Missing Malaysian Flight MH370: Part I

**Discussion starts at 3:20**

On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 took off in the early hours of the morning as the red eye flight from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, with an intended destination of Beijing, China.  There were 227 passengers on board, with 12 crew members.  The pilot in command, 53 year old Captain Zaharie Shah, was performing a final instructional flight for 27 year old co-pilot, First Officer Fariq Hamid.  It was a clear, calm night, and the flight was initially uneventful.  At cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, the flight was leaving Malaysian Air Space and was instructed to transfer to the air traffic control tower in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.  At 0119, Captain Shah radioed the Air Traffic Controllers in Malaysia “Good night, Malaysian 370”.  That was the last verbal contact with anyone on the plane.   Approximately 103 seconds later, the aircraft went dark and vanished from all radar screens in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Ho Chi Minh City.  There were two transponders onboard the plane, so to disappear, both transponders would need to cease functioning - either by catastrophic failure or by manual override by someone on the plane.  It was over 20 minutes before anyone noted the plane was missing.  It did not arrive for its 6:30AM ETA, and only had enough fuel to fly until approximately 8:15 AM.  The most expensive search and rescue operation in aviation history was initiated. To this day, we do not know where the airplane is, or what happened to the 239 souls on board.  An extensive safety report was released which did not answer many questions and had inconclusive findings.  They denied suspecting any crew was involved, and reported that air traffic control was delayed in noting the missing plane.  Theories vary, from a hijacking or suicide mission, to a military operation, and a plethora of questions still exist.   One thing is for sure, evidence of shoddy investigative work and potential cover-ups abound.  What really happened to MH370 in the early morning hours of March 8 , 2014?

Source Material and Additional Content

Transcript

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 What you got over there, Colleen?

I'm kind of drinking a couple of different things. I got a little coffee, got a little water. I'm bouncing between. I'm drinking around..

Right. I just have some good old fashioned, dihydrogen monoxide.

I can't. I cannot.

Yeah. Boring.

I've got a Waterloo Summer Berry mix.

 Waterloo

To be clear, I purchased it in the month of January.

Very interesting to me. 

Yeah, cause it’s kind of a patriotic can. 

Yeah it Is.

But delicious. Would you guys agree?

Yeah.  I thought maybe you had gotten it during 4th of July, but it was so good. 

Yeah. It kind of slapped. I had some earlier.

Alright guys, we've got quite a mystery today.

Yeah. Travel plans, Megan?

Yeah. I don't have a lot of fears of flying or the water, but something about this case really does terrify me, just like the vastness of the ocean, the vastness of the sky, and the fact that a plane can just disappear. So let's get into it and see what you guys think. On March 8th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH three 70 took off in the early hours of the morning as the red eye flight from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia with an intended destination of Beijing, China. There were 227 passengers on board with 12 crew members. The pilot in command, 53-year-old Captain Zaha Shaw, was performing a final instructional flight for 27-year-old copilot first officer fare Kade, and the flight was initially uneventful at cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The flight was leaving Malaysian airspace and was instructed to transfer to the air traffic control tower in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.

At 1:19, captain Shaw radioed the air traffic controllers in Malaysia. Goodnight, Malaysian 370. That was the last verbal contact with anyone on the plane. Approximately 103 seconds later, the aircraft went dark and vanished from all radar screens in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Ho Chi Min City, there were two transponders on board the plane. So to disappear, both transponders would need to cease functioning either by catastrophic failure or by manual override by someone on the plane. It was over 20 minutes before anyone noted the plane was missing. It did not arrive for its 6:30 AM ETA and only had enough fuel to fly until about 8:15 AM the most expensive search and rescue operation aviation history was initiated. To this day, we do not know where the airplane is or what happened to the 239 souls on board. An extensive safety report was released, which did not answer many questions at an inconclusive findings. They denied suspecting any crew was involved and reported that the air traffic controllers were delayed. And noting the missing plane theories vary from a hijacking or suicide mission to a military operation and a plethora of questions still exist. One thing is for sure, evidence of shoddy investigative work and potential coverups abound. What really happened to MH 370 in the early morning hours of March 8th, 2014?

Whoa.

There's a lot going on with this that I didn't realize. Yeah.

I mean, I also remember being 24 when this happened and my parents being like the Malaysian airplane, and I was like, what's the big deal?   Then, doing more research, you're like, holy…

Yeah, I remember hearing about it in the news, but I just thought it was just another plane crash. But it's not. It is not.

I know. Okay. I know you guys watched some documentaries. You don’t have a ton of knowledge on this, but you have a background. So what is your initial assessment of what you think happened to this plane?

Okay, I think something shady happened.

