Deep Dive: MH370, Remastered

Andy Tarnoff and I spent eight months making the 31 episodes that comprised the podcast series “Deep Dive: MH370.” Our goal was to break down a complicated case so that it could be understood by viewers and listeners in an entertaining and easy-to-digest format. In today’s episode, we discuss the six important conclusions about the case that the public might not understand were it not for the podc...

Today we’re going to go deeper than we’ve ever gone before on a question that I’ve called the crux of the whole MH370 mystery, and which is newly important because a bunch of viral MH370 videos have come out that spend a lot of time discussing it and, I’ll argue, they’re getting it wrong. And it matters a great deal because these videos are shaping what the public thinks is a reasonable explanatio...

It doesn’t seem to make much sense. Unless you understand the man who makes the decisions in Russia, and how he sees the world. Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer stationed in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Like many patriotic Russians, Putin experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union not as the blossoming of freedom, but as the humiliation of a once-great power. Territory that had once b...

Today’s topic is one that I’ve been fascinated by for a long time: the art of stage magic and what it can tell us about MH370. I’m joined by Ed Dentzel, the host of an excellent podcast Unfound , in which he’s examined hundreds of missing persons cases. In a previous life Ed was the stage manager for “The World’s Greatest Magic Show” at the Greek Isles in Las Vegas from 2005 to 2008. While there h...

If the satcom was hacked and MH370 was taken north, the perpetrators presumably had a plan that ended with them alive, and this would have to involve landing the plane at an airport. But is there an airport they could have landed at? If there are no airports near the part of the 7th arc where MH370’s flight would have terminated, then that would be a major blow to the cyber-hijack theory. As it tu...

When Andy and I made the original version of this episode in March, 2024, Malaysia and the underwater search company Ocean Infinity were publicly discussing the idea of restarting the scan of the seabed. At the time it had been several years since Fugro and then Ocean Infinity had carried out searches that together had covered an area the size of Great Britain. In this episode Andy and I discuss h...

In today’s episode, which aired in its original form on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of MH370, we discuss two major advances that we’ve made in the case. The first has to do with the age of the barnacles found on the pieces of debris, and hence how long they spent in the water, a topic that we laid the groundwork for in the previous episode. This is significant in understanding the fa...

Over the course of the next two episodes, we’re going to talk about how we can use fresh evidence involving gooseneck barnacles, Lepas anatifera, to gain new insight into the fate of MH370. This is an organism we’ve talked about a lot already. We first met them in Episode 18: The Flaperon , when we talked about how the first piece of debris washed ashore on La Réunion Island. A striking feature of...

In the months after the disappearance of MH370, Malaysian police searched for any clues that might suggest that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was the culprit. This would have been the simplest explanation for why the Boeing 777 suddenly went electronically dark and pulled a U-turn forty minutes into its flight, and scarcely a minute after Shah’s voice was heard over the radio calmly tel...

Part of the process of figuring out the mystery of MH370 is finding explanations for the seemingly inexplicable things that happened. Part two is trying to verify whether those explanations hold water. Today we revisit a topic that we explored in depth back in Episode 10, “The Vulnerability,” in which we talked about an idea that Victor Iannello and I have both worked on—namely, that MH370 had an...

Ever since Blaine Alan Gibson first crossed my radar screen, half a year before he found “No Step,” I’ve struggled to understand this eccentric character. In the media, he styled himself after Indiana Jones, always wearing a brown fedora. He portrayed himself as an inveterate adventurer and world traveler who before MH370 had pursued any number of quixotic international quests, including an attemp...

Last episode we talked about the surge of MH370 debris that started turning up in the western Indian Ocean in early 2016, and how search officials were optimistic that all this new data would help them understand where the plane went down. We focussed on drift modeling, and how the timing and location of the finds could have helped pin down the location of the crash through a process called revers...

