24 ms·

Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)

• nerpderp82 4y ago
  > As of January of 2021, some 33 pieces of wreckage found on beaches have with varying degrees of certainty been tied to MH370. Of these, more than one third were found by Blaine Gibson. This is amazing.
  • joshuawithers 4y ago
    Just to be sure for anyone else reading this, this is a different Blaine Gibson to the Rooster Teeth guy.
• SethTro 4y ago
  Should have [2021]
• gautamcgoel 4y ago
  Can someone TL;DR this please?
  • kerpotgh 4y ago
    [flagged]
  • leplen 4y ago
    They never found the plane. Most likely the lead pilot crashed it intentionally, but we don't really know. The person writing this blog post is more certain about that than the Malaysian authorities, but bloggers are allowed to speculate more than government commissions. There's some neat math people used to try and find the plane that gets alluded to, but not explained in depth, and the post is a reasonable summary, but didn't really change my mind much and my previous awareness was based on overhearing cable news, so it's not really anything new. It's written well enough to be entertaining, but isn't really enlightening.
    • olliej 4y ago
      And hey if we can’t trust random people on the internet, who can we trust? :)
    • AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      The smoking gun IMO is that deleted simulated flight path. If that is legit, then I think it's case closed.
      • avidiax 4y ago
        There are several smoking guns. The disabled transponder right at ATC handoff. The high-skill turn. The special flight path that skirts several jurisdictions, then blends with other traffic. The final turn off that path to somewhere far away. Lack of fuel being what ended the flight. The home simulator with the same flight path, i.e. one of these pilots has a history of flying this path. Not something a passenger can do. Not something that can be explained as the first & last presentation of an unknown technical flaw.
  • sleton38234234 4y ago
    There seems to be a knee jerk reaction to react negatively to anyone who doesn't read the article or doesn't read it in depth. i don't think the comment about TL;DR OR asking chatgpt is completely out of line. I could see businesses being built on top of chatgpt to create summaries of articles on the internet. This is a pretty big use case. Sometimes, people want a more efficient way to read articles, rather than actually reading them. If a service could be created that summarizes the main point of an article, I think there's value (and a potential business) in it. You might even be able to ask chatgpt or a service on top ofit, "has this article any new conclusions about the state of Mh370?" without actually reading the article.
    • lamontcg 4y ago
      Particularly when over half the article is Atlantic-style lengthy exposition about the history which a lot of us already know, and I don't really care if the author is that good of a writer or not.
    • dieselgate 4y ago
      I agree with you considering parent comment has currently been downvoted. This was one of the most fascinating articles I've read but it was so long I still didn't finish reading the entire thing
    • sdk16420 4y ago
      >Sometimes, people want a more efficient way to read articles, rather than actually reading them. Is it too much to assume that readers have had at least high school education and know about lead sentences and summary paragraphs?
      • sleton38234234 4y ago
        If AI can create the perfect executive summary, then why not? A good executive summary is better than just lead sentences.
    • outworlder 4y ago
      > You might even be able to ask chatgpt or a service on top ofit, "has this article any new conclusions about the state of Mh370?" without actually reading the article. The problem is, if ChatGPT doesn't have the data, it likes to create completely fictional narratives.
• edfletcher_t137 4y ago
  This is the crux/TL;DR: "Perhaps the most compelling reason to believe that Zaharie hijacked his own plane is its simplicity. It’s the only explanation that doesn’t rely on a series of independently improbable events: given a desire to do it, everything else falls into place as a reasonable part of the plan. In fact, from the timing of the transponder failure to the specific locations of the turns to the flight path into the Southern Indian Ocean, it would be harder to come up with a better way to make an airliner disappear. Why believe that this is a coincidence when it could well have been the goal from the very beginning? Furthermore, whoever was flying the plane had extensive systems knowledge and excellent hand-flying ability. Who else on board had those skills but Zaharie? Indeed, it’s by far the easiest answer."
  • yellow_lead 4y ago
    The part where he had flown the route in a simulator is compelling as well. What a long article though
    • rainworld 4y ago
      Except they made this up and he never flew that route, on his simulator or otherwise.
      • jefftk 4y ago
        Huh? The article has "In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc. Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number of other intriguing details. For example, the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight. Furthermore, although initial reports indicated that the track had been intentionally saved by the user, later analysis showed that it was kept only in the system files, and certainly was not meant to be found. Was this a dry run? It seems too odd to be a coincidence." -- what part of that do you disagree with?
• phlipski 4y ago
  Fascinating read but for some REAL fun Jeff Wise's "Russian Hijacking Theory" is pretty awesome.... http://jeffwise.net/2019/03/09/the-russian-passengers-aboard-mh370/ http://jeffwise.net/2019/03/09/the-russian-passengers-aboard...
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    >tradition is to brave subzero air temperatures and water temperatures of 34 degrees Good read, but: all that detail and couldn't be bothered providing a (bracketed) degree-centigrade comparison.
    • loeg 4y ago
      If you don't know that 34F is approximately 1C, that's a you problem. It doesn’t require any mental math to observe that 34 is marginally greater than 32, which is the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit.
      • andrewaylett 4y ago
        Why would I know that the freezing point of water is 32°F? Pretty much nothing in this country is measured in Fahrenheit. I've definitely seen the comparison made, on random US articles which almost invariably show °C as well as °F, but I'm not sure that if someone asked me if I would recall the answer.
        • loeg 4y ago
          If you're even aware that Fahrenheit exists, this might be a thing you know. For example, my country mostly uses Fahrenheit but I know that freezing in Celsius is zero, because I attended school as a child.
          • andrewaylett 4y ago
            Nope, fairly sure it was never mentioned in school. But in any case, that's a while ago now and I don't think I've ever had a need to use Fahrenheit except for reading US articles where they almost invariably also put Celsius. I know that 100°F is something close to 37°C, and I'll probably not forget 32°F for a while now. But it's fairly useless trivia as far as every day life goes.
