January 9, 2020 • 45 mins
In the absence of an official explanation of why flight MH 370 disappeared in 2014, conjecture and conspiracy theories have filled the vacuum.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
San Francisco. We're coming to see you soon. Yeah, we're
gonna be there on Saturday, January chuck. And since it's
San Francisco, we're gonna be wearing nothing but appropriately placed
clumps of rice roni. It is the San Francisco treat, Yes,
and we're the San Francisco treat too whenever we're in town.
So everybody should come see us. That's right. It's part
of Sketch Fest as always. We love performing there. You
(00:22):
can go to s Y s K live dot com
for details or s F sketch Fest dot com. Uh
and if you're around Sunday night you can come see
me do movie Crush Live and a very small fun
venue where you can shake my hand. Very nice. So
come see us, everybody. You won't regret it. We're pretty
sure that's correct. And hey, another thing, this is weirdly
(00:44):
edited in real time. We're recording this in our time.
Two days previous melted out of my ear. Well, we
wanted to kind of front load this with a listener
mail because of what's going on in Australia. All this
was sort of happening, been happening for a little while,
but over the holiday break when we weren't in here
and had a chance to do something. Um. This is
(01:06):
from Sally M. Guys who live in Sydney, New South Wales.
You've probably been hearing about the catastrophic wildfires that are
being happening across the country since September. Having lived in
California before, I thought I knew what to expect. However,
this has been truly unprecedented. Uh. Minor inconveniences for us
have been happening, but compared to what so many other
Aussies and our wildlife is experiencing. Yet another example of
(01:29):
the far reaching effects of this emergency. Uh, there's so
much need in Australia, and I thought this stuff you
should know Army might be primed to help out. This
from Sally M. And this is uh something that you
know has been on our radar for a little while,
but obviously, UM, being across the world, America's becoming more
aware and engaged thanks to social media in recent days
(01:52):
and weeks. It's just devastating to see what's happening there.
We've always had such incredible support from Australia and and
we had a chance to visit there, just charmed by
the people and by the beautiful country and it's just heartbreaking.
So we want to direct people to quite a few
places because there are lots of ways that you can
give money to help out. Um, do you have some.
(02:15):
I've got some too, Yeah, I've got a bunch, all right,
go ahead, I mean you can do the the usual,
the Australian Red Cross, the Salvation Army Australia, St Vincent
De Paul's Society. Um, there's a something called Food Bank
in Australia. Those are some pretty good places to start. Yeah,
And you know, we're huge fans of animals and held
koalas and petted kangaroos while we were there and to
(02:37):
see these images of these animals and needs just been
really tough. So the World Wildlife Fund is always a
great place to start. There's an organization called Wires Capital
w I R E s UH, the Port Macquarie Koala
Hospital U, the r s p c A of New
South Wales is all going to help out our animal friends.
(02:59):
And if you want to help the firefighters directly, the
New South Wales Rural Fire Service has set up funds
for the families of volunteers fighting the fires who have
died fighting the fires. Yeah, so do what you can.
It is a dire situation right now, and I think
people can come together and spare a few bucks. Every
(03:19):
little bit helps. Yea, and Australia, we are thinking of you.
The whole world is sending you good vibes and hanging there.
All right, So finally let's get on with the show.
Welcome to Stuff You should know, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(03:43):
I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and
this is part two of two about Image three seventy,
the most mysterious disappearance of any airliner in the history
of modern aviation. That's right. We won't do a full recap,
but where we're picking up now, wait, you want to
do a full recap twenty minutes easy. We are at
(04:05):
the point where the plane has crashed, and we're going
to pick up with post crash investigations, which, um, like
many airline crash investigations were bungled, and was bungled in
a lot of ways. Oh yeah, So Ed points out
that like kind of oddly that there are a lot
(04:28):
of crash investigations you can point to that, you know,
kind of deferred towards the airline manufacturer when they were
at fault, or tried to do some cover up or
was not great, none of them from what I can tell,
to this one. This is very very not good. And
the seems to be the roundly, roundly accepted reason for
(04:50):
the whole thing being bungled was that Malaysia at the
time was the dictatorship and you could disappear if you
weren't doing your job very well or if you offended
the people in charge, and a crash of a Malaysians
Airline flight in particular was kind of a dicey thing
to talk about because Malaysian Airlines was the pride of
(05:11):
Malaysia and it was a at the time, a government
largely government owned and controlled airline, a state owned airline.
