Finding MH370

The Malaysia government has extended by one year the no-find no fee deal that it made with Ocean Infinity last March to search for the missing Malaysian airliner.   Under the terms of that deal, Ocean Infinity would search a 15,000 square kilometer area of the southern Indian Ocean near the 7th arc and receive $70 million if it was successful. The company would have 18 months to complete the searc...

There's never been an air accident like MH370, but that doesn't been that we can't learn from cases that share common characteristics. Today we discuss the case of a Peruvian 727 that vanished in the midst of a repositioning flight from Malta to Peru. My co-host is Ed Dentsel, host of the Unfound podcast. Shockingly, I had never even heard of the case until Ed brought it to my attention. Though si...

I’ve been unflinchingly critical of other people’s videos about MH370, and now the shoe’s on the other foot. An account called Aviation Files has put up a video entitled “MH370: Why It Never Crashed” that gives a detailed account of my investigative efforts into MH370. It’s gotten quite a response — as I write these words, about a month after its release, it has been viewed nearly 180,000 times. A...

Someone took MH370. But who, and why? In today’s episode of Finding MH370, we delve into the motivation and methodology of one potential culprit with someone who has a rare and compelling perspective — recently retired CIA officer Sean Wiswesser, who spent decades studying and applying the lessons of espionage and spy tradecraft. I want to be clear up front, I’m not talking to Sean about what the...

In the previous two episodes I talked about how search officials became convinced that the plane must have gone into the southern Indian Ocean because they didn’t think that debris could be planted, and they didn’t think that Inmarsat data could be tampered with. Today I’m going to talk about a third belief: that the plane had to have been hijacked by the captain because that’s who was in the cock...

Soon after MH370 vanished in 2014, investigators became convinced that there was only one possible explanation: that the plane's captain, Zaharie Ahmed Shah, had hijacked the plane and carried out an elaborate and technically sophisticated plan to commit mass murder-suicide by flying to a remote stretch of ocean and crashing there. Underlying their sense of certainy were three core beliefs. In tod...

In July of 2015, fifteen months after Malaysica Airlines Flight 370 disappeared into the night, a piece of its right wing washed ashore on La Réunion island in the western Indian Ocean. Investigators hoped that barnacles growing on the wing could offer a clue as to where the plane had crashed. But unfortunately, so little was known about these creatures at the time that no inferences could be draw...

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

It’s Sunday, February 8, and Armada 86 05 has set sail from Gage Roads near Perth Australia, and is not heading back out to the search area, as many had hoped, but is instead sailing for the Pacific, putting the search for MH370 back on ice. Some have speculated online that Ocean Infinity stopped looking because they found the wreckage; I’ll unpack why that is probably not the case, and will look...

Phase 2 of the seabed search for MH370 has ended, as Ocean Infinity’s search ship pulls its robot subs from the water and hands for port. In today’s episode we’ll talk about what they accomplished in the fourth week of their seabed scan and what lies ahead for future searches. We’ll also solve a mystery that cropped up in last week’s episode and see what we can make of a new one — namely, what ent...

Last week we expected that the scan of the seabed was about to take a short-term break, as Ocean Infinity’s research ship, Armada 86 05, was scheduled to return to port the very next day. Well, right after that episode dropped Ocean Infinity changed its plans, and its arrival data in Fremantle was changed from January 20 to January 29. This was definitely a welcome change, as it’s always a good th...

Ocean Infinity has completed its second week of searching the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysian airliner, MH370, and it’s making good progress. But Armada 86 05, while a modern ship with state-of-the-art technology, isn’t really equipped to keep a substantial crew of mariners out at sea for very long, and the word on the street is that it will have to return to port ver...

The marine survey vessel Armada 86 05 has been back out on station, resuming the search for MH370. Things haven’t gone entirely smoothly. The ship did a couple days’ worth of scanning, had to go on standby for a couple of days due to bad weather before deploying its deep-scanning robot subs once more. We happen to know more about the details of the search than we usually do because lately the comp...