Do you think the pilot did something shady? Do you think there was a hijacking? Do you think…

Oh, I think there was a hijacking from another, someone from another country was trying to hijack the plane for whatever reason. I don't know the reason, but I feel like the plane was hijacked because to me it doesn't make sense that a pilot with this much knowledge and experience could just veer off course. That seems very strange.

Okay, how about you Colleen?

I am in between a couple of thoughts. My first thought was I think one of the documentaries brings up well, like a fire or some kind of crisis. But then my other thought is maybe health crisis with the pilots, but the communication on the radio is now making me lean more towards that. It was deliberate, but I don't think it was like a hijack situation. I think it was like a suicidal situation. I know we have all these reports saying how healthy the captain was and everything like that, but that's just what people saw. So my thought is that he purposely crashed it.

The two predominant theories are, suicide/murder or hijacking.  I have actually a different theory than both of you, but I’m going to save it for the end.  So there's a lot of information here. I'm going to try to sum it all up as succinctly as possible. But you ladies keep me on track in case any of this gets confusing, because again, I've watched like 18 different documentaries on this. I do want to say that the first one I watched was the Netflix documentary, which I thought was really interesting. Then I went down the Reddit rabbit hole and I learned pretty quickly that a lot of the people in that documentary are not great sources. Also, a lot of the family members and friends are Ian, multiple documentaries, which is also pretty interesting. So let's start by getting into the characters and the people on the flight.

Yeah Megan, who was there?

The pilot in charge was Captain Zahari Shah. He was 53, married with three children and one of the most senior pilots working for the airline, beginning his career with them in 1983. He had been flying the Boeing 7 77 since 1998 and worked as an instructor and examiner since 2007. He's pretty high up.  I read that he maybe had a thousand fewer flying hours than Sully who landed on the Hudson. So yeah, a pretty senior guy. He had 18,355 hours of flying under his belt. And in multiple documentaries, they had his friends and family and fellow employees who all said he was very professional. He was one of the best across the board. They said there's no way that there could have been any kind of malicious intent on his part or any involvement on his part. And the official report that the Malaysian government released again about four and a half years after the fact said that there was really no evidence of financial issues, no mental health issues, no personal issues. And so they didn't really blame him. They said there was no evidence of any kind of wrongdoing on his part. But there have been some rumors in some of the documentaries that perhaps that's not all accurate, that perhaps he was having some marital issues.

There was an Atlantic article that interviewed an anonymous fellow pilot, an alleged lifelong friend. I say that because I think you all would take my secrets to the grave, but he's just out there sharing them anonymously though he claims that Captain Shaw had a bad marriage and had slept with multiple flight attendants. His friend said, and I quote, we all do. You're flying all over the world with these beautiful girls in the back. But his wife knew like, okay, no cata for the men. They can't help it, that there's beautiful girls in the back. What are they supposed to do? 

That’s Crazy.

But again, that's all just rumors because everywhere else people were like, what are you talking about? He had a great marriage. But I think we do know at the time that this all happened, he was apparently living separately from his wife. They owned two homes and they were each living in a separate home. So they also talk about, I think in a couple of articles that he was just kind of an awkward dude. He had engaged in some one-sided flirting with other women on Facebook and social media, and he would just DM these girls and they wouldn't respond. Then he was just kind of awkward about it. So that's not good.

Oh, no.

Some people said that he was just in this empty house alone. His kids were full grown, his wife's living in another home, and he would just kind of pace around these empty rooms waiting for his next flight. And they also note that he spent a lot of time on social media, like I said, and that can be associated with feelings of isolation, depression. So perhaps he did have some problems. It's really hard for us to say

Maybe a little… Menty bee? 

Maybe… not unlike Diana. They also looked at the CCTV at the airport on the day of the flight and then the three flights he had been on prior. And so they see him and his co-pilot going through security, going to board the plane, and they found no significant behavioral changes. He was well-groomed. He looked appropriate normal characteristics of his normal gait, posture, mannerisms, that kind of thing. So nothing popping up right away other than these rumors, I guess about his mental state or the state of his marriage. But really nothing else giving any indication that this guy knew something was going to happen or was involved in any way. So that's him. And this is the crew member. They thought that if a crew member was involved, he's probably the most likely just because he was such a smart guy, he had so much aviation knowledge. So he's probably the only person on board from the crew at least, who could potentially have the ability to make this plane disappear if anyone could do it. 

Also is really cute. Did you see his youtube videos?  He’s like a cute little nerd! Doing his, what did he call it? “community service” but posting videos?

Yeah, and then we have his first officer. So his first officer was Fariq Hamid. He was 27. He'd been flying with Malaysia Airlines since 2007 and had previously been the first officer on the 737 and the Airbus A A330. In November, 2013, he began training as first officer of the Boeing 777, and this was his last training flight. He had 2,753 hours of flying experience, and he was engaged to be married to another pilot. They also reported that he had no financial, personal, mental issues, anything like that that would put him at risk of being involved. So he was also cleared in the report that comes out four and a half years later. But overall, people thought, again, he only has like 39 hours on this plane. He's pretty novice when you compare him to the pilot in command. So really unlikely that he would've intentionally been involved in this.