• type0 4y ago
  I try to think positively. It successfully landed on the beach in North Sentinel Island, where all the passengers and the crew still live happy lives away from these pesky newfangled life we call civilization. edit: satellite data needs to be bogus though, so my theory makes perfect sense
  • zxcvbn4038 4y ago
    4 8 15 16 23 42?
    • FeistySkink 4y ago
      Guess what happened to the guy who used this number while playing lotto?
      • kadoban 4y ago
        It's been years and this was very famous, so I'm going to guess that at least one person who played this number died in extremely questionable circumstances. Large numbers and probability pretty much guarantee that this is true.
        • Multicomp 4y ago
          Those numbers are a plot coupon from the television show "Lost" which involves an airplane crashing on a deserted island...that turns out to be not so deserted after all.
        • FeistySkink 4y ago
          It was a crusty old pun. I learned my lesson :')
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        He won!
  • humanistbot 4y ago
    Civilization can be pesky until someone falls and needs antibiotics to prevent sepsis.
• zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  Better question is what has been done to prevent the next MH370 and I bet the answer is nothing much, it took a back burner once the story was out of the headlines. There are only a thousand reasons aircraft operators might want to know where their planes are and if there are any issues. I’m sure that the gps position and black box data could be streamed over radio and/or satellite.
  • _cenw 4y ago
    MH370 likely had systems that enable tracking deliberately disabled by someone in the cockpit (or they all failed at the same time). That's not part of the threat model for good reasons.
    • twelve40 4y ago
      seems quite addressable if that was the case? just don't let humans disable tracking, what's a sane use case for that anyway?
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • nradov 4y ago
        For safety reasons airliners must have circuit breakers that allow disabling every electrical system in case of a fire, short circuit, or other dangerous malfunction.
        • outworlder 4y ago
          Any plane, in fact. Airliner or not.
  • chem83 4y ago
    Huh? A lot[0,1,2] has been done considering how little we know about what has actually happened and a trivial search would enlighten you. Also, real-time streaming of GPS position for the thousands of flights in the air at any given time is not a trivial problem (but technology is improving and ICAO is pushing for such solution[3]). [0] https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/us/mh370-fifth-anniversary-malaysia-flight-370-space-based-global-tracking/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/us/mh370-fifth-anniversary-ma... [1] https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2014-04-10/malaysia-airlines-flying-regulations https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2014-04-10/malaysia-airli... [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-probe-sparks-new-security-measure https://www.cbsnews.com/news/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-pr... [3] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11184544/un-flight-tracking-system-malaysia-airlines-mh370 https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11184544/un-flight-trackin...
• valstu 4y ago
  This is 3 years old but still pretty well done explanation of the case MH370 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd2KEHvK-q8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd2KEHvK-q8
• bengl3rt 4y ago
  "Before Fariq can attempt to get back into the cockpit, Zaharie reaches up and flips the pressurization switch, cutting off bleed air to the cabin. The airplane rapidly begins to depressurize." I really want to believe that a single switch doesn't control whether people in the back of the plane can breather or not...
  • TylerE 4y ago
    It won't unless there is some sort of major hull leak. If it was off long enough it would start to be a problem. Its basically the same same as turning off recirc on your car's climate controls. (Also, the pressurization controls are almost always on the overhead panels, which contains things that are used almost always for startup/shutdown steps so it's not like the pilot is going to reach over to adjust a radio or the autopilot and hit the bleed air. Really though there are plenty of switches in any cockpit that will result in the death of all aboard if no corrective action is taken. Do you freak out about driving? Plenty of controls in your car you could say the same thing about. Yanking the ebrake at highway speeds in rush hour traffic isn't gonna end well. Edit the 5th or so: There are also times when the pilot will legitimately and safely depressurize in flight, like when descending to the one of the super-high airports that are actually at higher altitude than typical cabin atmosphere, like La Paz Bolivia (over 13000ft, compared to a typical cabin altitude of 5-8000 or so. They do it gradually while descending, so they don't make everyones ears go bang all at once. Edit the 6th: Also, there's a big difference between turning off bleed air (which is pretty benign) and actually hitting the emergency pressure dump control, which is protected by a guard that holds the switch in the normal/auto position.
    • Ajedi32 4y ago
      I think the difference is that in a car, any action that could kill the passengers is nearly as likely to kill the driver as well. Obviously you can't stop the pilot from crashing the plane and killing everyone, but it's still pretty creepy to learn that there's a "kill all passengers but leave me alive" switch in every plane, in a locked cockpit inaccessible to the people whose lives are affected by that switch.
• ErikVandeWater 4y ago
  According to experts hired by NBC news, the audio between the pilots and ATC were edited: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/missing-jet/missing-jet-recordings-may-have-been-edited-experts-n94941 https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/missing-jet/missing-jet-re... For whatever reason, this doesn't seem to be widely discussed.
  • gabereiser 4y ago
    edited for brevity. You can't edit the recordings of the black box but you could certainly doctor recordings from either side. It mentions that in the article that it doesn't mean anything nefarious but rather just a matter of fact. If they were edited before release, its probably to cut out silence or something. I wouldn't go conspiracy theory here.
    • ErikVandeWater 4y ago
      Edits should be made clear upon release of the audio recording. The investigation is either incompetent or corrupt if it is not being forthcoming about edits to information released to the public.
    • luckylion 4y ago
      If you released something of that importance and edited beforehand, you'd probably say so and release the unedited version as well, wouldn't you? Sometimes I wonder whether some officials are trolling the conspiracy theory people, by editing something without even changing anything, just so people can freak out over it. Or give overlay specific denials just so people go "aha, they only said they never negotiated with Aliens from Mars, not that they didn't meet Aliens from Mars, nor that they didn't negotiate with Aliens from Pluto".
