November 1, 2019 • 53 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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, Welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt. Noel is
not with us today they called me Ben. We are joined,
as always with our super producer Paul Mission Controlled Decade
and 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
(00:45):
or nickname or appellation for Seth. That's appellation A P
P E L L A T I O 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
(01:06):
want you to know. Matt. I feel like it's been forever. Yeah,
You've You've been on an adventure. An adventures a way
to describe it. The last time I saw you, we
were in Los Angeles, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah, And by
the time this comes out, our episode with Mr Dan
Harmon will be out. But maybe that's something we should
(01:29):
discuss when all three of us are in the room. Sure. Yeah,
we took planes to our respective destinations, you and you
and NOL 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 of our
(01:52):
fellow listeners tuning in today are part of the one
point seven million US residents on a plane, Like as
we speak, Yeah, there are a lot of us in
the air right now, flying these guys. 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, right, oh yeah. And and it's who is it?
(02:16):
I think it's Luis k who as a bit about
how amazing planes are. Maybe 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 traveling by plane is
that amazing experience. But other times, I mean it's at
least a frustrating thing, or it can be. There are
(02:38):
a lot of pros and cons so if you are
going to get on a plane, you know for sure
you're gonna get to your destination a lot faster than
by any other means. Um. 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 and taking a car. Um.
But that is, of course, if everything goes well. There
(03:00):
are some issues, Like we said, um, just getting through
security now at this point is a bother um. 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 get really crowded. And
also you've got to deal with things like weather, because
(03:23):
let's face it, planes get delayed and sometimes even canceled
because of the way moisture acts in the air or
even lightning right as well, So we here and stuff
they don't want you to know, or no stranger to
being stuck in airports. Long time listeners will recall that
(03:44):
our our current record was somewhere around sixteen eighteen hours
in our own airport in Atlanta, Georgia. Let's also add
of course, 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,
(04:07):
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 on the interstate, unless you're just in a
car in well, yeah, I was gonna say in a garage,
but that can be unsafe too, right, if it's running
(04:28):
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 while a plane will simply disappear.
(04:49):
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 fly three seventy? Here are the facts. Okay,
so there are a lot of numbers in here that
we're gonna be going over. Some of them are much
more important than others. We'll kind of let you know
as we're going. So the flight in question, Malaysia Airlines
(05:12):
flight three seventy, was the plane at least a Bowing
seven seven seven now is a specific kind of seven
seven seven. It was a two h six e er. Now,
this just means that it was an extended range of versions,
so we can travel further than the regular Bowing seven
seven seven. Now, this particular model of UH seven seven
(05:34):
seven has been in the air have been flying commercially since.
And this model is it's huge. Its length is over
two hundred feet, and it's designed to accommodate upwards of
two hundred and sixty passengers, so two sixty plus. It
can be basically changed slightly how the how the seat
(05:55):
structure is to accommodate more people. Yeah, here's a little
conspiracy that will just we'll just add in add in
for free here on our free show and will confirm
this conspiracy to airline leg room is getting smaller with
each successive iteration because they can put more people on
(06:17):
the plane. Uh, 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 Bowing seven seven seven to H
six e R that was flying on flight three seventy.
It had the serial number TO eight four two Z ROW.
(06:39):
It had the registration number nine M DASH m r O.
It was the four hundred and fourth Bowing seven seventy
seven produced. It was first flown on May two thousand two,
and then after that it was delivered to Malaysia Airlines
on May thirty one, two thousand two. And you know,
like we were talking out with the confirmed conspiracy to
(07:02):
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 was impacked to the gills. Right, 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 have flown
(07:23):
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, row a row of two
seats on the left and a row of two seats
on the right. If you were sitting economy, it was
much more spread out and sparse if you're sitting first
class or a business class. And during this flight there
(07:45):
were twelve crew members. There were two hundred and twenty
seven passengers. A 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, but more on that later.
(08:05):
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 two thousand fourteen. They found no
significant issues, you know what I mean. So it's pretty good.
Twelve years of service almost with no major incidents. I
(08:26):
would take those odds if I was going to get
on that plane or be the captain of that plane.
So let's get to the day. Um On March eight,
so it departed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and it was
headed to Beijing, China. So and oh, so it's really
important to note here this is a red eye flight.
This was one of those early early morning you're gonna
(08:47):
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 there. They're
essentially flying north east a little bit to Beijing from
Kuala Lumpur, so they're in the same time zone. So
when we were talking about times here, um, it's it's
(09:10):
going to be the same thing. So uh leaves at
twelve thirty five am. It's scheduled to arrive in Beijing
at six thirty five am. 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
(09:31):
to point B and then fly it from point B
to point A, so it ends up where it left
and has it still has its home. It's HQ, but
now you have two flights instead of one. This flight
takes about five hours and thirty four minutes. This consumes
ballpark of eighty two thousand pounds of jet fuel. Which
(09:52):
is normal and in another routine practice, the aircraft carries
one hundred and eight thousand, 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
(10:15):
craft aloft in case they need to divert to another airport.
Think of it like a form of insurance, a margin
of error. Again, 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 routes, the passengers,
(10:37):
the amount of fuel they had, and so on. But
there was a very abnormal and tragic thing that happened
that made flight three seventy different from all the other
routine trips back and forth from Beijing and Malaysia, and
that was that this plane disappeared. What exactly happened. We'll
answer the question after a word from our sponsor. We're
(11:05):
back a little bit of a fake out mat unfortunately.
We will answer what we know about this question. Yes,
the the official numbers and such times, and what occurred
and again, it's 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.
(11:26):
Just um, we'll try and keep you as focused as
possible as we're getting through this. But this stuff is important.
So 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
(11:48):
any working knowledge of this, maybe you've just used Microsoft
Flight Simulator like like I have, so you know that
there's there are important transmissions that occur between air traffic
control and the person who is in control of a
flight and an aircraft flying vehicle in the sky. And uh,
A lot of this is actually transmissions that are done
(12:11):
by voice where to human beings are talking to each other.
But a lot of other really important stuff occurs just
through the systems within the airplane itself and the radar
that you know exists at air traffic control um at
varying places throughout the world. As a plane is flying
over certain areas, and there are these handoffs that occur
(12:33):
between the varying air traffic control systems. So let's say
in this case they're flying from Kuala Lumpour 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 Lumpoor Air Traffic Control
to then begin communicating with the Vietnam Air Traffic Control
(12:57):
or whichever local air traffic controllers 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
UM was this automated position report and it's something that
(13:18):
was sent through a CARS a C a r S,
the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting system, And this occurred
at one oh six Malaysian time, So that came that's
what thirty thirty five wheels up to one oh six.
That's where that signal went out. And this signal, this message,
this transmission does not contain multiple plot twist or anything.
(13:41):
It's sort of the meta data 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
UH nineties six thousand, six hundred pounds of gas, We're
we're ready to go. We're doing in the right thing.
