still searching for that thing, but it can't find
it because the phone is no longer transmitting.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, exactly. The people in the Vietnamese control center, they
know that MH three seventy is crossed in the airspace.
They've seen it disappear, and they tried to contact the
aircraft to various means, to no avail. The captain of
another aircraft attempted to contact the crew a little bit
(20:10):
after one point thirty using the International Air Distress or
IAD frequency, and he was trying to reach them to
relay what air traffic control in Vietnam was saying, which
was basically what happened to you call us check in,
and the captain of this other aircraft says that he
(20:32):
was able to establish communication, but he only heard mumbling
and static, which would make for a very creepy sound.
Cue purpose.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
In that right there could get into something that may
have occurred on that plane. Just the just keep that
in your mind, mumbling and static.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
And calls me to Flight three seventies cockpit at two
thirty nine AM and seven thirteen am as this search
is continuing and reaching fever pitch. They went unanswered, but
they were acknowledged by the aircraft's onboard satellite data unit.
So something acknowledged that received it. But it was an
(21:21):
automated acknowledgment. It was a machine.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
But it is at least good to know because again,
if we're following our timeline here, we're still around one
thirty right when we're talking about this other airplane that
was attempting to contact. But if we're jumping to you know,
the plane was supposed to be in Beijing at six
thirty am, right, and it's the same it's the same
time zone. So if they're pinging at seven thirteen. They're
(21:47):
attempting to establish communication again, and something on that plane
is still responding. That means it's it's functioning somewhere right.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yes. Exactly around the time that Flight three seventy disappears,
radar and its transponders stops pinging. Military radar shows Flight
three seventy turning right but then beginning a left turn
to some southwesterly direction. From one thirty in the morning
(22:16):
until one thirty five in the morning, military radar shows
Flight three seventy at thirty five thousand, seven hundred feet, so,
despite becoming unresponsive, the bird is still in the air.
The last satellite contact with the plane occurs much later
at eight nineteen am, which is believed to be the
time around the time when the plane ran out of
(22:38):
fuel somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean, and from that
point on, as far as we know, the plane largely disappeared.
So what happened, we'll tell you after a word from
our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. In the days, weeks, months,
(23:05):
years following the disappearance of the flight, numerous theories have
cropped up. There are a ton of them out there, folks,
and they range from the fanciful to what I have
to admit is the disturbingly plausible. Matt, which way do
you want to go with this?
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Let's start with some of the most plausible stuff that's
out there, because there have been some I think well
reasoned arguments as to what have possibly occurred. However, now
that we know a little more information, specifically what we
mentioned right before the break, the military radar info that
was held back for quite a time there by the
(23:42):
Malaysian authorities, we do know that that weird left hand
turn occurred, or at least that they went off course.
Right we talked about that northeast direction heading up to
Beijing where it should have been, and it didn't do that.
It turned around, went back over Malay and then over
the tip of Indonesia there and then took a left
(24:04):
turn somehow. That's what we know. So taking all that
into account, it changes things and it makes some of
these most plausible explanations a little different. So let's get
into the one of the most plausible, the idea that
somehow the people responsible for flying this plane either lost
(24:24):
consciousness or we're experiencing something called hypoxia, and hypoxia is
just a fancy way of saying, a lack of oxygen
specifically to the brain, and then what happens. It describes
what happens in the brain because of that lack of oxygen.
And this generally occurs on aircraft when there's a decompression
(24:45):
of the cabin right just quickly to go over this bend.
Maybe you can probably you could probably explain this a
little better than I But the thinning of air as
you go higher and higher in altitude is a real
issue because humans. Human bodies need a certain density of
oxygen in air to be able to breathe correctly. And
(25:05):
when you're flying in a plane, if you were just
at that altitude, like thirty five thousand feet in the
air without a pressurized cabin, you wouldn't be able to breathe.
It would only take a few seconds before you would
begin to experience hypoxia, not be able to think correctly,
and then pass out. In a plane, it's pressurized, and
(25:28):
it's generally pressurized to around ten thousand feet or the
equivalent of about ten thousand feet in the air, So
the air you're breathing inside the cabin is they call
it ten thousand feet generally it's the equivalent of that.
In this case. If the cabin was depressurized, then the
crew would have been experiencing hypoxia. They would have been disoriented,
(25:48):
They wouldn't have been able to make good decisions, or
at least decisions that were based on their training, and
if that happened, it could lead down this cascading pathway
of bad decisions and then tragedy. But here's the thing.
Even if the crew was unresponsive because the cabin de pressurized,
they experienced hypoxia, they passed out, Even the autopilot that
(26:12):
exists on these Boeing seven seven seven planes would have
kicked in and they would have at least stayed on
that path northeast towards Beijing.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, the autopilot would stay on until the engine literally
ran out of fuel and experienced a flame out, at
which point the autopilot would disengage and the aircraft would
crash very soon thereafter. However, this doesn't explain why the
planes seemed to turn around after becoming unresponsive, which I
think you mentioned at the top before we even started
(26:45):
going into theories. Yeah, autopilot won't do that. An autopilot
program would not do that. Hypoxia is known to cause
confusion and disorientation, which can lead to abnormal erratic behavior,
And the question here is could that have played a role.
Could the gradual decompression of the cabin occurred such that
(27:07):
people didn't maybe instantly pass out, but the captain or
someone piloting the aircraft was confused and freaking out and
then tried at the last minute to do what they
saw as a course correct. That's the question. Australian Transport
Safety Bureau doesn't one hundred percent confirm this. They're very
(27:27):
careful with the way they build their case. If you
read the report, they're essentially saying, the evidence indicates this
is the most plausible explanation, but there are other ones
out there. What if this was I know this is
a tense term for some people, an inside job. What
if the plane was hijacked by a member of the crew,
(27:50):
possibly in a suicide attempt. Rational Wiki has a great
approach to this. They summarize the following facts about the
pilot we'd mentioned earlier. Zahari Ahmad shah Shah was reported
by his coworkers and friends to be going through a
period of quote emotional distress due to his marriage falling apart.
(28:12):
A later police investigation, they did a background check on
everyone on the plane, and in these, of course these
background checks, the police investigation of Zahari found that he
had been acting in an erratic manner in the last
few days leading up to this flight. Specifically, he had
(28:33):
made absolutely no plans after March eighth. Yeah, that's where
his calendar ended. And it sounds crazy at first to say, Wait,
a pilot hijacked their own plane to commit suicide or
something like that. Weirdly enough, that's not as uncommon as
any of us would probably like to believe.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
It certainly happened a few times that I can think
of in the past. It's a weird thing to imagine
somebody deciding to take their own life along with two
hundred plus others. It's hard to imagine. Well, it's but
it's not. It's not implausible.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yeah, Unfortunately, that's something we know because one thing this
show has taught us about the human experience is that
humans are very very selfish and very very talented at
rationalizing their horrible base traits. Right, So we know that
it's we know it's not uncommon. There's another example. German
(29:36):
Wings flight nine five two five. That's a similar thing.
We also know that the same technology that prevents outside
hijackers from successfully taking a plane is the same technology
that helps inside hijackers carry off something like this. The
cockpit door of this Boeing seven seven seven had anti
(29:57):
hijacking technology on it make it once the door's locked,
nearly impossible, virtually impossible for crew members or passengers to
break in and stop him. Also, the police investigation turned
up some weird stuff at his homemade flight simulator. Right.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
Oh, yeah, he had this really impressive flight simulator set
up at his house. You know. For me, when I
was playing it, it was just on my home computer,
had a mouse and a keyboard, and I thought, I
it was awesome. But for him, he actually had a
lot of the controls, a lot of the actual devices
that you would need to manipulate on a plane to
(30:36):
make it function. And what they found there was very strange.