It was the Malaysia was the majority owner of stock
and it was publicly traded. Malaysian Airlines was, but they
owned the majority of it. They called the shots and
after two fourteen was proved to be a terrible year
(05:33):
by any airline standards, because not only was MH three
seventy did vanish. MH seventeen was shot down over Ukraine
the same year. Just less than six months later, the
Malaysian government set about buying back all of the shares
that were outstanding of Malaysian Airlines and took it off
of public listing, made it a fully stayed owned company.
(05:56):
So they certainly didn't want the bad press no short
follow now. So there's a lot of people who say
the Malaysian government covered this up, not because they did
anything nefariest, but because they were worried that something embarrassing
was going to come out. And this is not a
government that could handle embarrassment very well, and so they
literally obfuscated the the investigation into what happened at mhe. Yeah,
(06:23):
so the first problem here is, uh, we know now
that this plane crashed in the South Indian Ocean, and
it took a week before they were looking in the
South Indian Ocean, so the first twenty four hours was
in the South China Sea between Malaysian and Vietnam. Um
they ended up hooking up and uh creating a joint
(06:43):
Agency Coordination Center. Are actually Australia's who created that, and
they led the search efforts because it was close to them,
and uh they found no trace even after they did
all this ocean floor mapping UM search. You know, they
had that seventh arc Pegg searched all along there and
(07:03):
twenty thousand square miles. Yeah, which is you know, even
if you find that seventh arc and you know it's
somewhere in here, that's still a vast, vast area. And
this thing is on the bottom of the ocean at
this point, and we should say it. By this time,
Australia has stepped up and been like, well this happened
not too far from US. I guess where the closest
major country, certainly Western democracy in this in this area. Um,
(07:28):
we'll we'll head this up. Malaysia will help you out.
And they footed a lot of the bill, which was
pretty cools from Yeah. And I think it was the
most and still is the most expensive search in aviation history. Yeah,
which is kind of surpresent. You think that more would
have been spent, but I think they usually find them
(07:49):
sooner than this. This was not found. They searched for
two solid years for this thing in UM, just on
that seventh arc. There's a lot of people who at
the time we're like, no, you know how it forms
a circle. Well, there's a northern arc in a southern arc,
and some people said, no, northern ark somewhere, it's in Kazakhstan.
The southern arc was in the Indian Ocean. Most people said,
(08:10):
it's probably the southern arc um so that's where they searched,
and they still didn't find it. Yeah, and it took
so long to even get there. By that point, there
were a lot of things. If you had that first
twenty four hours, it's sort of like a a murder investigation.
Those that first day is so key. The first forty
eight is forty eight let's say I'm making I'm there
(08:30):
and down to buddy. Okay. So Malaysia then heads up
what's called the Joint Investigation Team. Uh, the US was involved, China, Britain,
and France. This was the one that was meant to
follow the protocols of just the internationally agreed upon accident
investigation to make for for everybody. And Malaysia did not
(08:53):
help out very well. No, so they issued the Malaysian
Ministry of Transport issued a preliminary and a final rep wort.
