Finding MH370

The seabed search for MH370 remains in full swing. It is now 12 days into Phase 2 of the third seabed search, and we’re talking about whose much-discussed theory of the plane’s disappearance is now being put to the test. I also share some interesting and intriguing information about one of the most important and influential characters in the MH370 community. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www...

In the last episode we talked about how we couldn’t tell what Ocean Infinity was planning, because they weren’t saying anything publicly and the ship tasked with searching the seabed seemed to heading off to South Africa. Well, fortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, Armada 78 06 sailed to a stretch of ocean near the 7th arc, arriving there on Tuesday March 11, and it deployed its three search A...

It was eleven years ago today that Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared from radar screens over the South China Sea. Since then millions of square miles of ocean have been searched from the air, hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of seabed have been scanned, a few dozen pieces of debris have been recovered from the shores of the western Indian Ocean, but we still don’t have any conclus...

Armada 78 06, the Ocean Infinity vessel tasked with the latest seabed search, has arrived safely in port in Henderson, near Perth Australia, a little earlier than originally planned. That means it will get refitted and will be back out at the search area earlier, too. That’s the good news. The bad news is that some dodgy characters have launched a new wave of misinformation about the case. In toda...

Today is Saturday March 1, 2025 and yesterday the Ocean Infinity ship tasked with carrying out the third seabed search for the missing Malaysian airliner MH370 left the search area and is sailing to the port of Fremantle Australia, some 1,000 miles to the east, less than a week after it started the scan on Sunday February 23. In today’s episode we’ll discuss the rationale for the part of the searc...

It’s Sunday February 23, 2025 and the Ocean Infinity Search vessel tasked with carrying out the third seabed search for MH370 has just now arrived in the search area. Not only is it in a good position to deploy its underwater robots, its position gives us a solid answer to one of the biggest mysteries hanging over the search — namely, where are they going to look and why? Get full access to Findin...

The third search for the missing Malaysian airliner, MH370, has began. A ship belonging to the martime survey company Ocean Infinity left the island of Mauritius Frday morning local time and is steaming towards a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean where the plane is believed to have crashed after vanishing 11 years ago. The ship is expected to arrive on February 23 and then deploy sophisticated un...

Of all disasters that can befall a plane, probably none is more terrifying than a sudden, near vertical dive at full speed into the ground. In today’s episode, will look at some of the reasons that this kind of accident can occur. The context, of course, is the crash last Friday, January 31, 2025, by a Learjet 55 less than a minute after takeoff from North Philadelphia airport. In the weeks ahead,...

Last month the Malaysian Government announced that it had reached an agreement with the marine survey company Ocean Infinity to restart the seabed search for the wreckage of MH370. A few days ago, the Australian commentator Geoffey Thomas caused a stir by claiming that the search was already a dead letter — that Ocean Infinity had “given up all hope” that a firm contract for the search would actua...

Big news in MH370 world with an announcement by the Malaysian government that it has okayed an agreement with seabed search firm Ocean Infinity to restart the search for the missing airliner. The question we’re going to address today is, where are they going to look for it, and why is this happening now? Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe Hosted by Simplecast, an A...

Civil aviation has entered a dangerous new era now that Russia has expanded its campaign of sabotage in northern Europe to attack civil aviation directly. The question we’re going to address in today’s episode is whether those attacks are limited to the planting of incendiary devices on board aircraft, or whether Russia has also started hacking navigational sytems to destroy aircraft and kill flig...

In early 2009, Iran’s secret proram to build nuclear weapons suffered a series of mysterious failures. Centrifuge machines used to purify uranium suddenly spun out of control and tore themselves apart. More than a thousand machines were destroyed, and Iran’s pursuit of the bomb was seriously delayed. It turned out that the machines had been sabotaged by a computer virus called Stuxnet, a sophistic...