Apparently when they actually pulled stuff up, all they really
found were coordinates of basically like takeoff and landing. Right, So,
there were several coordinates that were out in the Indian
(30:56):
Ocean where it's thought within the area that it's thought
that perhaps this plane crashed. Did we talk about that already? Like,
we honestly don't know at all where this plane crashed.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Yeah, there's literally a giant ocean and a huge number
of plot points basically where this plane could have crashed.
It's insane, but several of the coordinates on its flight
simulator were within that area, just in the ocean. And
you generally don't plot points like that when you're flying
(31:33):
a simulator.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Right, Yeah. According to New York Magazine, the the US
FBI was able to recover six deleted data points that
have been stored in his simulator program in the weeks
before three seventy disappeared. And what's interesting about that article,
which is through their intelligence or brand or imprint, is
(31:55):
that you can see the path here with the simulated
flight Sahari took in red, and then the projected flight
path of the actual plane in yellow. They don't line
up one hundred percent, but the direction is more or
less exactly the same. So this flight simulator stuff is
(32:17):
not proof positive that Zahari himself took over the plane
and purposely crashed it or crashed it in an attempt
to get somewhere.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
Well, yeah, because there's no you can't prove intent or
anything like that with his what he was doing on
his flight simulator. There's no way he may have just
been wanting to fly out towards Antarctica that day because
he was bored on his flight simulator.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Yeah, seriously, he may have just been And call me
crazy here. I mean, maybe this two timfoil hat for everybody.
Because he's a pilot. He might have just been practicing
flying planes. Yeah, I mean, maybe maybe I'm the fringe
theorist in this case. Here's here's the problem. A report
in twenty eighteen claimed to rule out suicide based on
(33:04):
an analysis of the cruise backgrounds including the pilot and
then personalities, and analysis of voice recordings. This report claimed
the pilot wasn't the culprit, but it did not rule
out interference by a third party. And we do have
to we have a couple of things we have to
mention about those reports in general, which is that the
(33:25):
Malaysian government and a couple of other governments scrambled to
cover up and suppress things in the initial in the
initial early days of the investigation, partially because they did
not want to They did not want to have bad
PR ultimately, and I don't mean to sound reductive calling
it that, but they didn't want to have bad PR.
(33:47):
They also did not want to reveal their military capabilities,
because if you allow military tech to enter into a
civilian or commercial search like this, you're essentially giving away
information to other adjacent countries and state actors. And Vietnam
will say, oh you can you can see that, Yeah,
(34:09):
but that's in our airspace, and then of course China
will say, oh, so that's how far your radar goes delightful,
Thanks for the info, bro. But this other report argues that, well,
it doesn't argue it does not rule out interference by
a third party. And this idea of hijacking by an
(34:30):
external party is the most commonly cited explanation. It's the
one you saw in most mainstream US media. The problem
is there's no terror group that has taken responsibility, or
no terrorists who said we did this. It's us.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
There's a weird open letter from some group purporting to
be from China, like a terror group from China, but
it was it was ruled to be likely not actual.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
And background checks and all the passengers have come up
relatively clean, except for some scuttle but about two Iranian
passengers flying on fake German passports, I want to say
there's still no known motive for the disappearance. Fire has
also been advanced as a possibility. That's true. Fire has
(35:16):
happened in the past, but until we actually find the
majority of the wreckage, there's no way to know it.
They are less plausible things that have been advanced. There's
always an alarmist call citing jahattist. Oh yeah, there's the
possibility of a cyber attack.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Oh yeah. And that has to do with the plane's
autopilot system, because after nine to eleven, as another way
to try and prevent some kind of hijacking, Boeing installed
this specific countermeasure within the autopilot so that air traffic
controllers could take over basically and remote control fly that plane.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
And in two thousand and seven Boeing had said they
had installed what they call the un into ruptible auto pilot.
So the theory is that hijackers on the plane around
the ground hijacked this autopilot program and tampered with it,
sort of the way that US intelligence agencies have been
accused of tampering with remote driving capabilities of newer vehicles.
(36:19):
And there's a tech writer named Jeff Wise who said,
maybe the hijackers access the systems through the floor of
the first class compartment, being able to spoof satellite data
to mislead searchers. And then he said maybe they flew
the plane north to Kazakhstan. But this doesn't This doesn't
explain nor account for dozens of other problems. One thing
(36:43):
I think is interesting that is probably not true. There's
a Delta Airlines captain named Field McConnell. His real first
name is Field, and he said that there was corporate
espionage a play that flight three P seventy was captured
because some of the passengers on the plane were Chinese
employees of an Austin based semiconductor manufacturer named Freescale. And
(37:06):
this is something that some of us have heard. Reading
into three seventy, Captain McConnell claimed that the paint and
equipment on flight three seventy were secret devices produced by
Freescale that gave the plane stealth capabilities. So he's saying
like it didn't wreck, Yeah, it was captured. The corporate
espionage angle is pretty fascinating. You know, initially when that
(37:30):
came out, I thought, I didn't know whether there was
sand to it, but I thought, okay, well these are
this is a collection of people who work in the
same rarefied air, right, so they would be potentially high
value subject matter experts to someone. But does that make
(37:51):
them a high value target? And that's what I couldn't
get past. They're easier ways to disappear people.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Certainly, but the concentration of a lot of those people
is if we were gaming it out, that would be
very helpful.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Yeah, true. And the other there's another part here, which
is that the plane doesn't have to have high value
targets quote unquote a board for it to just be
shot down. And a lot of people said it was
shot down. It was very popular with the right wing
contingents here in the United States. The theory is not
(38:30):
super complex, just says a government somewhere, possibly Malaysia, possibly
the US, possibly China shot plane down.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
So there are a lot of reasons there. Some of
it was just because the plane ended up in airspace
that was controlled, specifically over Ukraine. That was the thought
at least, and that he was shot down because it
was perceived as a threat in controlled airspace. There's some
other stuff in there about Oh I forgot even mention this.
(39:00):
Do we talk about North Korea and that possible connection
that proposed, Yeah, it's not possible there. Well, I can't
say that. It doesn't make much sense to me personally.
The idea that for some reason it was flown to
North Korea on purpose.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Yeah, that's a that's a reddit theory, right, yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
The only strong support I saw for that theory or
the argument for it was there was enough fuel in
the plane yea to make it to pill and.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Getting it would have been in range done. That's it.
Of course he went to North Korea.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Yeah, that's that's one of those things that gets advanced
is sort of a you know, I'm just asking questions
and there's nothing wrong with asking questions. Yeah, kind of
thing like that guy who was like, hey, maybe it
was a black hole.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Oh you mean Don Lemon from CNN.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Yeah, it's true. Don Lemon over at CNN asked whether
a miniature black hole could to have caused the wreck.
The answer is probably not, Don, probably not. But also
this hid behind that rhetorical device of just asking questions. Yeah,
by framing a preposterous claim as though it is a question,
(40:18):
we put the burden of proof on the person that
we're arguing at. Right now, we no longer have to
prove that we think the Queen of England is a
half hybrid alien who just has a real interest in
like screwing humans over for some reason. Now we just say,
(40:41):
I'm just asking the question, what if the Queen of
England is like a half alien reptilian, half human hybrid
and just generally hates people.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
I'm just asking, Yeah, in this case, don Lemon, I
think worded it as preposterously. Is it preposterous to think
that maybe a black hole opened up and sucked in
that plane and then closed and then nobody saw the
plane again, But nobody saw the black hole again. It
was just a quick little I'm just asking, just tell
me if that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
And then that's that's very much related to the other
idea aliens. There was a poll on CNN's website that
I think has been deleted now, and according to that poll,
nine percent of the people responding answered that it was
quote very likely or quote somewhat likely that Flight three
(41:32):
seventy was abducted by aliens. Time travelers or beings from
another dimension. There is no scientific basis for that. That's
a self reporting pole.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
Yes, and that's just the idea that maybe the concept
that nine percent of the people in that particular pole
believed that somehow aliens were involved. Right, It wasn't any
specific there's no specifics to that pole. It wasn't like
were was the plane itself transported onto another larger alien vessel.