The final verbal signal to air traffic control occurs just
(14:05):
a bit after it's a one nineteen in the morning.
Captain Zahari Ahmed Shah acknowledges the transition from the Kuala
Lumpur radar to the ho Cheatment Area Controls Center. And
that's just as you said earlier, Matt. Let's think of
it kind of like in an audio radar version of
(14:25):
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. 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 too.
(14:49):
Then it's called squawk to UH to then change that
to send out to the new air traffic controllers. Just
so the crew was expected to signal a traffic control
in Ho Chi Minh 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
(15:14):
that last verbal signal, we have the We have the
quote of what they said. The controller Kuala Lumpur Center
Radio Malaysian three seven zero contact Ho Chi Minh one
to zero decimal nine. Goodnight. The captain Zahari answers goodnight
Malaysia three seven zero. But he doesn't read back the
(15:36):
frequency the way he should have according to protocol. Otherwise
that transmission is normal. He didn't say anything, you know,
like the elder gods rise, the stars arrived, 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
(15:57):
understand a few basic things. Radar rely on just simple
raw pains thing thing thing off different objects in 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.
(16:21):
Secondary radar comes from the plane has the airplane's identity
and altitude. A few seconds after MH three seventy crosses
into Vietnamese airspace, the symbol showing its transponder at secondary
radar stuff drops from the screens. It disappears at least
as far as Malaysian Air Traffic Control can see, and
(16:44):
then in their sorry in their primary radar disappears from
Lasian air Traffic Control. Thirty seven seconds later, the whole
thing disappears from secondary radar, and that's that time occurs
sets around thirty nine minutes after takeoff. And that's really
weird because that would possibly signal that someone within the
(17:07):
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 um machine that you've got somewhere in your 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
(17:29):
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. Um. In this scenario,
it appears that somebody just turned the bluetooth off on
that phone or the airplane to where Now that Google
(17:50):
Home is still searching for that thing, but it can't
find it because it's the phone is no longer transmitting. Yeah, exactly.
The people in the Vietnamese control center, they know that
MH three seventies crossed in the airspace. They've seen it disappear,
and they tried to contact the aircraft various means to
(18:12):
no avail. The captain of another aircraft attempted to contact
the crew a little bit after one thirty using the
International Air Distress or i a D frequency, and he
was trying to reach them to relay what air traffic
control in Vietnam was saying, which was basically, what happened
(18:33):
to you? Call us check in. And the captain of
this other aircraft says that he was able to establish communication,
but he only heard mumbling and static, which would make
for a very creepy sound cue and that right there
(18:58):
could get into you something that may have occurred on
that plane. Just the just keep that in your mind,
mumbling and static 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 on
(19:22):
board satellite data unit. So something acknowledged that received it.
But it was an automated acknowledgement. It was a machine.
But it is at least good to know because again,
if we're 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
(19:43):
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 pining at seven thirteen,
they're attempting to establish communication again and something on that
plane is still responding, that means it's it's functioning somewhere. Yes.
Exactly around the time that Flight three seventy disappears from
(20:07):
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
until one thirty five in the morning. Military radars shows
(20:27):
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
fuel somewhere over the Southern Indian Ocean, and from that
(20:51):
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,
(21:12):
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. Uh Matt, Which which
way do you want to go with this? Let's start
with some of the most plausible stuff that's out there,
because there there have been some some I think well
(21:34):
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
Malaysian authorities. We we do know that that weird left
hand turn occurred, or at least that they went off course.
(21:57):
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 Malaysia and then over
the tip of Indonesia there and then took a left turn. Somehow,
that's what we know. So taking all that into account,
it changes things, and it makes some of these most
(22:19):
plausible explanations a little different. So let's let's get into
the one of the most plausible, the idea that somehow
the people responsible for flying this plane either lost consciousness
or we're experiencing something called hypoxia. And hypoxia is just
a fancy way of saying a lack of oxygen specifically
(22:40):
to the brain, and then what happens. It describes what
happens in the brain um because of that lack of oxygen,
and this generally occurs on aircraft when there's a decompression
of the cabin right. Um, just quickly to go over
this bend, maybe you could 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
(23:03):
a real issue because humans, human bodies need a certain
density of oxygen in air to be able to breathe correctly.
And when you're flying in a plane, UH, if you
were just at that altitude, like thirty five thousand feet
in the air without um a pressurized cabin, you wouldn't
(23:24):
be able to breathe. It would only take a few
seconds before you would begin to experience hypoxia, uh, not
be able to think correctly, and then pass out. In
a plane, it's pressurized, and it's generally pressurized to a
round ten thousand feet or the equivalent of about ten
thousand feet in the air, So the air you're breathing
inside the cabin is uh they call it ten thousand feet.
(23:46):
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, they wouldn't have
been able to make good decisions, or at least decisions
were based on their training. And if that happened, it
could lead down this cascading pathway of bad decisions and
(24:08):
then tragedy. But here's the thing. Even if the crew
was unresponsive because the cabin depressurized, they experienced hypoxia, they
passed out, even the autopilot that 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. Yeah,
(24:30):
the autopilot would stay on until the engine literally ran
out of fuel and experience the 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 going
(24:52):
into theories. 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 people didn't
(25:15):
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 confirmed this. They're very careful with the way
(25:36):
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,
you know, this is a tense term for some people,
an inside job. What if the plane was hijacked by
a member of the crew, possibly in a suicide attempt.
(26:00):
Rational Wiki has a great approach to this. They they
summarize the following facts about the pilot we mentioned earlier
as a Harry ahmade shop. Shaw was reported by his
coworkers and friends to be going through a period of
quote emotional distress due to his marriage falling apart. A
later police investigation, they did a background check on everyone
(26:24):
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 made absolutely
no plans after March eight. That's where his calendar ended.
(26:46):
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. It certainly happened
a few times that I can think of in the past. Um,
it's a it's a weird thing to imagine somebody deciding
(27:11):
to take their own life along with two hundred plus others. Um,
it's it's hard to imagine. Well, but it's but it's not,
it's not implausible. Yeah, Unfortunately, that's something we know because
what the show has taught us about the human experience
is that humans are very very selfish and very very
(27:32):
talented at rationalizing. They're horrible base traits, right, So we
we know that it's we know it's not uncommon. There's
another example, German Wings flight nine five to five that's
a similar thing. We also know that the same technology
that prevents outside hijackers from successfully taking a plane is
(27:54):
the same technology that helps inside hijackers carry off something
like this cockpit door of this Bowing seven seven seven
had anti hijacking technology on it, making it once the
doors locked nearly impossible, virtually impossible for crew members or
passengers to break in and stop him. Also, the police
(28:16):
investigation turned up some weird stuff at his homemade flight simulator. Right. 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 at a mouse
and a keyboard, and I thought, I was it was awesome.