So again, we had these two pilots, and then we had the 10 additional crew members who were all on the back end. So again, these 10 flight attendants are all Malaysian, and then there are 227 passengers on board. And these passengers come from a variety of different backgrounds. The majority of them were Chinese citizens, and then the remainder, again, are from a variety of different locations. So yeah, I think the family members of all of the passengers and crew really wanted answers for what happened to their family members. But again, I think there were a lot of protests, a lot of issues with these 140 Chinese passengers, family members being upset with the way the whole situation was handled by the Malaysian government.  I’m not sure what the relationship between the countries was like before this…

Kait: Well, it says here that Malaysia and China are really big trade partners. Apparently China is Malaysia's number one trade partner and Malaysia is China's second largest trading partner, which is interesting.

Very interesting.

Okay, so prior to this, they had a pretty good relationship, it sounds like. I would say later, there were definitely a lot of Chinese protests, I guess regarding the investigation and what happened. But anyway, so tthose are our players.

So now let's talk about the timeline and what we do know. So I kind of went through some of it in the introduction, but as a reminder, at 12:41 AM the flight departed Kuala Lumpur and is bound for Beijing, we can hear the transmission of the air traffic control tower and flight MH three 70. I was going to play a clip here, but it's kind of difficult to understand because talking in some air traffic control language and there are some accents. So without the closed cap sheet, it's kind of difficult to understand. So I'm going to summarize it, but we'll post it all online for you. So because this was a training flight, the pilot in charge was actually handling the communications once the plane took off. So the co-pilot handles the radio transmission on the ground. Now he's going to fly this plane, and all of the radio transmission in flight is going to be between Captain Shaw and the air traffic controllers. So 1241 we depart, and at about 1:08 AM the MH three 70 flight reports to air traffic control that they have reached their cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. That's again, level 3 5 0,

It kind of blows my mind how much air there is before space. It makes me feel like I'm in a simulation.

Yeah.  So at 1:01 and then 1:07 he reports that he's at cruising altitude 3 5 0, and I guess that's abnormal. So it was unnecessary information for him to provide the air traffic controller, let alone to provide that same information multiple times. 

Oh wait, really? Yeah. Oh, well, that's suspicious. 

That is really weird.  So at 1:19 AM air traffic controller says to MH three 70, Malaysian 370 contact Ho Chi Minh 120, decimal 9, goodnight. So what they're saying here is that they were leaving Malaysian airspace and they were being passed off to the air traffic controllers in Vietnam. And so Vietnam now should pick them up in theory and kind of that's who they're communicating with, and that's kind of responsible for that, which is part of, again, the specific spot where all this happened was like a connecting point, like an intersecting point of about seven different air spaces. So it's a lot of different areas of responsibility in a small geographical location. So if you were going to ever try to go missing, this is probably a prime place to do it.

Like the Bermuda Triangle of air traffic?

Yeah, I'll post a picture online of the airspace, but again, you can see how it would be difficult for people to really be able to tell who's controlling who, who's responsible for this flight, and you could easily just assume that someone else is kind of managing them. So 1:18 AM air traffic control says Malaysia three 70, contact Ho Chi Minh, one twenty decimal 9 goodnight. And then Captain Shaw responds immediately, goodnight, Malaysian three 70, which first of all, when you hear him say that, it gives me chills every time because that's the last contact anyone outside of this plane has with anyone on it.

Whoa.

But also what's wrong about this is that he's supposed to read back that radio channel. So what he should have said was, Malaysian 370 will contact Ho Chi Minh, 120 decimal 9 goodnight.

And he didn’t?

No, he just says Goodnight, Malaysian three 70. So that was an inappropriate response and leaves out that closed loop communication about the radio frequency of the min air traffic controllers. So that's our radio contact. So that's at 1:19 AM and then the last trans spotter communication is at 1:21 AM

Okay. As a captain of an airplane who has so much experience, he should know better, and he's the one that's instructing people. This seems a little deliberate. That's one of my first feelings.