(42:03):
Did as extraterrestrials board the plane and then take it
to North Korea. Sorry, that's poking fun a little bit,
but you know it's not to be poked fun at
here is the fact that hundreds of people went missing
on that plane, including the pilot and the first captain
and all the crew and all of the family members
(42:25):
that were on there. So these kinds of conspiracy theories. Again,
while while I'm making fun of it a little bit personally,
that is not to discount the tragedy that has occurred here.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Yes, and well said, there are other theories at play here,
the idea that the plane was abducted by the US
and taken to the a toll of di Ago Garcia,
or that it was taken to some other place. There
are different genres of MH three P seventy or conspiracy theories.
(43:03):
But we do know that some experts have claimed to
have found parts of the wreckage. Do you hear about this?
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Oh? Yeah, several pieces have washed up on the shores
of small islands out there within the Indian Ocean. Pieces
that are definitely you can you can link up the
serial numbers within these pieces. It's not the fuselage, it's the.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
There's a wing flap in Tanzania.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
Yeah, that's one of the things like that, you can
actually match it up and say, yes, this came from
this specific model and serial number.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
And there was a plain wing fragment in Martius Mauritius.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Yeah. There's a great, great article from the Atlantic called
What Really Happened to Malaysia's Missing Airplane that is written
by William Langwish or Languish.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
That's pretty recent, it's July twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Yeah, and within there he does Williams does a great
job of outlining there's a particular man that I cannot
recall his name right now, but.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
He Gibson Gibbs. It is Gibson Lane Gibson.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
He's the essentially self made Malaysia three Malaysia Airlines three
seventy hunter. I mean really, he's he's been looking for
pieces of debris that have washed up on shores across
the world, over, all over, and he's also put feelers
out to a lot of these smaller islands where you know,
(44:32):
stuff just happens to wash ashore and then they notify him.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
Yeah, to continue with the examples, there was a not
I am not an aviation expert. I do not know
what a flat perone is or a flat perone what
There was one found in Reunion Island or on Reunion
Island twenty fifteen. That would make a total of at
least three three confirmed pieces. But then there are other
(44:58):
things that have been found that are almost certainly from
the missing jetliner Madagascar. There was a cabin interior panel
found in June and twenty seventeen, engine calling in South Africa,
another interior panel on Rodriguez Island, horizontal stabilizers on Mozambique,
flap track fairing on Mozambique. The stuff is out there,
(45:20):
it's being found. One interesting conspiracy theory I heard about Gibson,
which I hope was not proposed in a serious air,
was that he had access to much more wreckage, but
was doling it out slowly for his reputation. And mister Gibson,
if you're listening, I do not believe that's the case.
(45:43):
And I think people are doing that we're hopefully being
satirical or trying to be edge lords online.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Yeah, I would agree, at least from the writing from
that article, it appears that his actions have been well intentioned,
like going to memorials to meet with family members of
victims and going, you know, traveling all over the world
with people. In particular, there was a young woman whose
mother I believe was lost in that flight. It's an
(46:12):
interesting thing because as they're finding these pieces of wreckage
that wash up on shores dotted across the area there,
the whole point is, or at least Gibson and some
of the other people involved, they're trying to trace back
through ocean currents where that piece of wreckage may have originated, right,
because if it was sixteen, you know, however many months
(46:35):
after the wreckage was found, from the day that they
know the plane went missing, you can kind of trace,
you know, just through the records of ocean currents what
possibly was the route, right, And then if you find
that route, then maybe you can find the origins of
where it actually went down, and you could find the
rest of the plane, and then the end goal for
(46:58):
that would be to find the black box so you
can actually hear what occurred inside that cockpit.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
And it's interesting you say that, because that would be
my summation to the importance of finding the black box. However,
that's not what the author from the Atlantic ends up proposing.
Because now we're several years past the event. People in
(47:23):
Australia have done all the research they could. The government
of China is censoring news that might The government of
China just wants to move on, right. The government in
Malaysia wishes that of course this never happened. They want
it to go away. And while people are still finding pieces,
(47:43):
and Gibson being one of the main sources of those pieces,
you would think that the government in Malaysia would be
more happy about it, right, But unfortunately that does not
seem to be the case. They want to walk away
from this because it made them look, bade them look
a little incompetent. They weren't following protocol. They were doing
(48:03):
cover ups pretty much immediately, and so to the Atlantic, author.
I guess the best way to sum it up is to
take an excerpt from their earlier piece in July twenty nineteen.
They say, quote, the important answers probably don't lie in
the ocean, but on land in Malaysia. That should be
(48:23):
the focus moving forward. Unless they are as incompetent as
the Air Force and air traffic control. The Malaysian police
know more than they have dared to say. The riddle
may not be deep. That is the frustration here. The
answers may well lie close at hand, but they are
more difficult to retrieve than any black box. If Blaine
Gibson wants a real adventure, he might spend a year
(48:45):
poking around Kuala Lumpur. I don't know what do you
think of that, Matt.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
It's weird to put it on Blaine Gibson like that,
because I think what he's doing is separate from what
the writer is talking about. The writer's saying about right
and an investigation into that corruption. What Blaine is doing
is literally trying to find pieces and then trace back,
working with Australia and a couple other places to trace
(49:13):
back to the originating point to find that black box.
So I don't know, to make inequivalency out of those
I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
I'm not doing that.
Speaker 3 (49:23):
No, No, that's what I'm saying. It doesn't It doesn't
make sense to me. But I see what the author
is saying in the same right that the way it
was obtuscated by the Malaysian military and some of those
you know groups, at least initially, it does lead you
down the path of they know something more than they're saying,
because they certainly did before it was leaked.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
And now the question is did they reveal all the
stuff they knew at the time or are they for
some reason holding back information? And if so, what is
that information? Yeah? Why what is the motivation? It goes
down to information and motive. And this is close to
where today's episode ends. We do not have all the answers.
(50:07):
There are pages and pages written about the event, but
what we can conclude is that it does clearly seem
to have wrecked many of the survivors. The relatives, the
family members and loved ones of people who most likely
died on this plane would of course be joyous for
(50:30):
the closure of discovering the bodies, giving them a proper
burial and so on. But the ocean is vast, and
at this time, while we can speculate about the circumstances
of these people's unfortunate deaths, we can not pinpoint where
(50:53):
the bulk of the plane is now, or even if
the plane exists in one largely coherent piece.
Speaker 3 (50:59):
Well, I don't know, man. It feels like if it
did crash into the ocean, you know, going as fast
as it generally would, it would be pretty difficult to
find a couple of big pieces of that plane. But
it doesn't make sense because it seems like there will
be more things in pieces floating on the surface than
wherever recovered.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Yeah. Also, the ocean is awash with trash, yeah, and huge.
It's very difficult. It's very Our species is very good
at losing things. It's very difficult to find missing planes.
I know that seems counterintuitive because planes are big, right, Yeah,
but the ocean is bigger, and we lose planes way
(51:41):
more often than I would like to believe. I agreed, agreed,
And this leads us to something that you have been
thinking of off air, right Occam's Razor.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
Yes, there's an article that's written by Christine Nagrony, and
she she basically just puts the idea that if we
do take Okham's razor into account, here, the combination of
a transponder that ended up somehow in standby mode, a
depressurized cabin that disoriented the people who were meant to
be flying that plane, and then an inexperienced first officer
(52:17):
who didn't know exactly what to do to then gain
control of the plane. Because in her mind, at least
to the facts that she has the idea that the
very very experienced pilot that was supposed to be piloting
the plane was in the bathroom for some reason in
the main cabin or in the business class cabin when
(52:41):
the cabin depressurized so that he could not get back
to where he needed to be to fly the plane,
and the inexperienced guy was at the helm. That's at
least what she believes, and that's what led to ultimately
to the weird stuff that happened on the flight and
in the crash. But that scenario does not account for
(53:06):
that strange left turn, well, I mean, the whole turning
round of the plane from their heading towards Beijing to
then taking that big left turn towards Antarctica.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
The manual Southwestern term, which was essentially.