But for him, he actually had a lot of the controls,
(28:38):
a lot of the actual devices that you would need
to manipulate on a plane to make it function. And uh,
what they found there was very strange. Apparently when they
when they actually pulled stuff up, all they really found
were um coordinates of basically like take off and landing. Right, So,
(29:00):
there were several coordinates that were out in the Indian
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 somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Yeah, there's literally a
(29:20):
giant ocean and a huge number of plot points basically
where this plane could have crashed. Um, it's insane, but
several of the 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 a simulator, right, Yeah,
(29:41):
According to New York Magazine, the FBI, 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 that article,
which is through their intelligence or um brand or imprint,
(30:02):
is 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, but the direction is more or less exactly
the same. So this flight simulator stuff is not proof
(30:26):
positive that Zahari himself took over the plane and purposely
crashed it or crashed in an attempt to get somewhere. 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
(30:46):
on his flight simulator. Seriously, he may have just been
and called me crazy here called me maybe there's two
tinfoil hat for everybody. Uh, because he's a pilot, he
might have just been practicing flying planes. I mean, maybe
maybe I'm the fringe theorists in this case. Here's here's
the problem. A report in two thousand eighteen claimed to
(31:10):
rule out suicide based on 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 we have a couple of
things we have to mention about those reports in general,
(31:31):
which is that the Malaysian government and a couple of
other governments scrambled to cover up and suppress things in
the initial uh, 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
(31:53):
to have bad PR. 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 you can,
(32:15):
you can see that, but that's an our airspace. And
then of course China will say, oh, so that's how
far your radar goes d lightful. Thanks for the info, bro.
But the this, 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 external
(32:37):
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. There's a
weird open letter from some group purporting to be from China,
like a terror group from China, but it was it
(33:00):
was ruled to be likely not actual, 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
(33:20):
as a possibility. That's true. Fire has happened in the past,
but until we actually find the majority of the wreckage,
there's no way to know it. They're less plausible. Things
have been advanced. There's always an alarmist call citing jahad ist. Uh,
there's the possibility of a cyber attack. Yeah, and that
(33:41):
has to do with the planes autopilot system, because after
nine eleven, as another way to try and prevent some
kind of hijacking, Boeing installed this specific countermeasure within the
the autopilot so that air traffic controllers could take over
basically in remote control we fly that plane. And in
(34:01):
two thousand seven Boeing had said they had installed what
they call the uninterruptible auto pilot. So the theories 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
(34:22):
driving capabilities of newer vehicles. And as a tech writer
named Jeff Wise who said, maybe the hijackers access the
systems through the floor 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
(34:44):
this doesn't This doesn't explain nor account for dozens of
other problems. One thing 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 seventy
(35:04):
was captured because some of the passengers on the plane
were Chinese employees of an Austin based semiconductor manufacturer named
free Scale. And this is something that some of us
have her reading into three seventy. Captain McConnell claimed that
the painting equipment on flight three seventy were secret devices
produced by Freescale that gave the plane stealth capabilities. So
(35:27):
he's saying like it it didn't wreck, it was captured.
The corporate espionage angle is pretty fascinating, you know. Initially
when they came out, I I thought I didn't know
whether there was sand to it, But but I thought, okay,
well these are this is a collection of people who
(35:48):
work in the same rarefied air right, so they would
be potentially high value subject matter experts to someone. But
does that make them a high value to market, and
that's what I couldn't get past. They're easier ways to
disappear people, certainly, but the concentration of a lot of
(36:09):
those people is if we were gaming it out, that
would be very helpful. Yeah, and the other there's another
part here, which is that the plane doesn't have to
have high value targets quote unquote aboard for it to
just be shot down. And a lot of people said
(36:30):
it was shot down. It was very popular with the
right wing contingents here in the United States. It the
theory is not super complex, just says a government somewhere,
possibly Malaysia, possibly the US, possibly China shot plane down.
So there are a lot of reasons there. Some of
it was just because the plane ended up in airspace
(36:52):
that was controlled, specifically over Ukraine. That was the thought
at least, and that it was shot down because it
was perceived as a threat um in controlled airspace. There's
some other stuff in there about um oh, I did
I forgot to even mention this. Do we talk about
North Korea and that possible connection that proposed, Yeah, there,
(37:14):
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. Yeah,
that's a that's a reddit theory, right. The only strong
support I saw for that theory or the argument for it,
(37:34):
was there was enough fuel on the plane to make
it to Peel and Gang. It would have been in range. Done.
That's it. Of course he went to North Korea. 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 kind of thing. Like
that guy who was like, hey, maybe it was a
(37:56):
black hole. Oh you mean Don Lemon from CNN. Yeah,
it's true. Don Lemon over at CNN asked whether a
minueture black hole could have caused the wreck. The answer
is probably not, Don, probably not. But also this hid
behind that that that rhetorical device of just asking questions.
(38:20):
By framing a preposterous claim as though it is a question,
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
(38:44):
like screwing humans over for some reason. Now we just say,
I'm just asking the question, what if the Queen of
England is like half alien reptilian, half human hybrid and
just generally hates people. I'm just asked, Kate. Yeah, in
this case, don Lemon, I think worded it as preposterous, like,
is it preposterous to think that maybe a black hole
(39:07):
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, They're just just tell me if that's crazy,
and then that's that's very much related to the other
idea aliens. There was a poll on CNN's website that
(39:28):
I think has been deleted now, and according to that pole,
nine percent of the people responding answered that it was
quote very likely or quote somewhat likely, the flight three
seventy was abducted by aliens, time travelers, or beans from
another dimension. There is no scientific basis for that. That's
a self reporting poll, yes, and that's just the idea
(39:50):
that maybe the concept that nine of the people in
that particular poll believed that somehow aliens were involved, right,
It wasn't any specific there's no specifics to that pole.
It wasn't like they were Was the plane itself transported
onto another larger alien vessel. Did as extraterrestrials board the
(40:13):
plane and then take it to North Korea? Um? Sorry,
that's poking fun a little bit um, but you know
it's not to be pokeponed. Here is the fact that
hundreds of people went missing on that plane, including the
pilot and the first captain, and all of the crew
and all of the family members that were on there.
(40:33):
So these kinds of conspiracy theories again while I'm while
I'm making fun of it a little bit personally, that
is not to discount the tragedy that has occurred here. 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 toll of di Ago Garcia, or
(40:59):
that it was taken to some other place. There are
different genres of MG three seventy theories, conspiracy theories. But
we do know that some experts have claimed to have
found parts of the wreckage. Do you hear about this?