    • MrOwnPut 4y ago
      Did you read the article? It seems like it wasn't just silence edited out. "At approximately 1:14 (a minute, 14 seconds into the audio, which can be heard here), the tone of the recording change to where to me, it sounds like someone is holding a digital recorder up to a speaker, so it's a microphone-to-speaker transfer of that information. That's a pretty big deal because it raises the first red flag about there possibly being some editing," he said. The next part that raises questions is two minutes, six seconds in, through two minutes, nine seconds in, he said. "I can hear noise in the room, along with the increase in the noise floor. I can hear a file door being closed, I can hear some papers being shuffled. so I'm further convinced that, beginning at 1:14 continuing through 2:06 to 2:15, it's a digital recorder being held up to a speaker." "But yet, at 6:17, there's a huge edit because the conversation is cut off. It's interrupted. And the tone changes again," he said. "The noise floor, when you're authenticating a recording from a forensic perspective, is a very important part of the process. All of a sudden, we go back to the same quality and extremely low noise floor that we had at the beginning of the recording."
• hiidrew 4y ago
  Just noticing the medium author, this guy posts fantastic breakdowns of plane crashes on r/catastrophicfailure Have to say the simulator part makes me lean heavily towards the pilot crashing it purposefully, from the article - "The most widely reported piece of evidence tying Zaharie to the disappearance was a course he had charted on his home flight simulator about a month before the crash. Zaharie had a number of hobbies, including paragliding and flying model airplanes, but he also spent a lot of time at home on his computer playing flight simulator games. He sometimes uploaded videos of himself playing on his YouTube channel, where he comes off as affable and knowledgeable, if a bit socially awkward. In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc. Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number of other intriguing details. For example, the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight. Furthermore, although initial reports indicated that the track had been intentionally saved by the user, later analysis showed that it was kept only in the system files, and certainly was not meant to be found. Was this a dry run? It seems too odd to be a coincidence." Also discovering that black box is a misnomer is mildly humorous, these are apparently orange! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder
  • Railsify 4y ago
    'Black box' is referring to the lack of visibility inside the box and to the fact that you can't tamper with it, what goes in stays in.
    • LarryMullins 4y ago
      Flight recorders are called black boxes because they originally were black-colored boxes. "Black box" in the sense that you are describing is an unrelated term.
• nobrains 4y ago
  The article doesn't mention the amateur ham radio interference pattern research data to figure out the flight path. See this: https://youtu.be/Jq-d4Kl8Xh4 https://youtu.be/Jq-d4Kl8Xh4
  • digitalsankhara 4y ago
    The methodology of using aircraft scatter of radio signals encoded in the WSPR protocol is described in [1]. I was so sceptical when I heard about this - mainly due to the normally mangled reporting in mainstream media - that I really didn't think there was any merit in it. The thought of being able to detect aircraft scatter using very low power HF signals over variable ionospheric propagation conditions at long range seemed almost impossible to me. The use of the WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporting) [2] network and its highly efficient protocol is what changed my mind. I'm much less of a sceptic having read the basis of the paper, at it appears there have been proving flights to evidence the technique can work. I haven't had time to research other workers who have reproduced the results, so would be interested if anyone has any links. [1] https://www.mh370search.com/2022/03/14/mh370-wspr-technical-report/ https://www.mh370search.com/2022/03/14/mh370-wspr-technical-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
    • mannykannot 4y ago
      I took a look at this a few months ago, and when I left off, I was unsure exactly how they conducted the validation of the technique. In particular, there was a test on June 3 2021 where they attempted to reconstruct the path of a flight from Samoa to Australia[1]. Certain phrases in the report leave me wondering whether the test simply amounted to looking for anomalies in the WSPRnet data in close spatiotemoral proximity to where the airplane was known to be: "There are no WSPRnet anomalies observed at departure. At 03:30 UTC there is a drift anomaly 2 minutes behind the aircraft as well as 5 WSPRnet links just behind the aircraft, which may be due to the wake." [my emphasis here and below.] "There is no obvious way to choose whether the aircraft turned to port or starboard to execute a 180° turn back towards Australia. I tried out both options and the best fit appears to be a turn to starboard." And from a comment by someone apparently involved: "There was one error of note, the initial turn of the aircraft after departure was to port and not starboard. Mike commented 'I should have told you that aircraft departing NSFA on RWY 08 will always turn to port due to terrain clearance considerations. If you’d known that then no doubt the first part of the route would have been a bit more accurate.'” These quotes seem to suggest, if not outright imply, a detailed knowledge of the airplane's track by the person(s) searching the WISPRnet data for indications of that track, and if this is the case, then the test falls short of demonstrating an ability to determine the previously-unknown track of an airplane, which is what is needed for the MH370 investigation. I would be more than happy to update this opinion once I get a clearer picture of how these tests are conducted. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/1cox7y91m89sjsv/GDTAA%20V2%20Blind%20Test%20Flight%2026082021.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/1cox7y91m89sjsv/GDTAA%20V2%20Blind...
• dml2135 4y ago
  Fascinating article. I had a chuckle at this excerpt: >The Malaysian investigators did look into whether the cargo could have started a fire, noting that it consisted mainly of ripe mangosteen fruits along with a small number of lithium batteries. Extensive attempts by the investigators to get mangosteen juice to react with the batteries and trigger a fire were unsuccessful. I'm sure plenty of people here have spent time wracking their brain on a hard problem and the image of a bunch of transportation investigators dousing batteries with juice in a late-night fit of desperation really gets me.