Speaker 3 (53:19):
A one to eight because somebody did that.
Speaker 1 (53:21):
Yeah, someone had to do that, And that's our classic
episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
It's right let us know what you think.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
You can reach.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on
Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy
Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three std WYTK. That's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say, then can fit in
that voicemail. Why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (53:57):
We are the entities the read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (54:27):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist, Welcome back to tonight's classic episode. You
have probably heard a lot of scuttle but about aviation
in general over the past few months, especially recently with
the changes happening to the FAA here in the US,
and of course with the early controversies surrounding Bowie. The
(00:25):
America's answer to Airbus not.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
To mention the news that came through. I believe yesterday
there was a Delta flight in Toronto that crash landed
on the airstrip and was inverted completely. I was asking
Matt off Air if anyone was killed. I think it
was just like an emergency evacuation.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
After the fact.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
But it's kind of crazy times to be flying the
friendly skies guys.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, several people were critically injured, but nobody got killed
in that incident, thankfully. They were all hanging upside down
though inside the plane, which but hey, that didn't stop
the three of us from getting on planes.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah, I mean, what else are we going to do?
Run really fast? I can't swim all right, but I
can't swim across the Pacific yet. I'm trying to get
my reps in. This is the thing. Though, thankfully, no
one died in that recent aviation debacle, and the plane
was like everybody knew where the plane was the entire time.
(01:28):
And it may be immensely, profoundly disconcerting to realize that
even now, in these our modern years, an entire plane
can simply disappear. In November twenty nineteen, we explored something
a lot of our fellow conspiracy realists. We're asking us
about Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Let's hear about him.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events, and turn back now or learn
this stuff. They don't want you to know. A production
of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Noel is not with us today.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
They call me Ben. We are joined, as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control Deck and in spirit.
Today we are joined with our returning super producer Seth Johnson.
So say hello to Seth. Let us know if you
think there is a particularly compelling moniker or nickname or
appellation for Seth. That's appalation app e l l A
(02:45):
t io N, not the Mountain range. I think Seth.
You just said your favorite one was Seth Metal. In
the meantime, you are you, You are here, and that
makes this stuff they don't want you to to know. Matt,
I feel like it's been forever.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Yeah, you've been on an adventure.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
An adventure is a way to describe it. The last
time I saw you, we were in Los Angeles.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
That's correct. Yeah. Yeah, And by the time this comes out,
our episode with mister Dan Harmon will be out. But
maybe that's something we should discuss when all three of
us are in the room.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Sure. Yeah. We took planes to our respective destinations, you
and you and Noel went to Atlanta and I went
to a couple other places before coming back to Atlanta.
And the reality is that we are on the road
and in the air pretty often. And you know, many
(03:45):
of our fellow listeners tuning in today are part of
the one point seven million US residents on a plane,
like as we speak.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
Yeah, there are a lot of us in the air
right now. Flyind this, guys.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, And let's be honest, planes are amazing, astonishing, even
it's this incredible thing that, for the majority of human
civilization was a wild fantasy.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Oh yeah, and it's who is I think it's Luisy Ka,
who has a bit about how amazing planes are. Maybe
you don't listen to it anymore. I don't know where
what the rules are, but you can he's got a
great bit on it. It exists. But here's the thing.
Sometimes traveling by a plane is that amazing experience, but
other times, I mean it's at least a frustrating thing,
(04:30):
or it can be. There are a lot of pros
and cons. So if you are going to get on
a plane, you'd know for sure you're going to get
to your destination a lot faster than by any other means.
If it's across a large body of water, then it's
insanely faster than taking a boat. If it's across land,
it's significantly faster in taking a car. But that is,
(04:50):
of course, if everything goes well. There are some issues.
Like we said, just getting through security now at this
point is a bother. And also, you know, like we said,
there are one point seven million people who are going
to be in the air flying. They're also at airports
hanging out and it gets really crowded. The planes themselves
(05:11):
get really crowded, and also you got to deal with
things like weather, because, let's face it, planes get delayed
and sometimes even canceled because of the way moisture acts
in the air.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Or even lightning right as well, so we hear in
stuff they don't want you to know, or no strangers
being stuck in airports. Longtime listeners will recall that our
current record was somewhere around sixteen eighteen hours in our
own airport in Atlanta, Georgia. Let's also add, of course,
(05:48):
the con that airplanes as they are designed now are
terrible for the environment. That's just true. It's true that
planes are often delayed, and while highly unlikely, plane sometimes crash.
Let's emphasize this. You are much safer in an airplane
than you will ever be in a car. So anybody
afraid of flying, just think about that while you're driving
(06:11):
on the interstate.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Unless you're just in a car in a well yeah,
I was gonna say in a garage, but that can
be unsafe too.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
All right, if it's running in the interstate. When you're driving,
let's all be very conscious of the fact that the
only thing preventing other people from careening into you is
an honor system of painted lines. In most cases, there's
no physical barrier. A plane is much safer, but a
plane will still sometimes crash, and every once in a
(06:40):
while a plane will simply disappear. In today's episode, we're
exploring one of the most recent, most famous examples of
disappearing aircraft. Here's today's question, what happened to Malaysia Airlines
Flight three seventy. Here are the facts.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Okay, So there are a lot of numbers in here
that we're going to be going over. Some of them
are much more important than We'll kind of let you
know as we're going. So the flight in question, Malaysia
Airlines Flight three seventy, was the plane at least a
Boeing seven seven seven now is a specific kind of
seven seven seven. It was a two h six er. Now,
(07:17):
this just means that it was an extended range versions,
so it can travel further than the regular Boeing seven
seven seven. Now, this particular model of seven seven seven
has been in the air, been flying commercially since nineteen
ninety seven. And this model is it's huge. Its length
is over two hundred feet and it's designed to accommodate
(07:39):
upwards of two hundred and sixty passengers. So two hundred
and sixty plus. It can be basically changed slightly. How
how the seat structure is to accommodate more people.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah, here's a little conspiracy that we'll just add in
add in for free here on our free show, and
we'll confirm this Concer two airline leg room is getting
smaller with each successive iteration.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Why has that been because.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
They even put more people on the plane. Oh oh,
and then there's still sell more tickets than there are
seats in the plane. There's a there's a dark science
to it. This particular plane in question, the one that
the Boeing seven seven seven two h sixty R that
was flying on flight three seventy. It had the serial
(08:30):
number two eight four two zero. It had the registration
number nine m MRO. It was the four hundred and
fourth Boeing seven seventy seven produced. It was first flown
on May fourteenth, two thousand and two, and then after
that it was delivered to Malaysia Airlines on May thirty first,
two thousand and two. And you know, like we were
(08:52):
talking about with the confirmed conspiracy to rob you of
leg room, this plane was configured to fit two hundred
and eighty two passengers. Yeah, So luckily for the people
who are stuck in those middle rows, the plane wasn't
packed to the gills, right.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, Well, let's go ahead and talk about that, just
so most people understand in the if you're thinking about
maybe a plane that you've been on before, if you've
flown in a plane Malaysia, this one, Malaysia Airlines flight
three seventy, had three seats in the center aisle. Then
it had two seats, you know, a row of two
seats on the left and a row of two seats
(09:28):
on the right. If you were sitting economy. It was
much more spread out and sparse if you were sitting
first class or a business class.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
And during this flight there were twelve crew members. There
were two hundred and twenty seven passengers. One hundred and
fifty three of those passengers were Chinese nationals, the majority
thirty eight passengers were Malaysian, and the rest were from
a combination a mixtape of twelve different countries. You will
read different estimates of the total number of people aboard,
(09:56):
but we'll have more on that later. The plane itself
had had no major incidents in the past, and routine
maintenance inspections had been carried out, the most recent one
on February twenty third, twenty fourteen. They found no significant issues,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
So it's pretty good. Twelve years of service almost with
no major incidents. I would take those odds if I
was gonna get on that plane or be the captain
of that plane. So let's get to the day. On
March eighth, twenty fourteen, So it departed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
and it was headed to Beijing, China. So and oh,
(10:34):
so oh, it's really important to note here this was
a red eye flight. This was one of those early
early morning you're gonna fly basically through the night and
probably sleep on the plane if you're a passenger. The
wheels were up at twelve thirty five am, the local time.