(41:20):
Several pieces have washed up on the shores of small
islands out there within the Indian Ocean. UM. Pieces that
are definitely you can you can link up the serial
numbers within these pieces. It's not the fuselage, it's the
there's a wing flap in Tanzania. Yeah, that's one of
the things like that. Um, you can actually match it
(41:42):
up and say, yes, this came from this specific model
and serial number, and there was a playing wing fragment
in Martius Mauritius. Yeah. There's a great, great article from
the Atlantic called What Really Happened to Malaysia's Missing Airplane
that is written by William lang Wish or Languish. That's
(42:05):
pretty recent it's July. Yeah, and within there he does
William does a great job of outlining there's a particular
man that I cannot recall his name right now, but
Gibson gives it is Gibson Lane Gibson. He's the essentially
self made Malaysia three Malaysia Airlines three seventy hunter. I
(42:26):
mean really, he's he's been looking for uh pieces of
debris that have washed up on shores across the world,
on all over, all over, and he's also put feelers
out to a lot of these smaller islands where you know,
stuff just happens to wash ashore and then they notify him. Yeah.
To continue with the examples, there was a I had
not I am not an aviation expert. I do not
(42:49):
know what a flap perone is or a flat perone
what There was one found in Reunion Island or on
Reunion Island. That would make a total of at least
three three confirmed pieces. But then there are other things
have been found that are almost certainly from the missing
jetliner Madagascar. There was a cabin interior panel found in
(43:13):
June and engine Cowean in South Africa, another interior panel
on Rodriguez Island, horizontal stabilizers on Mozambique, flaptrack firing on Mozambique.
There the stuff is out there, it's being found. One
interesting conspiracy theory I heard about Gibson, which I hope
was not proposed in a in a serious air, was
(43:37):
that he had access to much more wreckage but was
doling it out slowly to to for his reputation. And uh,
Mr Gibson, if you're listening, I do not believe that's
the case. And I think people are doing that. We're
hopefully being satirical or trying to be edge Lord's online. Yeah,
(43:57):
I would agree, at least for the writing from that article,
it appears that his actions have been well intentioned, like
going to memorials to meet with 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 uh was lost in that in that flight.
(44:19):
It's an 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,
(44:41):
many months 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 can
find the rest of the plane. And then the end
(45:05):
goal for that would be to find the black boxes
so you can actually hear what occurred inside that cockpit.
And it's interesting said, because that would be my my
summation to the importance of finding the Black Box. However,
that's not what the author from the Atlantic ends up proposing.
(45:26):
Because now we're you know, we're several years past the event.
People in Australia have done all the research they could.
The government of China is censoring news that might The
government China just wants to move on, right. The government
of Malaysia wishes, of course this has never happened. They
wanted to go away, and while people are still finding pieces,
(45:50):
and Gibson being one of the main sources of those pieces,
you would think that the government of 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 bad. It made
them look a little incompetent. They weren't following protocol. They
were doing cover ups pretty much immediately. And so to
(46:14):
the to the Atlantic author, I guess the best way
to sum it up is to take an excerpt from
their their earlier piece in July nineteen. They say, quote,
the important answers probably don't lie in the ocean, but
on land in Malaysia. That should be the focus moving forward,
unless they are as incompetent as the Air Force and
(46:35):
air traffic Control the Malaysian police. No 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 poking around Kuala Lumpur. I
don't know, what do you think of that, matt Um.
(46:58):
It's weird to put it on Blaine gibbs in like
that because I think what he's doing is separate from
what the writer is talking about. Um. The writer is
talking about corruption, right, and an investigation into that corruption. Um.
What Blaine is doing is literally trying to find pieces
and then trace back, working with Australia in a couple
(47:19):
of other places to trace back, um, the to the
originating point to find that black box. So I don't know,
to make inequialency out of those, I don't know. It
doesn't make sense to me. 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, and in the same
right that the way it was obtuscated by the Malaysian
(47:40):
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. 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,
(48:00):
what is that information? Why? What is the motivation? Goes
down to information and motivation, and this is close to
where today's episode ends. We do not have all the answers.
There are pages and pages written about the event, but
what we can conclude is that it does clearly seem
(48:23):
to have wrecked many of the survivors. The relatives, the
family members and loved ones with people who most likely
died on this plane would of course be joyous for
the closure of discovering the bodies, giving them a proper burial,
and so on. But the ocean is vast and at
(48:46):
this time, while we can speculate about the circumstances of
these people's unfortunate deaths, we can not pinpoint where where
the bulk of the plane is now, or even if
the plane exists in one largely coherent piece. But I
(49:06):
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 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 were
ever recovered. Um. Yeah. Also, the ocean is awash with
(49:28):
trash 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, but the ocean is bigger, um, And
we lose planes way more often than I would like
(49:51):
to believe. And this leads us to something that you
have been thinking of off air, right, Acum's razor. Yes,
there's an article that's written by Christine Negroni and she
she basically just puts forth the idea that if we
do take Ockham's razor into account, here, the combination of
(50:13):
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
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
(50:36):
very very experienced pilot that was supposed to be piloting
the plane was in the bathroom for some reason, um
in the main cabin or in the business class cabin
when the cabin depressurized so that he could not get
back to where he needed to be the to fly
the plane, and the inexperienced guy was at the helm
(50:59):
um that's at least what she believes, and that's what
led to the old ultimately to the weird stuff that
happened on the flight and then the crash. But that
scenario does not account for that strange left turn, well,
I mean, the whole turning around of the plane from
their heading towards Beijing two then taking that big left
(51:21):
turn towards Antarctica, the manual southwestern term which was essentially
a one eight because somebody did that. Yet someone had
to do that, and that's that's where we leave it today.
The problem with the most plausible theories is that they
do not explain that turn, And the problem with things
(51:42):
that explain that turn is that they are primarily oriented
towards explaining that term oriented is probably not the best
word to use there. However, we do know that the
at least pieces of the plane have been separated from
the plane entire and we want to hear rob you.
I will say, just by personal opinion here, I think
(52:03):
was the captain, but that's just based on this stuff
I've read. Yeah, I would say a lot of the sources,
at least that we've been looking through for this, appear
to aim that in that direction. And we want to
hear from you. Do you believe that Captain Zahara Ahmad
Shaw committed suicide, taking a plane full of more than
(52:24):
two people along with him in the process. Do you
believe that there was a state actor involved, either compromising
the plane electronically or physically shooting it down, or do
you think there was something more to the story. We'd
love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Twitter, you can find us
on Instagram. You can talk to our favorite part of
(52:45):
the show, your fellow listeners on our community page. Here's
where it gets crazy with some of the best mods
in the moderating business, the absolute best, hands down. Take
it from us. We know because we work with them
and they're awesome. If you don't want to do that,
you can give us a call. We are one eight
three three st d w y t K. Leave a message.
(53:08):
You make it on the air, but even if you don't,
we'll hear it and we will enjoy it. We'd love
to just do all these same other things, opinions, ideas
about what shows. You want us to do all that stuff,
put it in voicemail form and we'll listen to it.