I do want to say that there were a multiple different sources that did voice analysis of this radio chatter to determine was Captain Shaw distressed? Was he anxious? Whatever. I do know Netflix documentary said that on that final transmission, he had a faster and a higher pitch, and then he made that error. He misspoke, obviously, he kind of messed up. He was potentially nervous. He could have been distracted or stressed. But then a lot of other sources that looked at the radio transmission didn't find any abnormality with a voice analysis. So they didn't find any kind of conclusive evidence that anything was abnormal at that point, aside from, again, that he repeated the inappropriate transmission earlier on, and then he made an inappropriate transmission, the end, but the actual tone of his voice, the inflection, the rate he was speaking at all of that other sources have said there were no abnormalities with that. But again, we will post the audio clip and you guys can listen for yourself 

So now I'm going to tell you about what we know about the flight course after we lost communication. And I just want to kind of explain upfront that a lot of this data was developed with new research tools that hadn't been previously used. So when the flight first went missing, a lot of this information was not available on day one. So they would have a little bit of information, they would have their area that they were searching, and then more information would come in and they'd have to reevaluate and shift their search area. So obviously that would make the search very challenging. But I just want to be clear that when I go through the expected, what we think happened with the flight and the path it took, that information kind of slowly came out over quite a long period of time. So that information was not available early on.

So again, this last known contact, when they were transferring over, they were supposed to transfer over to Vietnam's airspace. So they were between the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. That's where these transponders went out by either, again, a catastrophic event or by a manual over at. And initially that was all the information that anyone had to go on. There was also a pilot who was, he was like a Malaysian airline pilot who was 30 minutes ahead of this other flight of the MH three 70. So he's 30 minutes ahead, and he did say that he got a call on his emergency frequency. That could have been the flight, but it was just a lot of interference and static. He did hear some mumbling on the other end, and this was just right around the time of that blackout. But again, nothing ever really came of that, I guess I don't know how much more that was investigated. And then the Malaysian military comes forward and they go, you know what? We do have some technology. We have these long range radars, which you guys said reminded you of Montauk.

Oh yeah, the banana. It looked like the banana thing. 

 Who are they talking to?

And so these radars, they don't rely on transponders. So they were able to get a little bit more information about the actual flight path that was taken.

I have a theory that I'm just suddenly thinking of. So I said maybe a suicidal mission, and I think it's still along that line, but I'm thinking the captain was transporting something in the plane and had to purposely crash the plane, and he knew that. That's my new thought, so I had to get that in there. 

Okay, get it in there.

So again, the Malaysia military aircraft was able to see that this flight, when it lost contact, it then took a very abrupt turn to the right and made a very sharp U-turn,

A wicked sharp uey. That was New England, wicked sharp uey.

Banging a uey is what my driver said in Boston…. But anyway, that uey?  That could not have been done with autopilot. It had to have been a pilot.

It had to have been manual.

So they saw the plane veering and then making a U-turn to the left, heading back toward Kuala Lumpur. But it passed over just north of Kuala Lumpur across the Ian Peninsula, turned right at Penang Island, and then continued northwest up the strai of Malalia. Again, we'll post a map.

I was just going to say we need to have a map ready for the people.

Yeah. I think if you look at the picture, it just makes this whole mystery even wilder.

It's crazy. It does not look normal in any way.

So again, the Malaysian military kind of lost the path of the plane after it turned right at Penang Island. But what is interesting to note is that that island is where Captain Shaw was born. And so if you think he was involved, whether that was intentionally or unintentionally, if this was planned or not planned, or whatever you think happened, if you think he was involved and he knew he was going to die, there are a lot of theories that perhaps he wanted to kind of make one more pass past his home and look down and see the island he was born in and grew up in.

I do think that played a part.

Yeah, I mean, think about all the times we're on a commercial airplane and you're just in the back of this plane minding your own business. You have no idea what's going on, and you don't even know where you are geographically, I guess, unless you're looking at the screen on the seat in front of you if it's giving you a flight path. But yeah, just a lot of trust. And apparently this plane with almost three people, you could just disappear. You could end up anywhere, and you have no idea just in the back of the plane taking a nap or watching a movie or reading a book.

There's just so much trust you have to have. 

I Can't believe that this is just now occurring to you.  I have anxiety.  This is what I think every time I get on a plane.

Oh, when I get on the plane I look at all the people on the plane with me, and I'm like, if we were to crash, who's my ally? You know what I mean? I look around, I'm like, who can make a fire?

I think, we’re all going to die.

No, no. I look at who I can survive on abandoned island with.

Oh, like a Lost situation.

Yes! Lost!

Mean, I think the three of us could do pretty well on an Island together. Oh, I'm a venture scout. I could totally survive. I'm concerned about Kate's ability to go without food or water – she get’s hangry.  

When I didn't even think about that.  We know it would kill me. My asthma.

At least you don't have a peanut allergy.

Yeah, that's true. 

I watch a lot of alone.  You want to do passive hunting because you don't want to expend energy.  And so you put out some fishing nets, and I'm like, I could a hundred percent just eat fish every day

And then some girl I saw on that one was going into the dirt and eating the bites.

Oh, that's smart. Eat the worms.

There was one guy who, he was like 19. He survived on these little field mice that he trapped… And they said they had as many calories in each mouse as like one pizza roll… which is what he survived on at home….  And he was having one of those a day. And that's how

Wow, that's smart.