And it should also be noted that this is the
same they're essentially flying north east a little bit to
(10:56):
Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, so they're in the same time zone.
So when we're talking about times here, it's going to
be the same thing. So leaves at twelve thirty five am,
it's scheduled to arrive in Beijing at six thirty five am.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
And this was a routine trip. It's one of two
daily flights the airline conducts along this route. That's pretty
common with a lot of airline destinations because you can
fly the plane from point A to point B and
then fly it from point B to point A, so
it ends up where it left and it still has
its home. It's HQ, but now you have two flights
(11:32):
instead of one. This flight takes about five hours and
thirty four minutes. This consumes a ballpark of eighty two
thousand pounds of jet fuel, which is normal, and in
another routine practice, the aircraft carries one hundred and eight thousand,
(11:53):
two hundred pounds of fuel, including its reserves. This gives
it an overall flight time endurance. It can be in
the air for seven hours and thirty one minutes. This
ensures that pilots can keep the craft aloft in case
they need to divert to another airport. Think of it
like a form of insurance, a margin of error. Again,
(12:16):
this is a pretty common thing. This is not in
any way unusual. We have to set the facts out there,
so we've established the following things as being normal and routine.
Right the roots, the passengers, the mountain fuel they had
and so on. But there was a very abnormal and
tragic thing that happened that made flight three seventy different
(12:38):
from all the other routine trips back and forth from
Beijing and Malaysia, and that was that this plane disappeared.
What exactly happened will answer the question after a word
from our sponsor. We're back a little bit of a
(12:59):
fake Matt, unfortunately, we will answer what we know about
this question.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
Yes, the official numbers and such times and what occurred.
And again, it may be a little bit confusing as
we're going through this because there are a lot of
times and kind of numbers that are occurring here. Just
we'll try and keep you as focused as possible as
we're getting through this. But this stuff is important. So
(13:25):
you've probably been on a plane before, and you've watched
movies hopefully maybe okay, So if you've ever seen a
movie before where a pilot is involved, or you get
to spend time in a cockpit of a pilot, or
maybe you've ever flown a plane, or you have any
working knowledge of this, maybe you've just used Microsoft's flight
simulator like I have, so you know that there are
(13:47):
important transmissions that occur between air traffic control and the
person who is in control of a flight an aircraft
flying vehicle in the sky. And a lot of this
is actually transmissions that are done by voice, where two
human beings are talking to each other. But a lot
(14:08):
of other really important stuff occurs just through the systems
within the airplane itself and the radar that exists at
air traffic control at varying places throughout the world. As
a plane is flying over certain areas, and there are
these handoffs that occur between the varying air traffic control systems.
(14:29):
So let's say in this case they're flying from Kuala
Lumpur up to Beijing. There are several places they're going
to go over Vietnam, right, So as they're going into Vietnam,
they have to then begin communicating rather than the Kuala
Lumpur air Traffic Control to then begin communicating with the
Vietnam Air traffic Control or whichever local air traffic controllers
(14:52):
are there. So just keep that in mind as we're
going through here. Communications are key. So the last automated
transmission that came from the plane that was sent out
to air traffic controllers was this automated position report, and
it's something that was sent through a cars ACARS, the
(15:13):
aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting system, and this occurred at
one six Malaysian time, so that came that's what twelve
thirty five wheels up to one oh six. That's where
that signal went out.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
And this signal, this message, this transmission does not contain
a multiple plot twist or anything. It's sort of the
metadata of the flight. How much gas do we have left?
Where are we is it where we're supposed to be
and the answers to all these questions at the time
where yes, we have ninety six six hundred pounds of gas,
(15:50):
where we're ready to go. We're doing the right thing.
The final verbal signal to air traffic control occurs just
a bit after. It's a one nineteen one twenty in
the morning. Captain Zahari Ahmad Shah acknowledges the transition from
the Kuala Lumpur radar to the ho Chi Min Area
Control Center. And that's just as you said earlier, Matt.
(16:14):
Let's think of it kind of like an audio radar
version of a handshake or a pass off, So that
despite no longer being in Malaysia's airspace, the plane is
still under the watchful eye of some sort of authority.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, and that's gonna come. It's going to be important
later on in the story because there's a very specific
thing you have to do within the airplane to change
your transponder to then it's called squawk, to then change
that to send out to the new air traffic controllers.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Just so. The crew was expected to signal air traffic
control in Ho Chi Min City as the aircraft passed
into Vietnamese airspace, and that was Vietnamese airspace was just
north of the point where contact was lost. Interesting part
about that last verbal signal. We have the We have
(17:11):
the quote of what they said. The controller Kuala Lumpur
Center radioed Malaysian three seven zero contact Ho Chi Minh
one two zero decimal nine. Good night. The captain Zahari
answers good night Malaysia three seven zero. But he doesn't
read back the frequency the way he should have according
to protocol. Otherwise that transmission is normal. He didn't say anything,
(17:36):
you know, like the elder gods rise, the stars are right,
the rivers run red with blood. He just said what
he was supposed to say. And when we get into
the pinging the science of the radar here, we just
have to understand a few basic things. Radar relies on
just simple raw pingsing thing thing off different objects in
(17:58):
the sky, but air traffic control systems use what's known
as secondary radar. Secondary radar needs a transponder signal that
is transmitted by each airplane and contains more information than
the primary radar does. Secondary radar comes from the plane
has the airplane's identity and altitude. A few seconds after
(18:21):
MH three seventy crosses into Vietnamese airspace, the symbol showing
its transponder its secondary radar stuff drops from the screens.
It disappears at least as far as Malaysian Air Traffic
Control can see, and then sorry, in their primary radar,
it disappears from Malaysian Air traffic control. Thirty seven seconds later,
(18:45):
the whole thing disappears from secondary radar. And that time
occurs that's around one twenty one thirty nine minutes after takeoff.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
And that's really weird because that would possibly signal that
someone within the aircraft in the cockpit turned their transponder
to stand by, which is like I'm trying to imagine
what an equivalent of that would be it's like a Bluetooth.
Imagine a Bluetooth machine that you've got somewhere in your
(19:15):
house and it's connected up. Let's say to your phone, right,
You've got let's say it's a Google Home speaker in
your phone. The phone is the airplane and the Google
Home is the air traffic controller, and they're connected via
this Bluetooth signal because both are sending out signals, right,
and they're talking to each other. In this scenario, it
(19:36):
appears that somebody just turned the Bluetooth off on that
phone or the airplane to where Now that Google Home
is still searching for that thing, but it can't find
it because the phone is no longer transmitting.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, exactly. The people in the Vietnamese control center, they
know that MH three seventy is crossed in the airspace.
They've seen it disappear, and they tried to contact the
aircraft to various means, to no avail. The captain of
another aircraft attempted to contact the crew a little bit
(20:10):
after one point thirty using the International Air Distress or
IAD frequency, and he was trying to reach them to
relay what air traffic control in Vietnam was saying, which
was basically what happened to you call us check in,
and the captain of this other aircraft says that he
(20:32):
was able to establish communication, but he only heard mumbling
and static, which would make for a very creepy sound.