In today’s episode we discuss a new approach to gathering the Lepas data that could help us finally understand how long MH370’s debris was in the water. By tapping into a worldwide community of oceangoing sailors who convence on the social media site No Foreign Land, it might be possible to retrieve data from barnacles that are just about anywhere in the ocean. I tried out this approach by reachin...

The ocean is a big place. So maybe it isn’t that surprising that MH370 wasn’t found. At least, that’s what you hear a lot of people say. It’s pretty widely accepted among the general public that the seabed search failed because, well, the ocean is big, why wouldn’t it be hard to find a plane in it? But actually, the scientists who defined the search area had good reason to think that they knew whe...

Sergei Deineka and Oleg Chustrak were childhood friends who graduated from high school together in Odessa, Ukraine, then served as conscripts in the Soviet Army before reuniting to open a furniture manufacturing and retail business in their home town. They also imported furniture from Malaysia and China, which is why they came to be on MH370 the fateful night of March 8, 2014. They were travelling...

Today I’m very excited to introduce The Finding MH370 Project, an ocean experiment to gather the first new evidence about the missing Malaysian airliner in seven years. This data will resolve key paradoxes about MH370 and should clarify once and for all what happened to plane and the 239 people aboard. To this day, the only physical evidence we have are several dozen pieces of debris that washed a...

Starting in 2014, Russia dramatically intensified its hybrid warfare attack against the democratic West, launching hacking operations, misinformation campaigns, assassinating critics, and tampering in elections. Was MH370 a part of this wide-front assault? I’ve argued that it likely was, but whether or not that is the case, what is inarguable is that the success of Russia’s efforts has been aided...

In order to understand where MH370’s debris came from, we need to know how marine organisms like the goose barnacle Lepas anatifera typically grow under similar conditions to those that the debris likely experienced. To do that, we’re going to need to collect specimens from buoys managed by an office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteo...

The Lepas anatifera is basically the spirit animal of this podcast. As we’ve discussed before, these animals live all over the ocean, and they attach quickly to anything that’s floating there, and they grow quickly in a predictable way, so just from the size alone you can tell how long something’s been afloat. Also, as the shells grow they incorporate minerals into their shells at a different rate...

If you spend any time engaged in the discussion about what happened to MH370, you’ll encounter the idea that the United States, and in particular the shadowy US intelligence community, certainly must know what happened to the plane since they have such a vast and all-encompassing network of assets for gathering information. In effect, the work of the French journalist Florence de Changy, whose wor...

Understanding MH370 requires understanding how strategic planners think. One of the most important concepts in strategic thinking today is the decision loop, which is a way of describing how people gather information, use it to understand their situation, then decide what to do and act upon that decision. This process is sometime referred to as the OODA loop (for “observe, orient, decided, act”) a...

In recent months one of the most viral pieces of MH370-related content has been a video that purports to show the airplane being surrounded by a trio of UFOs, which then escort it through some kind of wormhole or interdimensional portal. The video has been tirelessly promoted by a man named Ashton Forbes who has developed a whole elaborate patter to explain how the video came to be. On its face, t...

It’s been years since anyone’s reported finding a new piece of MH370 debris, and even longer since anyone has come up with any other evidence of what happened to the plane. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to collect new evidence. In today’s podcast, I’m joined by Andy Sybrandy, the founder and president of Pacific Gyre Inc., a company that makes sensors and telemetry for ocean data co...

Black box data is the ne plus ultra of aircraft accident investigation. But it is not the only kind of physical evidence. Pieces of debris—in particular, their dents and fractures — can tell a vivid story in themselves. When a plane crashes, it’s common for all different parts to exhibit different kinds of failure. Imagine a plane whose wingtip hits a tree. The impact would crush the leading edge...

In episode 6 we discussed a recent paper by Usama Kadri that examined whether the crash of MH370 should have been detected by a network of underwater microphones. Kadri argued that it should have been easily detected. The paper received a lot of attention in the mainstream press. Among the community of marine hydroacoustic researchers, it stirred some consternation. In today’s episode Dr David Dal...