Earlier this month the Malaysian government announced that the seabed search for MH370 would restart on December 30, and it looks looks like that is exactly what is happening. Right about now, as I’m putting together today’s episode on December 30, 2025, the Ocean Infinity marine survey vessel Armada 86 05 is pulling up to the search area, where it will deploy its three underwater robots to acoust...

It’s December 7, 2025, and Armada 86 05 has set sail from Benoa Port on the island of Bali, Indonesia. After spending a brief period conducting sea trials, it is now making a beeline for the area where it left off searching the seabed in March. If it maintains its current speed, it should arrive several days before the date previously given by the Malaysian government as the start of the new phase...

It’s December 3, 2025, and the Malaysia Government has just announced that the private underwater survey company Ocean Infinity will officially recommence the seabed search for MH370 in three weeks’ time. Today, we’re going to talk about why they’re doing it now, where they’ll look, and whether they’re likely to succeed. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe Hosted by...

Ocean Infinity’s state-of-the-art offshore support vessel, Armada 86 05, is currently on duty in the Philippines, about halfway through what is expected to be a two-week expedition to search the San Bernardino Strait for historical shipwrecks. Once it’s done, it will need to resupply, and then it will likely head to the southern Indian Ocean to once more take up the seabed scan that one of its sis...

Last December, the Malaysian government announced that the American ocean survey and salvage company Ocean Infinity would once again take up a search of the Indian Ocean seabed in hopes of finding the missing Malaysian airliner, MH370. The company had searched a considerable area of the ocean floor in 2018, but had thrown in the towel after finding nothing. This time around, a single custom-built...

Two episodes ago, I revealed that with the help of two volunteers on the island of Zanzibar I had been able to retrieve the first data showing how Lepas anatifera barnacles grow out on the open sea in the western Indian Ocean, where debris from MH370 was collected. In order to understand what this could tell us about the debris’ origin, I needed to measure the barnacles — more than 700 of them! —...

As the facts have emerged in the case of Air India 171, which crashed while taking off from Ahmedabad, India on June 12, it’s become increasingly clear that in all probability it was a case of mass murder suicide on the part of the captain. Mass murder suicide by pilot is a rare phenomenon, but until now they have all followed a certain pattern. Air India does not fit that pattern. In today’s epis...

This week mark the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the first piece of physical evidence in the case of the missing Malaysian Airliner, MH370. When the badly damaged right flaperon washed ashore on La Réunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, on July 17, 2015, it immediately caused a worldwide sensation. Scientists realized that the barnacles found growing on the flaperon could pro...

So far we’ve been focused on the physical and electronic evidence left behind by whoever took MH370. But there’s also a lot we can infer about the psychology of those who did the deed based on the actions that they carried out. In today’s episode, we zoom in five segments of the disappearance and discuss how they can help us narrow down the list of possible perpetrators. Get full access to Finding...

As we wait for the seabed search for MH370’s wreckage to restart, it’s worth taking the time to reflect about what we’ve learned from the search thus far, and what future scanning will tell us about the plane’s likely fate. Under the principles of Bayesian inference, the more of the seabed is searched without the plane’s wreckage being discovered, the greater the probability becomes that the plane...

Trying to understand what’s going on with the latest seabed search for MH370 is like reading tea leaves. Neither the Malaysian government, which is responsible for solving the mystery, nor Ocean Infinity, the marine survey company looking for the plane, has been very forthcoming about what they’re doing. So it was a nice change of pace when the Minister of Transport, Anthony Loke stood up at a pre...

On Friday March 28 the ship scanning the seabed for MH370, Armada 78 06, stowed its AUVs and set sail to the north, putting an end to the second phase of the third seabed search. It is currently underway for Singapore, about 2300 nautical miles to the north, and is scheduled to arrive on April 8. In today’s episode I discuss what Ocean Infinity accomplished during this last search phase and what m...