Cue purpose.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
In that right there could get into something that may
have occurred on that plane. Just the just keep that
in your mind, mumbling and static.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
And calls me to Flight three seventies cockpit at two
thirty nine AM and seven thirteen am as this search
is continuing and reaching fever pitch. They went unanswered, but
they were acknowledged by the aircraft's onboard satellite data unit.
So something acknowledged that received it. But it was an
(21:21):
automated acknowledgment. It was a machine.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
But it is at least good to know because again,
if we're following our timeline here, we're still around one
thirty right when we're talking about this other airplane that
was attempting to contact. But if we're jumping to you know,
the plane was supposed to be in Beijing at six
thirty am, right, and it's the same it's the same
time zone. So if they're pinging at seven thirteen. They're
(21:47):
attempting to establish communication again, and something on that plane
is still responding. That means it's it's functioning somewhere right.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yes. Exactly around the time that Flight three seventy disappears,
radar and its transponders stops pinging. Military radar shows Flight
three seventy turning right but then beginning a left turn
to some southwesterly direction. From one thirty in the morning
(22:16):
until one thirty five in the morning, military radar shows
Flight three seventy at thirty five thousand, seven hundred feet, so,
despite becoming unresponsive, the bird is still in the air.
The last satellite contact with the plane occurs much later
at eight nineteen am, which is believed to be the
time around the time when the plane ran out of
(22:38):
fuel somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean, and from that
point on, as far as we know, the plane largely disappeared.
So what happened, we'll tell you after a word from
our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. In the days, weeks, months,
(23:05):
years following the disappearance of the flight, numerous theories have
cropped up. There are a ton of them out there, folks,
and they range from the fanciful to what I have
to admit is the disturbingly plausible. Matt, which way do
you want to go with this?
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Let's start with some of the most plausible stuff that's
out there, because there have been some I think well
reasoned arguments as to what have possibly occurred. However, now
that we know a little more information, specifically what we
mentioned right before the break, the military radar info that
was held back for quite a time there by the
(23:42):
Malaysian authorities, we do know that that weird left hand
turn occurred, or at least that they went off course.
Right we talked about that northeast direction heading up to
Beijing where it should have been, and it didn't do that.
It turned around, went back over Malay and then over
the tip of Indonesia there and then took a left
(24:04):
turn somehow. That's what we know. So taking all that
into account, it changes things and it makes some of
these most plausible explanations a little different. So let's get
into the one of the most plausible, the idea that
somehow the people responsible for flying this plane either lost
(24:24):
consciousness or we're experiencing something called hypoxia, and hypoxia is
just a fancy way of saying, a lack of oxygen
specifically to the brain, and then what happens. It describes
what happens in the brain because of that lack of oxygen.
And this generally occurs on aircraft when there's a decompression
(24:45):
of the cabin right just quickly to go over this bend.
Maybe you can probably you could probably explain this a
little better than I But the thinning of air as
you go higher and higher in altitude is a real
issue because humans. Human bodies need a certain density of
oxygen in air to be able to breathe correctly. And
(25:05):
when you're flying in a plane, if you were just
at that altitude, like thirty five thousand feet in the
air without a pressurized cabin, you wouldn't be able to breathe.
It would only take a few seconds before you would
begin to experience hypoxia, not be able to think correctly,
and then pass out. In a plane, it's pressurized, and
(25:28):
it's generally pressurized to around ten thousand feet or the
equivalent of about ten thousand feet in the air, So
the air you're breathing inside the cabin is they call
it ten thousand feet generally it's the equivalent of that.
In this case. If the cabin was depressurized, then the
crew would have been experiencing hypoxia. They would have been disoriented,
(25:48):
They wouldn't have been able to make good decisions, or
at least decisions that were based on their training, and
if that happened, it could lead down this cascading pathway
of bad decisions and then tragedy. But here's the thing.
Even if the crew was unresponsive because the cabin de pressurized,
they experienced hypoxia, they passed out, Even the autopilot that
(26:12):
exists on these Boeing seven seven seven planes would have
kicked in and they would have at least stayed on
that path northeast towards Beijing.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, the autopilot would stay on until the engine literally
ran out of fuel and experienced a flame out, at
which point the autopilot would disengage and the aircraft would
crash very soon thereafter. However, this doesn't explain why the
planes seemed to turn around after becoming unresponsive, which I
think you mentioned at the top before we even started
(26:45):
going into theories. Yeah, autopilot won't do that. An autopilot
program would not do that. Hypoxia is known to cause
confusion and disorientation, which can lead to abnormal erratic behavior,
And the question here is could that have played a role.
Could the gradual decompression of the cabin occurred such that
(27:07):
people didn't maybe instantly pass out, but the captain or
someone piloting the aircraft was confused and freaking out and
then tried at the last minute to do what they
saw as a course correct. That's the question. Australian Transport
Safety Bureau doesn't one hundred percent confirm this. They're very
(27:27):
careful with the way they build their case. If you
read the report, they're essentially saying, the evidence indicates this
is the most plausible explanation, but there are other ones
out there. What if this was I know this is
a tense term for some people, an inside job. What
if the plane was hijacked by a member of the crew,
(27:50):
possibly in a suicide attempt. Rational Wiki has a great
approach to this. They summarize the following facts about the
pilot we'd mentioned earlier. Zahari Ahmad shah Shah was reported
by his coworkers and friends to be going through a
period of quote emotional distress due to his marriage falling apart.
(28:12):
A later police investigation, they did a background check on
everyone on the plane, and in these, of course these
background checks, the police investigation of Zahari found that he
had been acting in an erratic manner in the last
few days leading up to this flight. Specifically, he had
(28:33):
made absolutely no plans after March eighth. Yeah, that's where
his calendar ended. And it sounds crazy at first to say, Wait,
a pilot hijacked their own plane to commit suicide or
something like that. Weirdly enough, that's not as uncommon as
any of us would probably like to believe.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
It certainly happened a few times that I can think
of in the past. It's a weird thing to imagine
somebody deciding to take their own life along with two
hundred plus others. It's hard to imagine. Well, it's but
it's not. It's not implausible.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yeah, Unfortunately, that's something we know because one thing this
show has taught us about the human experience is that
humans are very very selfish and very very talented at
rationalizing their horrible base traits. Right, So we know that
it's we know it's not uncommon. There's another example. German
(29:36):
Wings flight nine five two five. That's a similar thing.
We also know that the same technology that prevents outside
hijackers from successfully taking a plane is the same technology
that helps inside hijackers carry off something like this. The
cockpit door of this Boeing seven seven seven had anti
(29:57):
hijacking technology on it make it once the door's locked,
nearly impossible, virtually impossible for crew members or passengers to
break in and stop him. Also, the police investigation turned
up some weird stuff at his homemade flight simulator. Right.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
Oh, yeah, he had this really impressive flight simulator set
up at his house. You know. For me, when I
was playing it, it was just on my home computer,
had a mouse and a keyboard, and I thought, I
it was awesome. But for him, he actually had a
lot of the controls, a lot of the actual devices
that you would need to manipulate on a plane to
(30:36):
make it function. And what they found there was very strange.
Apparently when they actually pulled stuff up, all they really
found were coordinates of basically like takeoff and landing. Right, So,
there were several coordinates that were out in the Indian
(30:56):
Ocean where it's thought within the area that it's thought
that perhaps this plane crashed. Did we talk about that already? Like,
we honestly don't know at all where this plane crashed.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Yeah, there's literally a giant ocean and a huge number
of plot points basically where this plane could have crashed.