I mean how did he survive?

Okay, so where were we? 

Okay, so this plane veers right, crosses over, goes kind of around that island. And then that's where that technology stopped working. The SATCOM terminal that they were connected to was a ground station in Perth, Australia, and it kind of confirmed the same path that we got from the last piece of technology. And when it veered north, made a U-turn veered northwest, it lost contact with the Satcom. And they were saying, so this could have been disabled within the cockpit by turning off the generator. And by doing that, it would also disable you guys, remember planes used to have the phones in the back of the seats in front of you for passengers to use. So it's like before cell phone time and everything. It's like if you wanted to make a phone call on a plane, you'd put your credit card in and you could make a satellite phone call. And I think a lot of people made their 9/11 phone calls that way as well.

Oh, to their friends and family?

So if you disable the satcom, which you would do in the cockpit, it would also disable all of the phone and text abilities for the passengers at their seat. And so then three minutes after it lost contact with the Malaysia military radar, the SATCOM logs back on, and then it kept connection or kept contact until six hours later when the fuel we think should have run out During this time, two calls were made from the ground via the Perth ground station, but nobody ever answered. And then we have that in Marsat. And so that's the international Maritime satellite. If there's no contact, it does what it calls a handshake. So every hour it'll bing to the plane just to kind of be like, Hey, are you there? Are you on? And so it binged to every hour. And that last Bing was at 8:11 AM local time, which was four minutes before we think the fuel should have run out of this plane.

Again, about 8:15 AM is when they expected this plane to have been out of fuel. So we do know that as of 8:11 AM the plane was still in the air. In the air, but again, this information had never been used to actually track location because it doesn't give you that information. It just kind of confirms that, Hey, we're on. So when you're over the water, but you have to talk to the ground, then you have to bounce that radio signal somehow. So you send out this radio signal, it goes to a satellite, which then relays back to land and vice versa. So they analyze the SATCOM data and they just calculate how long it would take to transmit that signal. And based on that, they were able to kind of determine distance, distance. And so they made this kind of a big circle. Think about a circumference actually more like a semicircle, but they use a circle and they're like, okay, somewhere in here is probably where this plane was at that time.

Oh, that makes sense. That's kind of cool. INMARSAT is a last ditch effort type thing.

A lot of geometry.

And there was a lot of theories too when I get into some of the theories that exist of people being like, oh, well, maybe someone hacked in and kind of changes data, but this data had never been used that way before. So I mean, I think that's incredibly unlikely. It was this one guy who works for set and he's like, I'm just sitting at my coffee table and I'm seeing this on the news, and I'm like, man, what can I do to help these guys? And he's the one who came with this idea and did the calculation. So again, calculating how long it took for that radio to transmit and using that information to determine a location. Just one guy doing a lot of math at his table, who used that for the first time. So again, I think it would require a lot of forethought for someone, even a really smart pilot or a hijacker, whoever, to be like, oh, we should rig that data.

That's really interesting that it was just some guy that was like, let me see how I can help.

That's why you got to marry nerds.

Yeah, shout out bourbon boy.

So then what else can I tell you about this data? This is just kind of a side note. 1:52 AM the copilot cell phone did connect to a cell tower. Initially rumors were he made a phone call or he received a phone call. But that's all now been invalidated. But we do know his phone did connect, so I don't know if he just turned it on or what happened, but there's a theory that maybe he was trying to make a phone call. So it just kind of adds to the mystery that at 1:52 AM this co-pilot's phone did come into contact with a cell tower.

Wasn't it also that they thought that he was trying not to make a phone call, but to find where they were? 

Yeah, like trying to use google maps

That's an interesting theory. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. But you're right, if all their instrumentation was down,

Yeah, cause how do you know where you are?

Have your ever been in a cockpit?

No, because you're not allowed to. 

Sure, You can

Yeah, go pose for a photo like the kids! 

I've been on a big plane before, went into the cockpit. It is terrifying.  It is So many buttons. 

So I did reach out to Captain Fred and I did ask about this. I was honestly, to be clear, I have a lot of respect for pilots. I think there's a lot of responsibility. I mean, the cost of that plane alone, a huge financial responsibility. And then you have 300 lives in your airplane, you're responsible for not to mention the people that you do harm to, not on the airplane. So I'm not minimizing that. I think, again, a lot of responsibility. But I said to him, honestly, other than takeoff and landing, you guys can just set cruise control. There's not a lot of work happening at that point. And I guess I just wanted to confirm it. This plane sort of have been on cruise control for six hours, and he said that that is the case. Somebody has to at some point kind of program this cruise control.