The preliminary report um ED describes as more or less
a reprint of the Boeing seven seven seven manual just like, well,
here there was the plane, which I think is kind
of standard to have technical information, but this is the
(09:14):
whole report. Uh. And then the second one, the final report,
basically pointed out where air traffic control failed along the way. Yeah,
and I saw in that languish article UM that that
they were politically speaking the easiest targets they were not
going to. There wasn't going to be any backlash by
(09:36):
kind of taking them to task, especially taking the ho
Chi min air traffic controllers to task too. They should
have been taking the task. Eighteen minutes is a very
long time to let an airliner in your jurisdiction just
be disappeared, so that that was a big problem. But
the Malaysian Air Force also UM should have been criticized
for covering up the fact that they hadn't done anything
(09:58):
for an hour that they were tracking this this unidentified
UM airplane in their airspace and let an entire search
multi national search be mounted in the South China Sea
like a couple of days before they were like, um,
actually we we think they went this way, you know,
because it takes a long time to even as symbol
(10:20):
that kind of search squad. So I think if they
searched for two days and didn't get start till a
week later. That's like four days just a like move right,
you know. And so in that time, an oil slick,
a debris field, all that stuff can just vanish, and
an airliner really can in an area the size of
the Indian Ocean, especially even when you know where to look,
(10:43):
can just disappear. And that is why a lot of
people say we will probably never find m H three seventeen.
There's there's another couple of reasons why too, are we
gonna get to this? The police in Malaysia and this
bore a little bit of fruit. They conducted some background
check on everyone on the plane, uh, and they did
(11:03):
find two passengers who were Iranians that had stolen passports.
Apparently they were just seeking political asylum though although that
does factor into some of the conspiracy theories that pop
up later on. Yeah, anytime you have two Iranian nationals
traveling under fake passports on him plane that disappeared, some
people are going to say, sure, I don't know about
(11:23):
that one, Yeah, exactly. Um. And then here was the
one thing about their final report from the police, UH
is they described Captain Sahari basically saying like this guy
was great, nothing wrong, he was a great pilot. Uh uh,
nothing to alarm anybody here about Captain Sahari And that's
(11:46):
in the final report and we'll get to him. But
that does not appear to be true. No. Um, So
after the search after two years, in a hundred and
sixty million dollars and a hundred and twenty thousand sorry
a square kilometers, I think it's a square miles. Still
(12:06):
a lot of square miles searched. Um, the Australians, the Malaysians,
and the Chinese that made up the tripartite um Commission
that we're kind of running the show in this search
said officially, we don't know what happened. All we can
say is that we believe MH three seventy ended somewhere
(12:28):
in the Southern Indian Ocean. That was that's the official
stance on what happened to a vanished airliner that they said,
we don't know, And that's as far as we're gonna go. Yeah,
and I do want to point out quickly there was
one private agency called in um or I think volunteered,
called Ocean Infinity from Texas. Yeah, they performed a search
(12:49):
basically pro bono. If they find the plane, they get paid.
But just as a sort of a nerd in this way,
I looked into that company. They're awesome. Yeah, it's really
cool man they are. They call it cbed Intelligence, and
it's it's like James Cameron style stuff. The resources and
the toys that these dudes play with, it's pretty pretty cool. Yeah,
(13:13):
they'll have a mothership at least, this is what they
did for the MH three seventy search. They have a mothership,
and I think the mothership goes through and maps the
underwater terrain in three D first, and then that forms
their search area. They release some autonomous drones. Yeah they
look like torpedoes, but they're drones that can be controlled
from this mothership and they go through and scan using
(13:35):
sonar like in detail the sea bed. It's so cool
and rus photography. It's like really cool stuff. It works
really well. Ocean Ocean Infinity has a great track record
finding stuff there. Who I would call they found like
a missing submarine from Argentina. They found a bunch of
other things. I would call them too. By the way,
we should get them on the we should hire them
out for the Tybee Island nuke. We totally should. I'm
(13:57):
surprised they haven't just done that for fun. Yeah, as
a matter of fact, I think they should solve the mystery. Yeah,
the broken era or the empty quiver. And they're like,
we spent how many multimillions of dollars just to say
we solve that mystery? Right? No, No, they're from Texas,
so anytime they find something, they don't think about that.
(14:17):
Instead they just shoot their six shooters into the air.
About that, right, So that's fine, that's a good enough
for them, let's pay enough. But Ocean Infinity, Yeah, they
know what they're doing, and they still couldn't find There
were some things that were found in the search Number one.