If you don't want to do that, you can always
reach us the good old fashioned way. We are conspiracy
at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want
(53:47):
you to know. As a production of i heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, Welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt. Noel is
not with us today they called me Ben. We are joined,
as always with our super producer Paul Mission Controlled Decade
and 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
(00:45):
or nickname or appellation for Seth. That's appellation A P
P E L L A T I O 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
(01:06):
want you to know. Matt. I feel like it's been forever. Yeah,
You've You've been on an adventure. An adventures a way
to describe it. The last time I saw you, we
were in Los Angeles, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah, And by
the time this comes out, our episode with Mr Dan
Harmon will be out. But maybe that's something we should
(01:29):
discuss when all three of us are in the room. Sure. Yeah,
we took planes to our respective destinations, you and you
and NOL 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 of our
(01:52):
fellow listeners tuning in today are part of the one
point seven million US residents on a plane, Like as
we speak, Yeah, there are a lot of us in
the air right now, flying these guys. 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, right, oh yeah. And and it's who is it?
(02:16):
I think it's Luis k who as a bit about
how amazing planes are. Maybe 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 traveling by plane is
that amazing experience. But other times, I mean it's at
least a frustrating thing, or it can be. There are
(02:38):
a lot of pros and cons so if you are
going to get on a plane, you know for sure
you're gonna get to your destination a lot faster than
by any other means. Um. 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 and taking a car. Um.
But that is, of course, if everything goes well. There
(03:00):
are some issues, Like we said, um, just getting through
security now at this point is a bother um. 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 get really crowded. And
also you've got to deal with things like weather, because
(03:23):
let's face it, planes get delayed and sometimes even canceled
because of the way moisture acts in the air or
even lightning right as well, So we here and stuff
they don't want you to know, or no stranger to
being stuck in airports. Long time listeners will recall that
(03:44):
our our current record was somewhere around sixteen eighteen hours
in our own airport in Atlanta, Georgia. Let's also add
of course, 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,
(04:07):
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 on the interstate, unless you're just in a
car in well, yeah, I was gonna say in a garage,
but that can be unsafe too, right, if it's running
(04:28):
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 while a plane will simply disappear.
(04:49):
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 fly three seventy? Here are the facts. Okay,
so there are a lot of numbers in here that
we're gonna be going over. Some of them are much
more important than others. We'll kind of let you know
as we're going. So the flight in question, Malaysia Airlines
(05:12):
flight three seventy, was the plane at least a Bowing
seven seven seven now is a specific kind of seven
seven seven. It was a two h six e er. Now,
this just means that it was an extended range of versions,
so we can travel further than the regular Bowing seven
seven seven. Now, this particular model of UH seven seven
(05:34):
seven has been in the air have been flying commercially since.
And this model is it's huge. Its length is over
two hundred feet, and it's designed to accommodate upwards of
two hundred and sixty passengers, so two sixty plus. It
can be basically changed slightly how the how the seat
(05:55):
structure is to accommodate more people. Yeah, here's a little
conspiracy that will just we'll just add in add in
for free here on our free show and will confirm
this conspiracy to airline leg room is getting smaller with
each successive iteration because they can put more people on
(06:17):
the plane. Uh, 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 Bowing seven seven seven to H
six e R that was flying on flight three seventy.
It had the serial number TO eight four two Z ROW.
(06:39):
It had the registration number nine M DASH m r O.
It was the four hundred and fourth Bowing seven seventy
seven produced. It was first flown on May two thousand two,
and then after that it was delivered to Malaysia Airlines
on May thirty one, two thousand two. And you know,
like we were talking out with the confirmed conspiracy to
(07:02):
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 was impacked to the gills. Right, 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 have flown
(07:23):
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, row a row of two
seats on the left and a row of two seats
on the right. If you were sitting economy, it was
much more spread out and sparse if you're sitting first
class or a business class. And during this flight there
(07:45):
were twelve crew members. There were two hundred and twenty
seven passengers. A 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, but more on that later.
(08:05):
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 two thousand fourteen. They found no
significant issues, you know what I mean. So it's pretty good.
Twelve years of service almost with no major incidents. I
(08:26):
would take those odds if I was going to get
on that plane or be the captain of that plane.
So let's get to the day. Um On March eight,
so it departed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and it was
headed to Beijing, China. So and oh, so it's really
important to note here this is a red eye flight.
This was one of those early early morning you're gonna
(08:47):
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 there. They're
essentially flying north east a little bit to Beijing from
Kuala Lumpur, so they're in the same time zone. So
when we were talking about times here, um, it's it's
(09:10):
going to be the same thing. So uh leaves at
twelve thirty five am. It's scheduled to arrive in Beijing
at six thirty five am. 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
(09:31):
to point B and then fly it from point B
to point A, so it ends up where it left
and has it still has its home. It's HQ, but
now you have two flights instead of one. This flight
takes about five hours and thirty four minutes. This consumes
ballpark of eighty two thousand pounds of jet fuel. Which
(09:52):
is normal and in another routine practice, the aircraft carries
one hundred and eight thousand, 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
(10:15):
craft aloft in case they need to divert to another airport.
Think of it like a form of insurance, a margin
of error. Again, 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 routes, the passengers,
(10:37):
the amount of fuel they had, and so on. But
there was a very abnormal and tragic thing that happened
that made flight three seventy different from all the other
routine trips back and forth from Beijing and Malaysia, and
that was that this plane disappeared. What exactly happened. We'll
answer the question after a word from our sponsor. We're
(11:05):
back a little bit of a fake out mat unfortunately.
We will answer what we know about this question. Yes,
the the official numbers and such times, and what occurred
and again, it's 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.
(11:26):
Just um, we'll try and keep you as focused as
possible as we're getting through this. But this stuff is important.
So 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
(11:48):
any working knowledge of this, maybe you've just used Microsoft
Flight Simulator like like I have, so you know that
there's there are important transmissions that occur between air traffic
control and the person who is in control of a
flight and an aircraft flying vehicle in the sky. And uh,
A lot of this is actually transmissions that are done
(12:11):
by voice where to human beings are talking to each other.
But a lot of other really important stuff occurs just
through the systems within the airplane itself and the radar
that you know exists at air traffic control um at
varying places throughout the world. As a plane is flying
over certain areas, and there are these handoffs that occur
(12:33):
between the varying air traffic control systems. So let's say
in this case they're flying from Kuala Lumpour 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 Lumpoor Air Traffic Control
to then begin communicating with the Vietnam Air Traffic Control
(12:57):
or whichever local air traffic controllers 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
UM was this automated position report and it's something that
(13:18):
was sent through a CARS a C a r S,
the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting system, And this occurred
at one oh six Malaysian time, So that came that's
what thirty thirty five wheels up to one oh six.
That's where that signal went out. And this signal, this message,
this transmission does not contain multiple plot twist or anything.
(13:41):
It's sort of the meta data 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
UH nineties six thousand, six hundred pounds of gas, We're
we're ready to go. We're doing in the right thing.