If there was one piece of debris, there should have been a lot more. Yet month after month went by without any further discoveries. Then in February of 2016 an independent researcher named Blaine Alan Gibson accomplished something no one ever had before: He set out to find a piece of MH370 debris, and he found one. In the months that followed, other people also found pieces of the plane. Blaine Gi...

At 8.30am on July 29, 2015, on the northeastern shore of Réunion Island, a cleanup crew was working its way along a stretch of pebbly beach when a worker named Johnny Begue spotted an unfamiliar-looking object at the edge of the surf. Roughly rectangular and about six feet long, it somewhat resembled a stubby airplane wing encrusted with marine life. Soon gendarmes were on the scene, along with lo...

For this episode, we’re trying something different. Until now we’ve spent each episode diving into a particular aspect of the mystery. This time, we’re pulling back to look at the mystery from a global perspective in order to address the question: What is this case like? Just as every person has a unique character, a mystery can have a personality of its own, and MH370 certainly does. The dominant...

In our last episode, we talked about the search of the seabed, which started in October 2014. By that time the plane had been missing for 8 months. And while the seabed search was everyone’s best hope for finding the black box and solving the mystery, people hadn’t forgotten about floating debris. You’ll recall that in the first month after the disappearance, there had been an extremely extensive...

As the southern spring of 2014 approached the search authorities prepared to undertake a search of the seabed where their calculations indicated MH370 had gone. They hired a Dutch marine survey company called Fugro, which dispatched three ships to the area: Fugro Discovery, Fugro Equator and Fugro Supporter. The area they were going to search had been defined by the probability density function we...

On July 17 Jeff was in his kitchen when the phone rang. It was a producer from CNN asking if he could go on air to talk about the Malaysia Airlines 777 that had just gone down over Ukraine. He’d spent so much time thinking about Ukraine and MH370 that it took him a moment to realize that she was talking about a completelely different airplane. The details were still sketchy, but it seemed that in...

This week we look at where the plane could have gone if it didn’t go into the remote southern Indian Ocean. According to the Inmarsat data, it would have flown to the northwest, but that raises another question: if it flew over mainland Asia, why wasn’t it picked up by anyone’s military radar? As you’ll recall, when Australian scientists applied the technique of Bayesian inference to the BTO data,...

Once the scientists at CSIRO had generated the probability distribution for the plane’s last known location on the 7th arc, the next question they had to answer was: how far did the plane travel from that point before it impacted the water? As we discussed earlier, their goal was to define a search box within which the plane was likely to be found. The plane’s location along the 7th arc defined th...

Today’s episode is something of a double-header, as we address two different but related topics: the scientific method, and how we the co-hosts came to be involved in the case. In the first half of the show, Andy and Jeff talk about their personal histories, and how their experiences prepared them for tackling the mystery of MH370. In the second half, Jeff describes how working on this mystery has...

[ Today’s episode is a remastered version of the 10th show I made with Andy Tarnoff as part of the original Deep Dive: MH370 podcast, in which we broke down the basics of the case step by step.] Today we tackle our most controversial topic date: the question of whether a backdoor exist in MH370’s satcom system that would have allowed the BFO data to be tampered with. If so, it will have radical im...

In the weeks after the disappearance of MH370, many theories were proposed, but one in particular quickly came to the fore: that one of the pilots had seized control of the plane and flown it on a murder-suicide mission into the southern Indian Ocean. While there have been a handful of known cases where pilots have flown their own plane into the ground, no one had ever before carried out a sophist...

From the first day MH370 went missing, it was the subject of an intense surface search. Planes, ships and satellites scoured millions of square kilometers of ocean. Not a single piece was ever spotted. In today’s episode we talk about how it went down, and what we might conclude from it. We also touch on a strange coda to the search, that involved an attempt to find the plane by listening for audi...

On March 24, 2014, the Malaysian Prime minister made a shocking announcement : using a new kind of mathematical analysis, scientists at the British satellite communications company Inmarsat had determined conclusively that MH370 had flown into a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean. Because there are no islands in the area, there was no possibility that anyone on the plane could have survived....