  • interestica 4y ago
    Investigations have some weird bits. I've always wondered if there's a certain title for the person who prepares the chickens for the 'chicken gun' in airplane testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_gun
    • RobRivera 4y ago
      Operational Testing Lead Quality Assurance Tester El Pollo Hermano
      • chanandler_bong 4y ago
        Mr. Fring would like to see you in his office. Now.
      • TylerE 4y ago
        Less fun than Operational Testing Lead Quality Assurance Tester Los Pollo Hermanos
      • duxup 4y ago
        Excuse me sir, it is: SENIOR OTL-QA-TEPH
        • vidanay 4y ago
          Sounds like a Mayan diety.
• markx2 4y ago
  I can highly recommend reading more of Admiral_Cloudberg's writings. Start at https://old.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/ If you wish to skip any comments, https://old.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/e6n80m/plane_crash_series_archive_patreon_contact_info/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/e6n80m/pl... and use the Medium links.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Old reddit is is needed for me because current reddit mangles the imgur posts which he used to do (now he uses medium)
• O__________O 4y ago
  Curious, based on actual evidence, is there any reason to believe the pilot didn’t exit the plane prior to it crashing?
  • jaundicedave 4y ago
    what, like he somehow smuggled a parachute onboard and then survived a late-night ditch into the middle of the ocean?
    • O__________O 4y ago
      Might be wrong, but I had heard it was possible to enter a pre planed flight path. Plane did a turn back over land before heading out to sea.
      • kashunstva 4y ago
        All air carrier flights are flown from shortly after takeoff to some point in the approach phase on a clearance that is entered in the flight management computer during pre-flight. Until the initial unplanned left turn the flight was likely flying in this manner. The turn itself could not have been executed on autopilot though. It was far too steep. The autopilot flight envelope protections would have limited the bank angle at that altitude. As it is, the plane was likely riding a fine line on the edge of a high altitude stall/spin scenario in order to execute that tight maneuver.
        • O__________O 4y ago
          Might be wrong, but the left turn I believe you’re referring to happened when the plane left its planned flight path, at which point it descended to 23,000 feet and flew over land.
    • williamcotton 4y ago
      More like he asphyxiated everyone on the plane, including the rich heiress with her priceless jewelry and millions in cash, flew over a known location where he had previously towed a get-away boat, stole all of the other valuables on the plane, and skydived into the perfect crime.
• rainworld 4y ago
  Read Florence de Changy’s The Disappearing Act if you want a rough idea what actually happened.
• kgwgk 4y ago
  Relevant book (open access): Bayesian Methods in the Search for MH370 Authors: Sam Davey , Neil Gordon , Ian Holland , Mark Rutten , Jason Williams https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0379-0 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0379-0
  • ghaff 4y ago
    Funnily enough I'm in the process of reading Blind Man's Bluff in which similar techniques were employed to locate subs that sank. ADDED: The loss of the Scorpion described in that book reminds me of this as well. While some of the details related to what exact sort of torpedo failure caused the Scorpion sinking is a matter of debate, the betting money is on some sort of torpedo failure rather than a Soviet tit-for-tat or other complicated scenario for which there's no real evidence.
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  To me, the most interesting thing about all of this is that civilian airports don't really have radar. You can disappear from an ATC screen just by turning off a transponder. If they'd had radar we would at least of known which way the plane went. A curious controller could have asked "unidentified object at height X, region Y" who they were and why they were in controlled airspace without a transponder on. The article even implies the controllers themselves did not know this: >Initially, no one noticed the sudden disappearance of the airplane. After handing the flight over to Ho Chi Minh control, the Malaysian controller looked away from his screen, and when he looked back, the plane was gone. He assumed that it had flown out of radar range and returned to his duties without a second thought. But there was no radar range limit. There was only a transponder range limit (or more likely an edge of the screen). >In Vietnam, controllers expected the plane to contact them, but it did not, and they couldn’t find it on radar either. Controllers in Ho Chi Minh City began trying to raise the plane on radio without success. For 18 minutes, they sent out a series of increasingly desperate calls: would MH370 please respond? Could any planes in the area contact MH370? The only answer was silence. So even when they were actively looking for it, it was invisible to their "radar". True radar would have told them there was a plane-sized metal object in their airspace even if it refused radio contact and had no transponder... It turns out you can make an entire plane full of people completely invisible by throwing 1 switch. Who knew?
  • EMM_386 4y ago
    Civilian airports don't all have radar, but approach and departure facilities (known as TRACONs) do, as do enroute centers.
  • fosk 4y ago
    Radar is not exactly “new” technology, to your point I wonder why airports are not equipped with one. Shouldn’t break the bank. Plus don’t militaries have radar anyways for air defense? How is it possible that no radar from multiple countries picked up a silent Boeing 777 flying to nowhere?
    • lukewrites 4y ago
      I think it's most likely that governments with radar in the area don't want to admit they have it.
• sopooneo 4y ago
  Hearing about all the painstaking analysis of this flight made me wonder something: If you look deeply enough, how frequent are inexplicable situations? That is, if you took all the info from a normal flight, and cut it off at the halfway point and gave it to a group of enthusiastic investigators, would they find aspects that contradicted or truly did not make sense? My guess is they would. This is not to say MH370 was without incident, only that apparent contradiction may be unavoidable if you look closely enough at anything.
  • dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    I get what you’re saying but I doubt it because air travel now is extraordinarily systematic and well understood.
  • travisjungroth 4y ago
    Even more, I imagine the average flight would look extraordinary. You would always hit some rare event if you looked hard enough. Rare events are so common! What are the odds that this many people on the plane were military / government / communists / CEOs / Jews / elderly? Well, pretty high if you're looking after-the-fact. And if you look into the background of every person and started reaching out a bit it would get weirder. You'd have tons of former whatevers, brother-in-laws of important people, criminals, all sorts. And people would be absolutely certain it meant something. In the case of MH370, this is why I always found the simulator history of the pilot the most relevant. It doesn't require this long chain of relationships like some other things. It is the most impactful person recently doing something related to the event that is extremely weird behavior.