And so that plane did make a couple of more subtle turns after that initial sharp U-turn, which could have all been done on cruise control, but they would've had to have been programmed in advance. But yeah, it is possible that maybe they made this really sharp U-turn. Something happened. They wanted to go back to Kuala Lumpur after they make the sharp U-turn, something happens that prevents them from landing or whatever. So yeah, I think it does make sense. And Captain Fred was with you that this was probably a murder suicide situation, but I have issues with that theory, which we will get into. Okay, so then this is the end of the technology aspect of it all. But I just again want to kind of clarify that was all the information that they had to go on these initial searches. So as we talk about how I think we have more likely maybe pinpoint where this plane can be.

Now, a lot of the information took many, many years to come out. And I want to tell you about the searches which got stopped, but more recent data in the last couple of years, they looked at what we call whisper data. And so this looks at the interruptions caused by aircraft passing through radio connections. So we talked about the radio waves in our lunar landing episode and how the reason that the radio waves were able to travel so far in space is because there's nothing to block them. So now though, if there's radio signals being transmitted and planes are flying through these paths where the radio signals are going, you're going to have these brief disruptions. And so they went back and they looked at this and they said, okay, there were 160 interruptions in radio waves by something interfering. And so using that information, they were able to plot them out and make an estimate of this flight path.

And it gave them a little bit more specific information. And this is where we think, again, this is I think our most specific information, our best estimate of where this plane went down, if it did in fact go down in the ocean. And again, I think we believe it went down in the ocean. There are some other theories we'll talk about. And they combined that whisper data with information from the Western Australian Oceanography Group, which we'll also talk about them later. They're interested because they offered a lot of help to the Malaysians and the Malaysians turned them down, but they were helpful in finding some of the debris from some aircraft and some remnants, which we'll discuss. They looked at kind of tides and where if using this whisper data, we think the plane went down here and here's how the tides have been going, and this is where we would find debris.

And so if debris washes up in this location, then you kind of backtrack it and use that information to confirm where the plane was. So all of this information matched up. So it all seems pretty legitimate. Okay. So again, going back, we had our last ping at 8:11 AM we think eight 15 ish is when the fuel should have run out on this plane. This whisper data comes out a couple of years ago. And based on that, they think that there might've been a 22 minute holding pattern from eight 12 to 8 34 where it looks like a plane just kind of circled for 22 minutes and a holding pattern until we presume that gas ran it. This was purposeful. So we can talk about our theories later, but I think as far as hijacking and terrorist theories, I just have a really hard time believing that's what happened here, because there's no message.

It's not a very effective attack if you don't get your message out there. No one's taken responsibility for this or anything like that. But I guess some of the newer theories is maybe during this 22 minute holding pattern, someone was talking to someone else. So perhaps whoever had controlled this plane was talking to the Malaysian government for 22 minutes. But all that's just been covered up, so we don't know what that communication was. So if something like that happened, and I think maybe it's a little more believable that someone could have potentially hijacked this plane was politically motivated for whatever reason, and we just never heard that message because it's been covered up. You could think about that. But again, we'll get deeper into that as we discuss our theories.

There were always some less popular theories that the plane went north. When we talk about the handshake transmissions and kind of that radius, the seven rings, it could have gone north. But I think everyone seems to agree particularly with this newer whisper data that the plane probably did go south and did go down in the ocean. I mean, if it went south, it had to go into the ocean because nothing out there. And if it did go into the ocean, we don't really know. It could have been a controlled descent or it could have been an uncontrolled descent. So in an uncontrolled descent, which is the primary theory now, I think with the most recent data, it could have been a suicide mission, but crashing into the ocean at supersonic speeds would cause the plane to shatter into a ton of pieces, and it would be a pretty painful way to go.

So we hope if this was a suicide mission, that the pilot maybe killed himself and his passengers in a more peaceful, less painful way, which we can talk about before this actual dissent. So again, if they determine this was an uncontrolled dissent, it does not necessarily rule out suicide. And if something had happened and everyone on board was dead uncontrolled dissent is how the plane would've had to have gone down. Alternatively, you could have been a more controlled descent. So if the motivation was just to make this plane disappear, and if the pilot just wanted to be part of the craziest aviation mystery in history, and again, just kind of disappear, doing a nice gradual glide to the ocean, would minimize debris and make it tougher to find, or if they were trying to land this plane in water somehow, again, a more gradual descent is the way that would've happened.

So initially when they found some airplane debris, which you will discuss in a moment, it was intact. So people thought this must have been a controlled descent. But I think now with all the other evidence we have, people are leaning more towards, this was probably an uncontrolled descent, and the plane was just descending so rapidly that the pieces of the aircraft flew off before the plane hit the water. So the reason that a lot of the debris we have found is not more damaged is not because it was this controlled gradual descent, but more so just because it was such an aggressive descent that the pieces flew off before there was actual contact with the ocean.