The final verbal signal to air traffic control occurs just
(14:05):
a bit after it's a one nineteen in the morning.
Captain Zahari Ahmed Shah acknowledges the transition from the Kuala
Lumpur radar to the ho Cheatment Area Controls Center. And
that's just as you said earlier, Matt. Let's think of
it kind of like in an audio radar version of
(14:25):
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. 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 too.
(14:49):
Then it's called squawk to UH to then change that
to send out to the new air traffic controllers. Just
so the crew was expected to signal a traffic control
in Ho Chi Minh 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
(15:14):
that last verbal signal, we have the We have the
quote of what they said. The controller Kuala Lumpur Center
Radio Malaysian three seven zero contact Ho Chi Minh one
to zero decimal nine. Goodnight. The captain Zahari answers goodnight
Malaysia three seven zero. But he doesn't read back the
(15:36):
frequency the way he should have according to protocol. Otherwise
that transmission is normal. He didn't say anything, you know,
like the elder gods rise, the stars arrived, 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
(15:57):
understand a few basic things. Radar rely on just simple
raw pains thing thing thing off different objects in 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.
(16:21):
Secondary radar comes from the plane has the airplane's identity
and altitude. A few seconds after MH three seventy crosses
into Vietnamese airspace, the symbol showing its transponder at secondary
radar stuff drops from the screens. It disappears at least
as far as Malaysian Air Traffic Control can see, and
(16:44):
then in their sorry in their primary radar disappears from
Lasian air Traffic Control. Thirty seven seconds later, the whole
thing disappears from secondary radar, and that's that time occurs
sets around thirty nine minutes after takeoff. And that's really
weird because that would possibly signal that someone within the
(17:07):
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 um machine that you've got somewhere in your 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
(17:29):
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. Um. In this scenario,
it appears that somebody just turned the bluetooth off on
that phone or the airplane to where Now that Google
(17:50):
Home is still searching for that thing, but it can't
find it because it's the phone is no longer transmitting. Yeah, exactly.
The people in the Vietnamese control center, they know that
MH three seventies crossed in the airspace. They've seen it disappear,
and they tried to contact the aircraft various means to
(18:12):
no avail. The captain of another aircraft attempted to contact
the crew a little bit after one thirty using the
International Air Distress or i a D frequency, and he
was trying to reach them to relay what air traffic
control in Vietnam was saying, which was basically, what happened
(18:33):
to you? Call us check in. And the captain of
this other aircraft says that he was able to establish communication,
but he only heard mumbling and static, which would make
for a very creepy sound cue and that right there
(18:58):
could get into you something that may have occurred on
that plane. Just the just keep that in your mind,
mumbling and static 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 on
(19:22):
board satellite data unit. So something acknowledged that received it.
But it was an automated acknowledgement. It was a machine.
But it is at least good to know because again,
if we're 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
(19:43):
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 pining at seven thirteen,
they're attempting to establish communication again and something on that
plane is still responding, that means it's it's functioning somewhere. Yes.
Exactly around the time that Flight three seventy disappears from
(20:07):
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
until one thirty five in the morning. Military radars shows
(20:27):
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
fuel somewhere over the Southern Indian Ocean, and from that
(20:51):
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,
(21:12):
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. Uh Matt, Which which
way do you want to go with this? Let's start
with some of the most plausible stuff that's out there,
because there there have been some some I think well
(21:34):
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
Malaysian authorities. We we do know that that weird left
hand turn occurred, or at least that they went off course.
(21:57):
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 Malaysia and then over
the tip of Indonesia there and then took a left turn. Somehow,
that's what we know. So taking all that into account,
it changes things, and it makes some of these most
(22:19):
plausible explanations a little different. So let's let's get into
the one of the most plausible, the idea that somehow
the people responsible for flying this plane either lost consciousness
or we're experiencing something called hypoxia. And hypoxia is just
a fancy way of saying a lack of oxygen specifically
(22:40):
to the brain, and then what happens. It describes what
happens in the brain um because of that lack of oxygen,
and this generally occurs on aircraft when there's a decompression
of the cabin right. Um, just quickly to go over
this bend, maybe you could 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
(23:03):
a real issue because humans, human bodies need a certain
density of oxygen in air to be able to breathe correctly.
And when you're flying in a plane, UH, if you
were just at that altitude, like thirty five thousand feet
in the air without um a pressurized cabin, you wouldn't
(23:24):
be able to breathe. It would only take a few
seconds before you would begin to experience hypoxia, uh, not
be able to think correctly, and then pass out. In
a plane, it's pressurized, and it's generally pressurized to a
round ten thousand feet or the equivalent of about ten
thousand feet in the air, So the air you're breathing
inside the cabin is uh they call it ten thousand feet.
(23:46):
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, they wouldn't have
been able to make good decisions, or at least decisions
were based on their training. And if that happened, it
could lead down this cascading pathway of bad decisions and
(24:08):
then tragedy. But here's the thing. Even if the crew
was unresponsive because the cabin depressurized, they experienced hypoxia, they
passed out, even the autopilot that 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. Yeah,
(24:30):
the autopilot would stay on until the engine literally ran
out of fuel and experience the 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 going
(24:52):
into theories. 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 people didn't
(25:15):
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 confirmed this. They're very careful with the way
(25:36):
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,
you know, this is a tense term for some people,
an inside job. What if the plane was hijacked by
a member of the crew, possibly in a suicide attempt.
(26:00):
Rational Wiki has a great approach to this. They they
summarize the following facts about the pilot we mentioned earlier
as a Harry ahmade shop. Shaw was reported by his
coworkers and friends to be going through a period of
quote emotional distress due to his marriage falling apart. A
later police investigation, they did a background check on everyone
(26:24):
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 made absolutely
no plans after March eight. That's where his calendar ended.
(26:46):
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. It certainly happened
a few times that I can think of in the past. Um,
it's a it's a weird thing to imagine somebody deciding
(27:11):
to take their own life along with two hundred plus others. Um,
it's it's hard to imagine. Well, but it's but it's not,
it's not implausible. Yeah, Unfortunately, that's something we know because
what the show has taught us about the human experience
is that humans are very very selfish and very very
(27:32):
talented at rationalizing. They're horrible base traits, right, So we
we know that it's we know it's not uncommon. There's
another example, German Wings flight nine five to five that's
a similar thing. We also know that the same technology
that prevents outside hijackers from successfully taking a plane is
(27:54):
the same technology that helps inside hijackers carry off something
like this cockpit door of this Bowing seven seven seven
had anti hijacking technology on it, making it once the
doors locked nearly impossible, virtually impossible for crew members or
passengers to break in and stop him. Also, the police
(28:16):
investigation turned up some weird stuff at his homemade flight simulator. Right. 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 at a mouse
and a keyboard, and I thought, I was it was awesome.