  • TylerE 4y ago
    It's unlikely, since about 98% of the Earth has transponder coverage, so you at least have position and what the aircraft think's it's altitude is, with pretty good precision and sample rate. It's only in a few spots in the middle the ocean that this doesn't exist. This was also relevant in that Airbus crash from maybe 15 years ago between South America and Africa. This is not a problem on the main to/from North America routes because there are enough populated islands along the way (Iceland, Greenland, Hawaii, Guam, etc)
• ak_111 4y ago
  As someone who doesn't have intuition about these things: what are the chances that an 777 could have crashed and yet many years later very very few of its debris showed up or were spotted anywhere in the world (also factoring in intense search efforts around the most likely places where it crashed)? Is this one of these 1 in a billion chance thing or is it not as crazy as it sounds? Like even if you were intentionally trying not to leave a trace, it is so hard to plan the drift and spread of debris and get so lucky in them not being spotted.
  • dan_quixote 4y ago
    Major structures of a 777 are aluminum. I wouldn't expect many large, easily identifiable, parts to float (for long).
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      Aluminium floats Edit: was wrong
      • bufferoverflow 4y ago
        Not in water.
  • civilized 4y ago
    There's not much watching the middle of the southern Indian Ocean, a large fraction of which is literally more than a thousand miles away from any place humans usually inhabit. It's one of the most remote, desolate, hostile regions of the planet. I can see the appeal as a suicide method. You fly out for a while, it's quiet and pleasant, and before long there's no turning back, no possibility of rescue.
    • rippercushions 4y ago
      And we also have discovered numerous pieces of MH370 debris, all in the kinds of places in eastern Africa where the simulations said they should end up.
• ak_111 4y ago
  The strangeness of this story - a 777 disappearing into thin air in one of the most surveilled and monitored (due to geopolitics) places on earth leaving no traces behind - has spooked people so much that there is a section on the wikipedia page debunking theories related to black holes.
  • nerdponx 4y ago
    Isn't this how the show Lost starts?
    • euroderf 4y ago
      Time to get A.I. to patch the opening episode to be MH 370.
  • kccqzy 4y ago
    > By treading the line between the two countries, he hopes that both will view the unidentified plane as the other country’s problem. (Indeed, this is what happened: Thai military controllers saw the plane but assumed Malaysia was handling it; Malaysian military controllers, on the other hand, probably weren’t paying attention at all.) On Malaysian military: > Why didn’t [the Malaysian military] intercept the unidentified aircraft as it was crossing the north of the country? The military claimed it was because the plane wasn’t a threat. But how could they have known that unless they had identified it as MH370, rather than a foreign incursion? And if they had identified it as MH370, why didn’t they tell anyone until days after the crash? The most likely explanation was that the military simply wasn’t monitoring its own radar at the time that the plane flew through Malaysian airspace.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    That the show Lost was the same sort of concept probably adds to it.
• roxgib 4y ago
  > They were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website, which, as they would only realize hours later, simply continued to display an aircraft’s projected path if its transponder stopped broadcasting position information. Oops
• chs20 4y ago
  I agree that much evidence points towards the pilot intentionally crashing. However, it's not proven and constructing a story around this theory is a bit distasteful. Otherwise, the article is quite interesting.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    What bothered me was how personal it was made to be. If it had just said “Pilot A” rather than repeatedly naming them and bringing in personal details, it would have felt more tasteful to me, less… “true crime”-y.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  Good read from a few years ago: Langewiesche's conclusion is that the pilot probably crashed the plane on purpose. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• _Adam 4y ago
  > ... reaches up and flips the pressurization switch, cutting off bleed air to the cabin. The airplane rapidly begins to depressurize ... I cannot believe that a "kill everyone" switch actually exists, and if it really does this seems like a bug. Especially because not hitting the switch would also kill everyone.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    There's many "kill everyone" switches in most vehicles; this is why people get training and screening before being allowed to operate one. It's not foolproof, but there is no such thing as foolproof transport.
  • paranoidrobot 4y ago
    Your assumption is that it's a "kill everyone" button. Yes, used incorrectly or maliciously, in the right circumstances, it can do so. By the same reasoning, a huge percentage of the controls and switches in the cockpit can also have the same result. Just disconnect the fuel to the engines, or push the control stick forward.
    • maegul 4y ago
      I feel like the need for qualified pilots is essentially that it’d be easier to identify what isn’t effectively a “kill everyone” button in the cockpit if used in the wrong way. It’s a fricken giant metal tube flying through the air!
      • martopix 4y ago
        Slightly related: a family friend who was a pilot once told us that the security at an UK airport once very thoroughly inspected him before his flight. Puzzled, he asked: what are you looking for? Because I have a literal axe in the cockpit - and I can also crash the plane. How could I possibly be carrying more dangerous stuff? The security people didn't like it.
        • 4y ago
• hdesh 4y ago
  Fantastic article. Did the MH370 incident change anything about the communication systems used by modern aircrafts?
  • jdmichal 4y ago
    TFA has an entire paragraph covering your question... > Even without finding the plane, a number of lessons have been drawn from the disappearance of MH370. Many of the responses to the disappearance centered on the fact that in the 21st century, commercial airliners should not just disappear. In the interest of knowing where every plane is at all times, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) began requiring that all airliners manufactured after the 1st of January 2021 include autonomous tracking devices that broadcast their location once per minute. To give greater coverage of airplanes manufactured before that date, Inmarsat (which supplies satellite relays to nearly all commercial airliners) changed the frequency of its handshakes from once per hour to once every 15 minutes. The European Aviation Safety Agency began requiring that the “pingers” on aircraft flight recorders last at least 90 days, rather than 30. ICAO also amended its guidelines to require that airliner designs approved after 2020 include cockpit voice recorders that record 25 hours of conversations (instead of the current standard of two), and that flight data recorders either stream data to a location on the ground or be designed to float to the surface after a crash. (Like all ICAO regulations, these only come into force if adopted by the member states, which may take some time.)
