Finding MH370

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 similar to MH370 in many ways, it offers some striking contrasts as well, and in particular highlights the tremendous advances in satellite communications and navigation technology that took place during the 24 years that separate the two events.

In other news, I’ve got a new poll question up to test of your core MH370 knowledge — have you been paying attention? To give it a go, click here.

#MH370 #unsolvedmystery #mystery #unexplained #unexplainedphenomena

To learn more about this episode, to sign up for a free weekly newsletter, or to view other episodes from Season 1 and 2, please visit our show page at FindingMH370.com.

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For a concise account of the MH370 mystery check, and an explanation of what might have happened to it, check out my book "The Taking of MH370,” availalble on Amazon:

https://a.co/d/3DePduu

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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. As far as I know it’s the first time anyone has done a detailed third-party critique of my work, and of course I’m interested to see how the ideas I’ve been developing have been making their way out into the information ecosystem. In today’s episode I watch and give my response in real time.

You can see the Aviation Files video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29yWY63Tvs8&lc=UgzL0DDkNvJPKiC0LK94AaABAg.AVvoHJ3TzogAWkTwKJMj7O

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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 CIA thinks happened to MH370. Rather, we're discussing the strategic environment in which the disappearance took place. That will help us understand the number one question that people always ask me: Why was this plane taken? What was the motive?

The most widely held assumption, of course, has long been that the captain must have taken the plane. In the previous three episodes, we saw how the three pillars underlying that main theory turn out to be fragile. The implication — that the captain wasn’t the culprit — leaves us with only one plausible alternative explanation, that the hijacking was carried out by extremely ruthless and sophisticated outside actors. Namely, Russia.

But why would Russia want to do such a thing?

This is where Sean Wiswesser’s expertise comes in. He has studied their motives, he has studied their mindset and their methodologies, he has gone toe to toe with Putin’s Russia for decades. You can find his book here: https://www.usni.org/press/books/tradecraft-tactics-and-dirty-tricks

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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 cockpit, and the plane can only be flown from there. It was a reasonable-sounding assumption, but it turns out to be wrong. There is a relatively simple way to fly the plane from the electronics bay, and I was able to figure it out in detail by looking at publicly available documents and talking to professors at aeronautical universities and retired control system engineers.

To help me explain it, I’m honored to be joined today by John Waters, a former US Air Force fighter pilot who now flies 777s for a living, and is also the host of the excellent Afterburn Podcast.

As for this podcast, if you want to get a free newsletter that goes out with every new episode, you can sign up at the showpage, FindingMH370.com.

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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 today's episode we explore the second of those: their belief that the data that they had received from the plane’s satellite communication system, and which scientists had analyzed to designate a search area, was 100 percent reliable and couldn’t have been tampered with.

We'll look at new research which finds that the 777 data bus is actually wide open to data tampering, and that by feeding falsified information into a program called the Doppler Precompensation Algorithm, sophisticated hiijackers could have made the plane seem to investigators like it had traveled south into the remote ocean when it had actually flown north to an airfield in Central Asia.

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