But for him, he actually had a lot of the controls,
(28:38):
a lot of the actual devices that you would need
to manipulate on a plane to make it function. And uh,
what they found there was very strange. Apparently when they
when they actually pulled stuff up, all they really found
were um coordinates of basically like take off and landing. Right, So,
(29:00):
there were several coordinates that were out in the Indian
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 somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Yeah, there's literally a
(29:20):
giant ocean and a huge number of plot points basically
where this plane could have crashed. Um, it's insane, but
several of the 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 a simulator, right, Yeah,
(29:41):
According to New York Magazine, the FBI, 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 that article,
which is through their intelligence or um brand or imprint,
(30:02):
is 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, but the direction is more or less exactly
the same. So this flight simulator stuff is not proof
(30:26):
positive that Zahari himself took over the plane and purposely
crashed it or crashed in an attempt to get somewhere. 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
(30:46):
on his flight simulator. Seriously, he may have just been
and called me crazy here called me maybe there's two
tinfoil hat for everybody. Uh, because he's a pilot, he
might have just been practicing flying planes. I mean, maybe
maybe I'm the fringe theorists in this case. Here's here's
the problem. A report in two thousand eighteen claimed to
(31:10):
rule out suicide based on 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 we have a couple of
things we have to mention about those reports in general,
(31:31):
which is that the Malaysian government and a couple of
other governments scrambled to cover up and suppress things in
the initial uh, 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
(31:53):
to have bad PR. 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 you can,
(32:15):
you can see that, but that's an our airspace. And
then of course China will say, oh, so that's how
far your radar goes d lightful. Thanks for the info, bro.
But the this, 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 external
(32:37):
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. There's a
weird open letter from some group purporting to be from China,
like a terror group from China, but it was it
(33:00):
was ruled to be likely not actual, 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
(33:20):
as a possibility. That's true. Fire has happened in the past,
but until we actually find the majority of the wreckage,
there's no way to know it. They're less plausible. Things
have been advanced. There's always an alarmist call citing jahad ist. Uh,
there's the possibility of a cyber attack. Yeah, and that
(33:41):
has to do with the planes autopilot system, because after
nine eleven, as another way to try and prevent some
kind of hijacking, Boeing installed this specific countermeasure within the
the autopilot so that air traffic controllers could take over
basically in remote control we fly that plane. And in
(34:01):
two thousand seven Boeing had said they had installed what
they call the uninterruptible auto pilot. So the theories 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
(34:22):
driving capabilities of newer vehicles. And as a tech writer
named Jeff Wise who said, maybe the hijackers access the
systems through the floor 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
(34:44):
this doesn't This doesn't explain nor account for dozens of
other problems. One thing 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 seventy
(35:04):
was captured because some of the passengers on the plane
were Chinese employees of an Austin based semiconductor manufacturer named
free Scale. And this is something that some of us
have her reading into three seventy. Captain McConnell claimed that
the painting equipment on flight three seventy were secret devices
produced by Freescale that gave the plane stealth capabilities. So
(35:27):
he's saying like it it didn't wreck, it was captured.
The corporate espionage angle is pretty fascinating, you know. Initially
when they came out, I I thought I didn't know
whether there was sand to it, But but I thought, okay,
well these are this is a collection of people who
(35:48):
work in the same rarefied air right, so they would
be potentially high value subject matter experts to someone. But
does that make them a high value to market, and
that's what I couldn't get past. They're easier ways to
disappear people, certainly, but the concentration of a lot of
(36:09):
those people is if we were gaming it out, that
would be very helpful. Yeah, and the other there's another
part here, which is that the plane doesn't have to
have high value targets quote unquote aboard for it to
just be shot down. And a lot of people said
(36:30):
it was shot down. It was very popular with the
right wing contingents here in the United States. It the
theory is not super complex, just says a government somewhere,
possibly Malaysia, possibly the US, possibly China shot plane down.
So there are a lot of reasons there. Some of
it was just because the plane ended up in airspace
(36:52):
that was controlled, specifically over Ukraine. That was the thought
at least, and that it was shot down because it
was perceived as a threat um in controlled airspace. There's
some other stuff in there about um oh, I did
I forgot to even mention this. Do we talk about
North Korea and that possible connection that proposed, Yeah, there,
(37:14):
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. Yeah,
that's a that's a reddit theory, right. The only strong
support I saw for that theory or the argument for it,
(37:34):
was there was enough fuel on the plane to make
it to Peel and Gang. It would have been in range. Done.
That's it. Of course he went to North Korea. 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 kind of thing. Like
that guy who was like, hey, maybe it was a
(37:56):
black hole. Oh you mean Don Lemon from CNN. Yeah,
it's true. Don Lemon over at CNN asked whether a
minueture black hole could have caused the wreck. The answer
is probably not, Don, probably not. But also this hid
behind that that that rhetorical device of just asking questions.
(38:20):
By framing a preposterous claim as though it is a question,
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
(38:44):
like screwing humans over for some reason. Now we just say,
I'm just asking the question, what if the Queen of
England is like half alien reptilian, half human hybrid and
just generally hates people. I'm just asked, Kate. Yeah, in
this case, don Lemon, I think worded it as preposterous, like,
is it preposterous to think that maybe a black hole
(39:07):
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, They're just just tell me if that's crazy,
and then that's that's very much related to the other
idea aliens. There was a poll on CNN's website that
(39:28):
I think has been deleted now, and according to that pole,
nine percent of the people responding answered that it was
quote very likely or quote somewhat likely, the flight three
seventy was abducted by aliens, time travelers, or beans from
another dimension. There is no scientific basis for that. That's
a self reporting poll, yes, and that's just the idea
(39:50):
that maybe the concept that nine of the people in
that particular poll believed that somehow aliens were involved, right,
It wasn't any specific there's no specifics to that pole.
It wasn't like they were Was the plane itself transported
onto another larger alien vessel. Did as extraterrestrials board the
(40:13):
plane and then take it to North Korea? Um? Sorry,
that's poking fun a little bit um, but you know
it's not to be pokeponed. Here is the fact that
hundreds of people went missing on that plane, including the
pilot and the first captain, and all of the crew
and all of the family members that were on there.
(40:33):
So these kinds of conspiracy theories again while I'm while
I'm making fun of it a little bit personally, that
is not to discount the tragedy that has occurred here. 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 toll of di Ago Garcia, or
(40:59):
that it was taken to some other place. There are
different genres of MG three seventy theories, conspiracy theories. But
we do know that some experts have claimed to have
found parts of the wreckage. Do you hear about this?