• amatecha 4y ago
  If you haven't seen it, this Google Map of all found debris is quite interesting: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Kghrk3iwRInii5qBTG8hfQZ0WmE https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Kghrk3iwRInii5qBTG...
  • colineartheta 4y ago
    [flagged]
  • return_to_monke 4y ago
    what I don't understand is: if the plane could make contact with the satellite, why aren't there automated systems in place to send location info through that channel? can someone explain?
    • zokier 4y ago
      From tfa > In the interest of knowing where every plane is at all times, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) began requiring that all airliners manufactured after the 1st of January 2021 include autonomous tracking devices that broadcast their location once per minute.
      • nly 4y ago
        It's bat shit insane that we're 50 years in to the industry and ~20-25 years in to GPS and this is still only happening in 2021.
        • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
          GPS is a one-way system though, using sattelite signals to triangulate your own position; there's no uplink / reverse contact required, and it's up to the GPS receiver to then send the location on through a ground station.
        • hugh-avherald 4y ago
          It won't save lives and wouldn't have saved lives. It's only to improve the efficiency of recovery operations.
• roxgib 4y ago
  At this point the data from his computer, at least the data from the flight simulator software, should be released publicly so that those with experience can apply their knowledge to reconstructing the data. It's entirely possible that someone with more knowledge of the software in question, rather than a generic computer expert, might have more luck.
  • maegul 4y ago
    Agreed. Whenever I return to this story I’m always astounded at rereading that part of the story (even though I know it’s coming). I’m also surprised it isn’t given more weighting. Surely it’s the biggest reddest flag in all the evidence and underemphasised purely because of the political implications of a murderous pilot. The main question about it in my mind is one for aviation experts … why would any pilot plot and practice that course? Is there any possible motivation other than wanting to crash a plane in the middle of nowhere? Because if not, it’s almost a closed, albeit morbid and troubling case and the rest would be details. It also raises interesting questions about the importance of pilot mental health that are maybe uncomfortable for the industry, in addition to the fact that aviation tech could still completely lose a plane.
  • whywhywouldyou 4y ago
    What about the data would require an expert to reconstruct? They have the simulated flight path. It's very similar to the final flight path of the real plane.
    • outworlder 4y ago
      Probably because it wasn't just a simple 'replay' file.
    • roxgib 4y ago
      From the report it was recovered from backup files at the system level, it wasn't as simple as a save game file or whatever. It's possible there's more data there or that what's there has different interpretations - we can only speculate at this point based on the very limited information that's been released.
• femto 4y ago
  > However, engineers also could not rule out that some or even most of this frequency offset was due to the crystal oscillator inside the transmitter warming back up after the power interruption. Didn't the plane have two power interruptions, the first of which it is known that the plane wasn't in the process of crashing at high velocity? I wonder what effort was made to compare them, possibly allowing the effects of crystal drift and Doppler to be separated? Maybe any unexpected frequency offsets after the first power cut can be entirely attributed to the crystal warming up after the power cut? Maybe it could be assumed that the crystal behaves similarly after each power cut, as crystals are typically repeatable with temperature? In that case the characteristics of the crystal are known after the second power cut and Doppler can be determined. I'm sure this would have been thought of, but one has to ask.
  • treeman79 4y ago
    20 years In college we had a link between campuses for the mainframes. Occasionally systems go out. When that happened. It was my job to replace the lightbulb that sat on the transmitter to keep it warm.
    • absenceOfQuiet 4y ago
      Interesting. Why do transmitters need to be kept warm?
• 9sIX3oZ1JB5 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd2KEHvK-q8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd2KEHvK-q8
• nadow 4y ago
  one of the best long-form articles i've ever read on this was "Goodnight Malaysian 370" by William Langewiesche in the atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...
  • FearlessNebula 4y ago
    I think you mixed up the headline with this one? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/17/good-night-malaysian-three-seven-zero-unraveling-an-aviation-mystery-mh370 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/17/good-night-mal...
  • ComputerGuru 4y ago
    It would have been better if it didn’t feature around his personal assumption of what happened (at least that’s how I recall that article, but it’s been years).
  • hyperbovine 4y ago
    Thank you, this is the article that immediately came to mind (but whose title or venue I could not remember) when I saw this post. I found it pretty convincing at the time.
• neilv 4y ago
  > But Sherlock Holmes was right: once we have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. This matter isn't entertainment fiction, and nobody involved is Sherlock Holmes. Hundreds of people died. Amateurs publicly casting blame on one of the presumed dead seems unfair to the individual accused, and insensitive to the families. Especially when it depends on bits like this: > How these aspects of Zaharie’s life could have led him to commit an unspeakable act of mass murder is difficult to understand. But while he was said to be an affectionate and emotionally sensitive person who loved life, perhaps something dark lurked within him, something which he suppressed so thoroughly that no one else knew it was there. It is said that the people who seem happiest are sometimes also in the deepest agony, struggling against demons that they never reveal even to their closest friends. Why not leave this real, recent tragedy to the professional investigators.
  • outworlder 4y ago
    Because the 'professional investigators' have not published their conclusions?
  • 12345hn6789 4y ago
    Ignoring the fact the route of the plan is close to the path the pilot flew on his personal computer is more insensitive to the deceased than grandstanding that this was an accidental.