Well, the amount of small pieces they found that feels more correct

Now even with a controlled versus uncontrolled descent and all this data we have, again, I think in the last couple of years, they have really narrowed this down to a potential area where this plane could be, but that still allows for a 200 kilometer possible variation of where this plane could have entered the ocean. So still a pretty large, it definitely narrows down a potential search area, but that's still a pretty large search area.

Interesting.

That still doesn't, explain why it's circled for 22 minutes.

Yeah, I don't have an answer for that, but yeah, we'll talk about it. The only thing that I can think of is if the oxygen ran out and he fell asleep and pulled up his throttle causing it to spin in a circle…  

Yeah, yeah. That's an interesting perspective.

So also, I just wanted to comment on this. We'll talk about how I think this whole investigation was botched, but most of these families that were interviewed found out their loved ones were missing, and then eventually presumed dead from the press. Communication was just terrible. In fact, I think two weeks after the plane disappeared, when they determined that everyone on the plane was probably dead, they just sent out an SMS text message to all of the family members saying, yeah, we're going to just assume that all of your family members are dead. So that's pretty harsh.

Oh my God.

There was one guy who was a source in the Netflix documentary who I'm not going to talk too much about because again, I don't know that I really believe his theories. They're pretty out there, and I'm not even sure that they're possible. But even he was like, never in the history of the world has someone just been told their loved one must be dead because of math. I thought that was a pretty legitimate quote, just like your dad is dead because math tells us that he's probably in the ocean, and that's enough for us to just wash our hands of this and be done with it. These families want to know what happened. Again, there were some theories that perhaps this plant had gone north and it could have landed. So some of them might've been holding out a little bit of hope. I just think there are better ways you could have handled that than an SMS text message. And also, again, they're still, even if you think they're dead, why? How did this happen? What happened? Where are they? I don't know. They just don't. They never really seemed all that interested in really providing answers for these family members. And again, I think communication was pretty harsh. So

If they would've made it somewhere, don't you think the first phone call would be to their families?  Wait, were there calls? I just got chills. Did someone call their parents?

No, but there were some people who, family members of passengers or friends of passengers who said that they did try to call people on the plane once they found out it was missing. And no one ever answered the phone, but they said the phones were ringing. They didn't go straight to voicemail. That kept ringing, which I think was, again, maybe giving them some hope that this plane was not in the bottom of the ocean. The airline has since come forward to apologize, and they're saying that they were really focused on biting this plane at the beginning. So they acknowledge we did really drop the ball on our communication. But again, I just think very few positive things that Malaysian Airlines did as far as addressing this entire catastrophe. And then I guess some other things that make this mystery is that they were, again, we're talking about seven air spaces in this vicinity, which I think makes it easy to go missing.

But also they flew over so many air spaces on that flight path, but no one has really produced any good radar evidence. They flew over an Australian airbase. They flew over Butterworth. And so again, you would think you're an Australian air base, and this Rogue 7 77 just flies over your base. And no one was alerted. Nobody tried to contact them, and no one's just wondering why this unidentified aircraft is flying over military airspace. And then they said there were a couple of large US military exercises that were happening in the area at this time. So there was a lot of military personnel in a pretty concentrated area. And again, how could nobody have seen anything? It's all just very weird.

Or this unidentified aircraft is flying over our airspace. Sir, are you requesting, that's weird. You know what? Airspace was not involved. United States. The United States has the number one Air Force in the world just saying…

You know what there, there's a US Air Force theory, so don't get too cocky.

Oh, very interesting.

So again, the initial search was really difficult because all this information came out over a long period of time. They initially just had that radio transmission to go on, and that was it. And so that's where they had to search. And then again, they try to kind of move their search around. But as time goes on, by the time all this information comes forward, now we have currents, we have movement. So yeah, it was I think always a challenge. But there was this search and rescue group, so again, a lot of Americans and Australians involved in this whole search operation, and it was done on a volunteer basis. So it was a fee for find basis. They weren't going to get paid unless they found the aircraft. So again, them searching isn't costing them Malaysian government anything. It's only going to cost them something if they actually find the plane. So this group searched 4.5 million kilometers.

Jesus.

Yeah. I mean, their search area was larger than the size of the United States. And then they did like 120,000 kilometers of surface search of sending their cameras and their tools down to search the surface of the ocean, the ocean floor.

Oh, I was going to say they were on the ground of the ocean and then they searched that much.

They didn't want to stop the search. I know they hadn't found anything yet, but they wanted to keep going until they found something. And it was the Malaysian government who halted this search.

No, there's something weird.

Yeah. What's the harm in letting these people look? 

They were afraid of them finding something.

I guess what the Malaysian government said when they called off the search was like, we will allow the search to resume when we can obtain credible evidence, but for now, the case is closed. So first of all, if you're not searching, how are you going to find evidence?

Where are they supposed to get that info?