(41:20):
Several pieces have washed up on the shores of small
islands out there within the Indian Ocean. UM. Pieces that
are definitely you can you can link up the serial
numbers within these pieces. It's not the fuselage, it's the
there's a wing flap in Tanzania. Yeah, that's one of
the things like that. Um, you can actually match it
(41:42):
up and say, yes, this came from this specific model
and serial number, and there was a playing wing fragment
in Martius Mauritius. Yeah. There's a great, great article from
the Atlantic called What Really Happened to Malaysia's Missing Airplane
that is written by William lang Wish or Languish. That's
(42:05):
pretty recent it's July. Yeah, and within there he does
William does a great job of outlining there's a particular
man that I cannot recall his name right now, but
Gibson gives it is Gibson Lane Gibson. He's the essentially
self made Malaysia three Malaysia Airlines three seventy hunter. I
(42:26):
mean really, he's he's been looking for uh pieces of
debris that have washed up on shores across the world,
on all over, all over, and he's also put feelers
out to a lot of these smaller islands where you know,
stuff just happens to wash ashore and then they notify him. Yeah.
To continue with the examples, there was a I had
not I am not an aviation expert. I do not
(42:49):
know what a flap perone is or a flat perone
what There was one found in Reunion Island or on
Reunion Island. That would make a total of at least
three three confirmed pieces. But then there are other things
have been found that are almost certainly from the missing
jetliner Madagascar. There was a cabin interior panel found in
(43:13):
June and engine Cowean in South Africa, another interior panel
on Rodriguez Island, horizontal stabilizers on Mozambique, flaptrack firing on Mozambique.
There the stuff is out there, it's being found. One
interesting conspiracy theory I heard about Gibson, which I hope
was not proposed in a in a serious air, was
(43:37):
that he had access to much more wreckage but was
doling it out slowly to to for his reputation. And uh,
Mr Gibson, if you're listening, I do not believe that's
the case. And I think people are doing that. We're
hopefully being satirical or trying to be edge Lord's online. Yeah,
(43:57):
I would agree, at least for the writing from that article,
it appears that his actions have been well intentioned, like
going to memorials to meet with 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 uh was lost in that in that flight.
(44:19):
It's an 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,
(44:41):
many months 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 can
find the rest of the plane. And then the end
(45:05):
goal for that would be to find the black boxes
so you can actually hear what occurred inside that cockpit.
And it's interesting said, because that would be my my
summation to the importance of finding the Black Box. However,
that's not what the author from the Atlantic ends up proposing.
(45:26):
Because now we're you know, we're several years past the event.
People in Australia have done all the research they could.
The government of China is censoring news that might The
government China just wants to move on, right. The government
of Malaysia wishes, of course this has never happened. They
wanted to go away, and while people are still finding pieces,
(45:50):
and Gibson being one of the main sources of those pieces,
you would think that the government of 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 bad. It made
them look a little incompetent. They weren't following protocol. They
were doing cover ups pretty much immediately. And so to
(46:14):
the to the Atlantic author, I guess the best way
to sum it up is to take an excerpt from
their their earlier piece in July nineteen. They say, quote,
the important answers probably don't lie in the ocean, but
on land in Malaysia. That should be the focus moving forward,
unless they are as incompetent as the Air Force and
(46:35):
air traffic Control the Malaysian police. No 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 poking around Kuala Lumpur. I
don't know, what do you think of that, matt Um.
(46:58):
It's weird to put it on Blaine gibbs in like
that because I think what he's doing is separate from
what the writer is talking about. Um. The writer is
talking about corruption, right, and an investigation into that corruption. Um.
What Blaine is doing is literally trying to find pieces
and then trace back, working with Australia in a couple
(47:19):
of other places to trace back, um, the to the
originating point to find that black box. So I don't know,
to make inequialency out of those, I don't know. It
doesn't make sense to me. 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, and in the same
right that the way it was obtuscated by the Malaysian
(47:40):
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. 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,
(48:00):
what is that information? Why? What is the motivation? Goes
down to information and motivation, and this is close to
where today's episode ends. We do not have all the answers.
There are pages and pages written about the event, but
what we can conclude is that it does clearly seem
(48:23):
to have wrecked many of the survivors. The relatives, the
family members and loved ones with people who most likely
died on this plane would of course be joyous for
the closure of discovering the bodies, giving them a proper burial,
and so on. But the ocean is vast and at
(48:46):
this time, while we can speculate about the circumstances of
these people's unfortunate deaths, we can not pinpoint where where
the bulk of the plane is now, or even if
the plane exists in one largely coherent piece. But I
(49:06):
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 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 were
ever recovered. Um. Yeah. Also, the ocean is awash with
(49:28):
trash 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, but the ocean is bigger, um, And
we lose planes way more often than I would like
(49:51):
to believe. And this leads us to something that you
have been thinking of off air, right, Acum's razor. Yes,
there's an article that's written by Christine Negroni and she
she basically just puts forth the idea that if we
do take Ockham's razor into account, here, the combination of
(50:13):
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
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
(50:36):
very very experienced pilot that was supposed to be piloting
the plane was in the bathroom for some reason, um
in the main cabin or in the business class cabin
when the cabin depressurized so that he could not get
back to where he needed to be the to fly
the plane, and the inexperienced guy was at the helm
(50:59):
um that's at least what she believes, and that's what
led to the old ultimately to the weird stuff that
happened on the flight and then the crash. But that
scenario does not account for that strange left turn, well,
I mean, the whole turning around of the plane from
their heading towards Beijing two then taking that big left
(51:21):
turn towards Antarctica, the manual southwestern term which was essentially
a one eight because somebody did that. Yet someone had
to do that, and that's that's where we leave it today.
The problem with the most plausible theories is that they
do not explain that turn, And the problem with things
(51:42):
that explain that turn is that they are primarily oriented
towards explaining that term oriented is probably not the best
word to use there. However, we do know that the
at least pieces of the plane have been separated from
the plane entire and we want to hear rob you.
I will say, just by personal opinion here, I think
(52:03):
was the captain, but that's just based on this stuff
I've read. Yeah, I would say a lot of the sources,
at least that we've been looking through for this, appear
to aim that in that direction. And we want to
hear from you. Do you believe that Captain Zahara Ahmad
Shaw committed suicide, taking a plane full of more than
(52:24):
two people along with him in the process. Do you
believe that there was a state actor involved, either compromising
the plane electronically or physically shooting it down, or do
you think there was something more to the story. We'd
love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Twitter, you can find us
on Instagram. You can talk to our favorite part of
(52:45):
the show, your fellow listeners on our community page. Here's
where it gets crazy with some of the best mods
in the moderating business, the absolute best, hands down. Take
it from us. We know because we work with them
and they're awesome. If you don't want to do that,
you can give us a call. We are one eight
three three st d w y t K. Leave a message.
(53:08):
You make it on the air, but even if you don't,
we'll hear it and we will enjoy it. We'd love
to just do all these same other things, opinions, ideas
about what shows. You want us to do all that stuff,
put it in voicemail form and we'll listen to it.
If you don't want to do that, you can always
reach us the good old fashioned way. We are conspiracy
at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want
(53:47):
you to know. As a production of i heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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