  • nasseri 4y ago
    I'm sympathetic to your point of view -- I remember the "independent investigators on reddit" wrongly accusing Sunil Tripathi of being the perpetrator of the Boston Bombing and causing his family a great deal of distress. But the author provides a few salient examples of why relying on "professional investigators" has come up short: > The official report also did its best to paper over a number of failings that contributed to the plane not being found. In addition to the long delay in informing authorities — caused by missteps at the Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City control centers, as well as at Malaysia Airlines — criticism should have been levied at the Malaysian military. Why didn’t they intercept the unidentified aircraft as it was crossing the north of the country? The military claimed it was because the plane wasn’t a threat. But how could they have known that unless they had identified it as MH370, rather than a foreign incursion? And if they had identified it as MH370, why didn’t they tell anyone until days after the crash? The most likely explanation was that the military simply wasn’t monitoring its own radar at the time that the plane flew through Malaysian airspace. But admitting this would expose a massive security vulnerability by revealing Malaysia’s military to be dangerously incompetent. Probably for national security reasons, the official report had nothing to say about this at all. Seems like this is a pretty serious omission. and > Zaharie’s social life was also not as smooth as Malaysian authorities portrayed it to be. A combination of the leaked police report and interviews with people who knew him revealed that he had separated from his wife on an informal basis and was living alone in the family home. So in essence Malaysian police were obfuscating the facts around the pilot, for whatever reason they may have. Perhaps they concluded based on further research that the pilot was probably guiltless. But whatever the reason, we do know that what they said in public diverges from what they found in private. It seems to me that independent investigation and open source intelligence of this kind can be useful when there may be reasons for the official investigators to cover up certain parts of the story. Lastly, I think there is a substantial difference between a crowd of people online with no real investigatory track record accusing someone (a la Sunil Tripathi) in the days/hours/minutes after the incident, and someone with a proven track record of credible investigatory reporting and some subject matter expertise, laying out some mixture of facts/theories/conclusions (that have already been circulating online) ten years after the fact.
• Flatcircle 4y ago
  another great article about a horrible crash. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-crash-of-air-france-flight-447-8a7678c37982 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
• fds456435 4y ago
  Just erased from this timeline after a time traveling incident?
• loeg 4y ago
  Seems most likely it was a (mass) murder suicide. Extremely sad.
• sakex 4y ago
  I assume you must be pretty low to be able to ping a 4g tower. Is it impossible that the guy would have jumped from the plane with a parachute? Then he would have run with the insurance money.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    How does he run away with insurance money? Unless his estranged ex is part of the conspiracy.
• MisterTea 4y ago
  "For the reasons listed above, most experts believe MH370 was the victim of some kind of deliberate action." What if the plane was struck by a meteorite? It certainly sounds like there was some kind of incident that caused them to turn around abruptly to head back but they were disabled. It is possible they experienced an extreme rare event. Rare dpesnt mean impossible, just highly unlikely.
  • EamonnMR 4y ago
    The author addresses this. Such a scenario requires explaining why comms systems were turned off one by one as if by a person rather than an instantaneous event like an asteroid strike. Also, it would be a very big coincidence for not only an asteroid to strike an aircraft and cause it to drift aimlessly (rather than just rapidly disassembling), but also for that aimless drift to randomly line up with a course plotted by one of the pilots of that plane with no apparent purpose.
    • MisterTea 4y ago
      That one-by-one scenario you described is admitted to be dramatized fiction. The real story is: plane disappears as transponder signal is lost. Plane cant be raised via radio or sat phone. Sat phone shows plane still flying. Malaysian military tracks plane but does nothing as they are asleep at the wheel. We really don't know. Only the black box does. I could talk about different alternative scenarios, both corroborating the murder-suicide plot and a rare catastrophic event. But I'm not looking to drive traffic so its just as much pointless fiction.
• cyber_mock 4y ago
  So 12 minutes of oxygen, i just learn that
  • alexitosrv 4y ago
    Yeah, like it's not that long. They should add that disclaimer to the safety messages at the beginning of the flight. "In case of an emergency, you will have 12 minutes of oxygen, which while we know is not that much, is better than to die instantly."
    • phire 4y ago
      It only needs to be long enough for the pilots to descend to a safe altitude.
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        There is a cloudberg article on a crash due to faulty/expired oxygen generators in cargo. They use an exothermic reaction that produces oxygen. But of a fire hazard. I suppose there is a trade off of how much oxygen vs. fire risk.
  • gridspy 4y ago
    Pilots are trained in a loss of pressure situation to reduce aircraft altitude (fly down) until the decompression is no longer dangerous. So even with no mask on, the most you will experience is a short period of unconsciousness.
• nigrioid 4y ago
  I still think it's weird that there were 20 Freescale employees on that flight.
  • thepasswordis 4y ago
    Were they on their way to/from a conference or meeting or something? Doesn't seem that weird tome.
• swyx 4y ago
  apparently Ocean Infinity, the private salvage search company mentioned in the article that spent millions on a "no find no fee" search for MH370 is committing to doing it again this or next year: https://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments/t85bdv/ocean_infinity_commits_to_new_search_for_mh370_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MH370/comments/t85bdv/ocean_infinit... how exactly do these guys fund themselves? this must be a horrendously expensive enterprise and fairly infrequent at that.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    There's a lot of people with a lot of money who look for ventures to invest into; some build schools or affordable housing, some buy artwork, some set up charities for tax dodging reasons, and others will invest in a company like this which will get customers calling them nonstop if they find the plane. I mean the article mentioned this company spent "millions" on the search. There's people that earn millions per day by doing nothing or sending a tweet. There's tons of money out there, it's just allocated poorly.
    • Eisenstein 4y ago
      Yeah, 'millions' to a company with 8 autonomous submarines each equipped with long-range sonar is probably not much at all. The crew is probably paid anyway, might as well use them for something.
  • phire 4y ago
    They have other customers. Even if they don't find it, this is great advertising for them, and gives them a reason to test their technology. And if they do find it, even better advertising. I wouldn't be surprised if their negotiated finders fee from Malaysia is still below cost.