It's insane, but several of the coordinates on its flight
simulator were within that area, just in the ocean. And
you generally don't plot points like that when you're flying
(31:33):
a simulator.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Right, Yeah. According to New York Magazine, the the US
FBI was able to recover six deleted data points that
have been stored in his simulator program in the weeks
before three seventy disappeared. And what's interesting about that article,
which is through their intelligence or brand or imprint, is
(31:55):
that you can see the path here with the simulated
flight Sahari took in red, and then the projected flight
path of the actual plane in yellow. They don't line
up one hundred percent, but the direction is more or
less exactly the same. So this flight simulator stuff is
(32:17):
not proof positive that Zahari himself took over the plane
and purposely crashed it or crashed it in an attempt
to get somewhere.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
Well, yeah, because there's no you can't prove intent or
anything like that with his what he was doing on
his flight simulator. There's no way he may have just
been wanting to fly out towards Antarctica that day because
he was bored on his flight simulator.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Yeah, seriously, he may have just been And call me
crazy here. I mean, maybe this two timfoil hat for everybody.
Because he's a pilot. He might have just been practicing
flying planes. Yeah, I mean, maybe maybe I'm the fringe
theorist in this case. Here's here's the problem. A report
in twenty eighteen claimed to rule out suicide based on
(33:04):
an analysis of the cruise backgrounds including the pilot and
then personalities, and analysis of voice recordings. This report claimed
the pilot wasn't the culprit, but it did not rule
out interference by a third party. And we do have
to we have a couple of things we have to
mention about those reports in general, which is that the
(33:25):
Malaysian government and a couple of other governments scrambled to
cover up and suppress things in the initial in the
initial early days of the investigation, partially because they did
not want to They did not want to have bad
PR ultimately, and I don't mean to sound reductive calling
it that, but they didn't want to have bad PR.
(33:47):
They also did not want to reveal their military capabilities,
because if you allow military tech to enter into a
civilian or commercial search like this, you're essentially giving away
information to other adjacent countries and state actors. And Vietnam
will say, oh you can you can see that, Yeah,
(34:09):
but that's in our airspace, and then of course China
will say, oh, so that's how far your radar goes delightful,
Thanks for the info, bro. But this other report argues that, well,
it doesn't argue it does not rule out interference by
a third party. And this idea of hijacking by an
(34:30):
external party is the most commonly cited explanation. It's the
one you saw in most mainstream US media. The problem
is there's no terror group that has taken responsibility, or
no terrorists who said we did this. It's us.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
There's a weird open letter from some group purporting to
be from China, like a terror group from China, but
it was it was ruled to be likely not actual.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
And background checks and all the passengers have come up
relatively clean, except for some scuttle but about two Iranian
passengers flying on fake German passports, I want to say
there's still no known motive for the disappearance. Fire has
also been advanced as a possibility. That's true. Fire has
(35:16):
happened in the past, but until we actually find the
majority of the wreckage, there's no way to know it.
They are less plausible things that have been advanced. There's
always an alarmist call citing jahattist. Oh yeah, there's the
possibility of a cyber attack.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Oh yeah. And that has to do with the plane's
autopilot system, because after nine to eleven, as another way
to try and prevent some kind of hijacking, Boeing installed
this specific countermeasure within the autopilot so that air traffic
controllers could take over basically and remote control fly that plane.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
And in two thousand and seven Boeing had said they
had installed what they call the un into ruptible auto pilot.
So the theory is that hijackers on the plane around
the ground hijacked this autopilot program and tampered with it,
sort of the way that US intelligence agencies have been
accused of tampering with remote driving capabilities of newer vehicles.
(36:19):
And there's a tech writer named Jeff Wise who said,
maybe the hijackers access the systems through the floor of
the first class compartment, being able to spoof satellite data
to mislead searchers. And then he said maybe they flew
the plane north to Kazakhstan. But this doesn't This doesn't
explain nor account for dozens of other problems. One thing
(36:43):
I think is interesting that is probably not true. There's
a Delta Airlines captain named Field McConnell. His real first
name is Field, and he said that there was corporate
espionage a play that flight three P seventy was captured
because some of the passengers on the plane were Chinese
employees of an Austin based semiconductor manufacturer named Freescale. And
(37:06):
this is something that some of us have heard. Reading
into three seventy, Captain McConnell claimed that the paint and
equipment on flight three seventy were secret devices produced by
Freescale that gave the plane stealth capabilities. So he's saying
like it didn't wreck, Yeah, it was captured. The corporate
espionage angle is pretty fascinating. You know, initially when that
(37:30):
came out, I thought, I didn't know whether there was
sand to it, but I thought, okay, well these are
this is a collection of people who work in the
same rarefied air, right, so they would be potentially high
value subject matter experts to someone. But does that make
(37:51):
them a high value target? And that's what I couldn't
get past. They're easier ways to disappear people.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Certainly, but the concentration of a lot of those people
is if we were gaming it out, that would be
very helpful.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Yeah, true. And the other there's another part here, which
is that the plane doesn't have to have high value
targets quote unquote a board for it to just be
shot down. And a lot of people said it was
shot down. It was very popular with the right wing
contingents here in the United States. The theory is not
(38:30):
super complex, just says a government somewhere, possibly Malaysia, possibly
the US, possibly China shot plane down.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
So there are a lot of reasons there. Some of
it was just because the plane ended up in airspace
that was controlled, specifically over Ukraine. That was the thought
at least, and that he was shot down because it
was perceived as a threat in controlled airspace. There's some
other stuff in there about Oh I forgot even mention this.
(39:00):
Do we talk about North Korea and that possible connection
that proposed, Yeah, it's not possible there. Well, I can't
say that. It doesn't make much sense to me personally.
The idea that for some reason it was flown to
North Korea on purpose.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Yeah, that's a that's a reddit theory, right, yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
The only strong support I saw for that theory or
the argument for it was there was enough fuel in
the plane yea to make it to pill and.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Getting it would have been in range done. That's it.
Of course he went to North Korea.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Yeah, that's that's one of those things that gets advanced
is sort of a you know, I'm just asking questions
and there's nothing wrong with asking questions. Yeah, kind of
thing like that guy who was like, hey, maybe it
was a black hole.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Oh you mean Don Lemon from CNN.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Yeah, it's true. Don Lemon over at CNN asked whether
a miniature black hole could to have caused the wreck.
The answer is probably not, Don, probably not. But also
this hid behind that rhetorical device of just asking questions. Yeah,
by framing a preposterous claim as though it is a question,
(40:18):
we put the burden of proof on the person that
we're arguing at. Right now, we no longer have to
prove that we think the Queen of England is a
half hybrid alien who just has a real interest in
like screwing humans over for some reason. Now we just say,
(40:41):
I'm just asking the question, what if the Queen of
England is like a half alien reptilian, half human hybrid
and just generally hates people.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
I'm just asking, Yeah, in this case, don Lemon, I
think worded it as preposterously. Is it preposterous to think
that maybe a black hole opened up and sucked in
that plane and then closed and then nobody saw the
plane again, But nobody saw the black hole again. It
was just a quick little I'm just asking, just tell
me if that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
And then that's that's very much related to the other
idea aliens. There was a poll on CNN's website that
I think has been deleted now, and according to that poll,
nine percent of the people responding answered that it was
quote very likely or quote somewhat likely that Flight three
(41:32):
seventy was abducted by aliens. Time travelers or beings from
another dimension. There is no scientific basis for that. That's
a self reporting pole.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
Yes, and that's just the idea that maybe the concept
that nine percent of the people in that particular pole
believed that somehow aliens were involved. Right, It wasn't any
specific there's no specifics to that pole. It wasn't like
were was the plane itself transported onto another larger alien vessel.
(42:03):
Did as extraterrestrials board the plane and then take it
to North Korea. Sorry, that's poking fun a little bit,
but you know it's not to be poked fun at
here is the fact that hundreds of people went missing
on that plane, including the pilot and the first captain
and all the crew and all of the family members
(42:25):
that were on there. So these kinds of conspiracy theories. Again,
while while I'm making fun of it a little bit personally,
that is not to discount the tragedy that has occurred here.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Yes, and well said, there are other theories at play here,
the idea that the plane was abducted by the US
and taken to the a toll of di Ago Garcia,
or that it was taken to some other place. There
are different genres of MH three P seventy or conspiracy theories.