Also, how are they calling this a closed case when they literally four and a half years after this accident released this massive report saying, we don't know what happened. Inconclusive. How do you say, case close to you later doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, this is crazy. 

That is suspicious.

Don't be suspicious. Don't be suspicious.

And number two, this whisper data has since come out, which again was kind of verified with the oceanography data. So we do have some critical information. We've narrowed this down to this 200 kilometer area, which again, seems so vast, but there's probably nothing to them. But again, why won't they allow them to resume the search? There was also some photographs that they thought were maybe some contra trails, and so they thought they could use that to kind of help guide the flight path earlier on. And then I think some people decided that maybe they were just these really abnormal cloud patterns and nothing ever really came of that. We can for sure post those pictures online

Chem trail?

There was not a lot of information for about 16 months. 16 months after the disappearance, this debris washed the shore on the French territory of Reunion Island, which when you see all these documentaries or you see these pictures online, I guess initially I was like, oh, yeah, it's not that far. And then I saw an actual map. I'm like, that is a massive distance for this debris to travel.

It floated so far, allegedly, allegedly,

The first alleged piece of airplane debris they found was a flapper on

Flapper on flapper off. 

Yeah, if you sit over the wing of the airplane. You can see it moving. It makes noise.

So again, the fact that the debris washed up their tracks with the oceanography data, the Inmarsat data, the whisper data, they all sort of confirmed the suspected 200 kilometer location that we aren't allowed to search. But here's where it gets interesting, and you guys tell me what you think about this because I could go one of two ways. So there's this American who allegedly maybe had Russian ties.

Oh God.

He claims that. He's like, I'm just an adventurer and I wanted to do something. And so he sees this flapper on, has watched as shore, it's on the news, and he's like, you know what? I'm going to go help him. I want to find some pieces of this airplane. And he spent two years working with that Australian oceanographer who the Malaysian government didn't want assistance from. He spent two years working with them, and they keep giving him all these places where, well, here's where we think there might be more debris. And so he goes to all these different islands and is just searching for debris. So again, the Australians would be like, this island is probably where something's going to wash up. So he'd go to this island and he would find some local and be like, where do the fishermen check their fishing nets? And where are things washing ashore? And he would just walk around and find these airplane pieces. So in total, there have been 33 pieces of debris that have washed as shore on a variety of different islands, which could be parts of the plane. Really. They've only been able to validate a couple of them, as for sure, belonging to the plane. 

Aren’t here only three things that are confirmed? Three of the pieces that found yes, and the rest are like, oh, it could be highly likely. Yeah.

But of those 33 items that have washed ashore, 20 of them were found by this man. So one of the theories was like, is this guy a Russian who's just planting shit? Or alternatively is this just incompetence that again, it's the largest search effort ever and no one could find anything. And then some guy just goes and walks to the beaches of these islands and finds 20 fess of airplane debris. Again, he's up to no good or he's the only competent person involved in this whole search. And then just to be clear, that debris that they found on the island, none of that debris was, I think there was one that had maybe one or two tiny little burn holes, but for the most part, if we're thinking that this was a catastrophic event, like this airplane exploded or caught on fire, you would think a lot of the debris would be burned. But none of the debris that's washed ashore has been burned.

Very weird.

Because if you look at all at pictures too, it's like there's small pieces and yeah, there's a lot of pictures of him posing with these pieces. What else? There are a lot of pictures of the Malaysian government looking really proud of themselves. So they had so many press conferences where all these bigwigs would just get together, and again, they'd always be like, we don't know anything. They'd never had a lot of information, but then they would just pose and they just look so proud of themselves. They just look a bunch of pompous assholes.

Yeah, you did nothing.

You didn't alert anybody. This was going on initially. You didn't communicate well with the families. You halted a search that was of no expense to you. Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of searching, but it wasn't like the Malaysian government searching. Again, it was Australians and Americans and all these other countries involved in the search. I just can't get over that. They would call off this search that was of no cost to them. Four and a half years later, they released this massive report of what they think happened, and again, didn't really provide any information. It said that there was no evidence that the pilot committed suicide. Everything was pretty inconclusive. The only thing they said is that the air traffic controllers were kind of delayed in figuring out this plane was missing. What is really interesting is the Australian Prime Minister said that about four days after this crash, the Malaysian Prime Minister told him that this was likely murder suicide by the pilot, or he was just like, it's probably a murder suicide. But the Prime Minister was like, honestly, I didn't even know we were still Talking about it. Yeah,

Like, it’s still a thing?  Jokes on him because it's 2024 and it's still a thing.

Here we are. So we're going to leave it there. I'm going to let you guys all mull over on that again, a lot of information. And then what do you guys think? Come back next week

And yeah, next week.

Yeah, let's talk about theories next.  Okay. Thanks for joining us, and we will see you next Tuesday.