    • gsnedders 4y ago
      If they _do_ find it, they'll be getting reported for _decades_ for having found it. Putting a marketing value to that is… incredibly difficult.
• washywashy 4y ago
  Once on a flight headed west I happened to look out the window and just then another plane flew beneath the plane I was on headed north-ish and quickly off into the distance. I remember thinking two things: 1. It was far away from us so quickly it kind of shocked me, although it makes perfect sense of course. 2. I felt like i got a really good view of it. It didn’t look far away at all altitude-wise as it passed beneath the plane I was on. I’ve always wondered how normal this is to cross paths with other planes that closely. I’ve seen other planes way off in the distance before but never that close.
  • __sy__ 4y ago
    Pretty common. You can check out Skyvector "World Hi" [1] to get a sense of intersecting flight routes. [1] https://skyvector.com/ https://skyvector.com/
  • sva_ 4y ago
    I think if you're close to any airport, it is very normal. If you're, for example, landing in Chicago, I'd be shocked if you can't see a bunch of other planes out of the window. I also once had some delay when having to fly over Dubai, where we had to fly in circles before landing, and I saw a large amount of airplanes circling around the same area above and below us. But I'm no expert in aviation by any means, so I can't really comment on the appropriateness.
  • ipnon 4y ago
    Planes on intersecting paths will be placed in separate flight levels. The standard is 35,000ft or “FL35”, and usually East bound traffic gets odd FL and West bound gets even. It’s likely the plane you saw would have collided with yours had it been on the same FL, but it was likely off by 1,000ft. The relative addition of two cruising speeds make it more dramatic too.
    • kqr 4y ago
      Small correction: 35,000 ft in flight level is FL350. (But the east/west distinction still applies to even and odd thousands of feet, or tens of flight level.)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• NHQ 4y ago
  I can think of one motive. The pilot knew that the internet is crazy for airplane crash mysteries, and wanted to create a grand one.
• 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  another incident, that has some similarities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Airways_Flight_295 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Airways_Flight_2... theories that it was apparently transporting weapons to apartheid regime in a commercial airliner which caught fire over the indian ocean and consequently covered up.
• stephen_g 4y ago
  Yes, I think the pilot has to have deliberately done it. The turns after the transponder went off are too intentional, and nothing like the flight plan the plane was meant to be flying. I saw a simulation that looked fairly convincing, that showed if the plane was ditched in a controlled glide from where the last ping was received, assuming that's were it ran out of fuel, then the plane would have glided out of the area that was searched. They also claimed that the damage on the flaperons and other control surfaces that washed up was fairly consistent with landing fairly level, where those control surfaces may have been ripped off but most of the rest of the plane might have been fairly intact and would have quickly sunk in mostly one piece. It seemed fairly plausible.
  • a2tech 4y ago
    I hope for the passengers sake that he flew that plane straight into the ocean instead of gently laying it down. It would turn a basic instant death into a nightmare slow action drowning scenario where if you didn't die immediately taking many days to die from exposure and thirst.
    • Mali- 4y ago
      They mention in the article that the passengers oxygen would already have run out - apparently they would have all been dead or unconscious.
• BoardsOfCanada 4y ago
  > Zaharie was also deeply involved in Malaysian politics and was a big supporter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. In a strange coincidence, just hours before MH370 disappeared, Ibrahim was sentenced to prison on sodomy charges that were widely considered to be politically motivated. I don't think this "strange coincidence" should be dismissed as the reason so easily.
• nakedneuron 4y ago
  > Exactly one minute and forty-three seconds later, a dramatic and mysterious sequence of events would begin to unfold, the opening chapter in a story that transfixed the world. https://bocpages.org/wiki/Magic_Window https://bocpages.org/wiki/Magic_Window > "Magic Window" is track number 23 on the Geogaddi album. The song is one minute and forty-six seconds of pure silence.
• smusamashah 4y ago
  Has anything been done in the airline system so that we never loos a flight again like this ever?
  • cstross 4y ago
    If you had read to the end you would have found your answer(s). Work is in progress: but as airliners are designed for a working life of at least 30 years it will take a while yet before the lessons of MH370 are universally adopted.
  • mehphp 4y ago
    Not to sound harsh, but given how rare something like this, I doubt it's urgent enough of a problem for the funds/effort it would require.
• eternalban 4y ago
  > Routine automatic satellite communications were made approximately every hour, except for the initial period of the flight between 01:21 and 02:25, when some kind of power interruption to the airplane’s satellite data unit had prevented the satellite from making contact. After that, every hour or so a ground station in Perth sent a query (or “handshake”) to the plane via a geostationary satellite located over the Indian Ocean. I didn't see any comments referring to this +1hr blackout of the sat unit. This happened right after the 1.19 ATC handoff. Does anyone know if this signal could have been faked (e.g. by someone sitting in a boat in the ocean)? I assume the tx and rcv end points have some sort of private identifier.
• stevev 4y ago
  Interesting bits from the reading: Communication devices lost contact. The first turn can only be done by an experienced pilot. No distress calls. Or passenger attempted cellular communication when they became within range. Flight path matches similarly to Pilot’s in-home game simulator. If an explosion occurred wiping out communication devices, it was only a matter of time before they crashed. The plane was on radar and tracked going south for several hours. Due to the many turns, someone had to be in control of the plane in some capacity after the first turn. It leaves me to two conclusions. An alien parasite froze everyone. Made the pilot turn off communications. Made the pilot fly a flight pattern that closely resembles the one at home. The pilot picked that specific flight as his last. Why he didn’t just nose dived immediately will be answered in the remaining hours he was on that flight. It would be inhumane to keep crew/passengers alive to witness their own demise. Thus I believe he was alive and alone heading south.