(43:03):
But we do know that some experts have claimed to
have found parts of the wreckage. Do you hear about this?
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Oh? Yeah, several pieces have washed up on the shores
of small islands out there within the Indian Ocean. Pieces
that are definitely you can you can link up the
serial numbers within these pieces. It's not the fuselage, it's the.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
There's a wing flap in Tanzania.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
Yeah, that's one of the things like that, you can
actually match it up and say, yes, this came from
this specific model and serial number.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
And there was a plain wing fragment in Martius Mauritius.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Yeah. There's a great, great article from the Atlantic called
What Really Happened to Malaysia's Missing Airplane that is written
by William Langwish or Languish.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
That's pretty recent, it's July twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Yeah, and within there he does Williams does a great
job of outlining there's a particular man that I cannot
recall his name right now, but.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
He Gibson Gibbs. It is Gibson Lane Gibson.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
He's the essentially self made Malaysia three Malaysia Airlines three
seventy hunter. I mean really, he's he's been looking for
pieces of debris that have washed up on shores across
the world, over, all over, and he's also put feelers
out to a lot of these smaller islands where you know,
(44:32):
stuff just happens to wash ashore and then they notify him.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
Yeah, to continue with the examples, there was a not
I am not an aviation expert. I do not know
what a flat perone is or a flat perone what
There was one found in Reunion Island or on Reunion
Island twenty fifteen. That would make a total of at
least three three confirmed pieces. But then there are other
(44:58):
things that have been found that are almost certainly from
the missing jetliner Madagascar. There was a cabin interior panel
found in June and twenty seventeen, engine calling in South Africa,
another interior panel on Rodriguez Island, horizontal stabilizers on Mozambique,
flap track fairing on Mozambique. The stuff is out there,
(45:20):
it's being found. One interesting conspiracy theory I heard about Gibson,
which I hope was not proposed in a serious air,
was that he had access to much more wreckage, but
was doling it out slowly for his reputation. And mister Gibson,
if you're listening, I do not believe that's the case.
(45:43):
And I think people are doing that we're hopefully being
satirical or trying to be edge lords online.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
Yeah, I would agree, at least from the writing from
that article, it appears that his actions have been well intentioned,
like going to memorials to meet with family members of
victims and going, you know, traveling all over the world
with people. In particular, there was a young woman whose
mother I believe was lost in that flight. It's an
(46:12):
interesting thing because as they're finding these pieces of wreckage
that wash up on shores dotted across the area there,
the whole point is, or at least Gibson and some
of the other people involved, they're trying to trace back
through ocean currents where that piece of wreckage may have originated, right,
because if it was sixteen, you know, however many months
(46:35):
after the wreckage was found, from the day that they
know the plane went missing, you can kind of trace,
you know, just through the records of ocean currents what
possibly was the route, right, And then if you find
that route, then maybe you can find the origins of
where it actually went down, and you could find the
rest of the plane, and then the end goal for
(46:58):
that would be to find the black box so you
can actually hear what occurred inside that cockpit.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
And it's interesting you say that, because that would be
my summation to the importance of finding the black box. However,
that's not what the author from the Atlantic ends up proposing.
Because now we're several years past the event. People in
(47:23):
Australia have done all the research they could. The government
of China is censoring news that might The government of
China just wants to move on, right. The government in
Malaysia wishes that of course this never happened. They want
it to go away. And while people are still finding pieces,
(47:43):
and Gibson being one of the main sources of those pieces,
you would think that the government in Malaysia would be
more happy about it, right, But unfortunately that does not
seem to be the case. They want to walk away
from this because it made them look, bade them look
a little incompetent. They weren't following protocol. They were doing
(48:03):
cover ups pretty much immediately, and so to the Atlantic, author.
I guess the best way to sum it up is to
take an excerpt from their earlier piece in July twenty nineteen.
They say, quote, the important answers probably don't lie in
the ocean, but on land in Malaysia. That should be
(48:23):
the focus moving forward. Unless they are as incompetent as
the Air Force and air traffic control. The Malaysian police
know more than they have dared to say. The riddle
may not be deep. That is the frustration here. The
answers may well lie close at hand, but they are
more difficult to retrieve than any black box. If Blaine
Gibson wants a real adventure, he might spend a year
(48:45):
poking around Kuala Lumpur. I don't know what do you
think of that, Matt.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
It's weird to put it on Blaine Gibson like that,
because I think what he's doing is separate from what
the writer is talking about. The writer's saying about right
and an investigation into that corruption. What Blaine is doing
is literally trying to find pieces and then trace back,
working with Australia and a couple other places to trace
(49:13):
back to the originating point to find that black box.
So I don't know, to make inequivalency out of those
I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
I'm not doing that.
Speaker 3 (49:23):
No, No, that's what I'm saying. It doesn't It doesn't
make sense to me. But I see what the author
is saying in the same right that the way it
was obtuscated by the Malaysian military and some of those
you know groups, at least initially, it does lead you
down the path of they know something more than they're saying,
because they certainly did before it was leaked.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
And now the question is did they reveal all the
stuff they knew at the time or are they for
some reason holding back information? And if so, what is
that information? Yeah? Why what is the motivation? It goes
down to information and motive. And this is close to
where today's episode ends. We do not have all the answers.
(50:07):
There are pages and pages written about the event, but
what we can conclude is that it does clearly seem
to have wrecked many of the survivors. The relatives, the
family members and loved ones of people who most likely
died on this plane would of course be joyous for
(50:30):
the closure of discovering the bodies, giving them a proper
burial and so on. But the ocean is vast, and
at this time, while we can speculate about the circumstances
of these people's unfortunate deaths, we can not pinpoint where
(50:53):
the bulk of the plane is now, or even if
the plane exists in one largely coherent piece.
Speaker 3 (50:59):
Well, I don't know, man. It feels like if it
did crash into the ocean, you know, going as fast
as it generally would, it would be pretty difficult to
find a couple of big pieces of that plane. But
it doesn't make sense because it seems like there will
be more things in pieces floating on the surface than
wherever recovered.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Yeah. Also, the ocean is awash with trash, yeah, and huge.
It's very difficult. It's very Our species is very good
at losing things. It's very difficult to find missing planes.
I know that seems counterintuitive because planes are big, right, Yeah,
but the ocean is bigger, and we lose planes way
(51:41):
more often than I would like to believe. I agreed, agreed,
And this leads us to something that you have been
thinking of off air, right Occam's Razor.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
Yes, there's an article that's written by Christine Nagrony, and
she she basically just puts the idea that if we
do take Okham's razor into account, here, the combination of
a transponder that ended up somehow in standby mode, a
depressurized cabin that disoriented the people who were meant to
be flying that plane, and then an inexperienced first officer
(52:17):
who didn't know exactly what to do to then gain
control of the plane. Because in her mind, at least
to the facts that she has the idea that the
very very experienced pilot that was supposed to be piloting
the plane was in the bathroom for some reason in
the main cabin or in the business class cabin when
(52:41):
the cabin depressurized so that he could not get back
to where he needed to be to fly the plane,
and the inexperienced guy was at the helm. That's at
least what she believes, and that's what led to ultimately
to the weird stuff that happened on the flight and
in the crash. But that scenario does not account for
(53:06):
that strange left turn, well, I mean, the whole turning
round of the plane from their heading towards Beijing to
then taking that big left turn towards Antarctica.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
The manual Southwestern term, which was essentially.
Speaker 3 (53:19):
A one to eight because somebody did that.
Speaker 1 (53:21):
Yeah, someone had to do that, And that's our classic
episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
It's right let us know what you think.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
You can reach.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on
Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy
Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (53:40):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three std WYTK. That's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say, then can fit in
that voicemail. Why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (53:57):
We are the entities the read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (54:27):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
24/7 News: The Latest
Today’s Latest News In 4 Minutes. Updated Hourly.