This was uncharted um territory and now huge swaths of
(14:37):
it are now mapped. They found an underwater volcano, an
enormous one that they had no idea existed before. They
found a couple of shipwrecks from the nineteenth century that
had just been totally lost. But they still found no
trace whatsoever of MH three seventy, despite two major searches
and an official finally, an official final report from Australia
(15:00):
is saying we don't know we will probably never know.
All we can say is that the flight ended almost
certainly in the Southern Indian Ocean. That's right, And um,
we should shout out the Independent Group. Uh, this is
an online group of enthusiasts Internet. Yeah, who got together
to try and figure this out. And uh Ed even
(15:20):
pointed out, like, you know, you hear Internet sluz and
you're like, come on, get off the tinfoil hat. But
it turns out that these people a lot of more.
There were engineers, they worked in aviation formally or currently,
and they were really interested in trying to help and
I think ended up helping in a lot of ways. Yeah,
and even even beyond like tinfoil hats, Internet slus can,
(15:41):
they've done things like identified John does and Jane does. Um,
they've done a lot of cool stuff. But typically they're
not qualified in what they're doing. They're just very interested
in and very dogged in their pursuits. Right with the
Independent Group, these are actual like people with PhDs and
electrical engineering and secondary radar and satellites and the stuff
(16:06):
that they're they're doing. They just all happened to come together,
bound by their common interest in the search for this plane.
And if you go and read, I will give you
a thousand dollars if you can make it through one
of their blog posts. It's so dan and so scientific,
but they're so legitimate. The Australian government when they wrapped
up their search, maybe at some point during it they
(16:28):
actually acknowledged and thank the Independent Group for their work
because they were relying on it to some extent. Yeah,
and I'm sure like no one ever and this kind
of thing or search and rescue, no one ever wants
this to happen. But this is their chance to really
get involved and try and do some good. Who the
Independent Group? Yeah, sure. They also agitated for um more
(16:50):
transparency in this stuff, and I think they got their hands. Well.
They went around about way um the they made friends
with some of the family of MH three seventy, just
by the families um hearing about what they were doing.
And from one of the families they got the raw
M Marsett data. At a time when M Marsett was
saying this actually belongs to Malaysia or Malaysian Airlines, we
(17:13):
can't release it. Malaysia was saying, well, no, M Marsett
has to release it. They just went around both and
got the raw data, and we're able to really do
some much better calculations than they had before with the
raw m Marsett data. All right, so let's take a
break and we'll go start up our own Internet sleuthing concern.
Get that ramped up. What are we going to get
(17:33):
to the bottom of puppies? Sure? Okay, why are they
so darn cute? That sounds like us? All right, we'll
be right back, okay, Chuck. So, um we at wreckage?
(18:09):
Not quite yet. I want to talk about the Yeah,
we are at wreckage. I think they'll tie in nicely
to I was gonna say, yeah, I mean because this
thing disappeared. That is not to say there were no traces,
because we have pieces of this plane. Now. There are people, um,
sort of like these Internet slues that are captured by
(18:30):
a story such that they will spend a large portion
of their life trying to solve it and looking for
stuff and savings. Yeah, sure, a lot of money. I think.
I think by people you really mean person. Now there
are a lot of other people. There was one man
called Zahid Raza who searched for years and he was
murdered in Madagascar. So he was. His job was as
(18:53):
the Malaysian Council to Madagascar's like the ambassador to Madagascar. Yeah,
and the conspiracy minded will say, now this guy's finding stuff,
and they took him out. So there was a dude
who did leave his life in I think Seattle and
moved well, actually just started moving around the world, which
(19:13):
he did normally anyway. But his name was Blaine Gibson. Yeah.
He factors big into that William Langwish article. He talks
about him a lot. But he just became moved by
this and decided that he was going to go start
finding wreckage. And he has I think a third of
the debris found from MH three seventy has been personally
(19:34):
found by Blaine Gibson. Just globe trotting, basically, but he
figured out if it was the Southern Indian Ocean, then
this wreckage is probably going to start to show up
somewhere around the southern the southwest coast of Africa, um
South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar. And he was right. And the
(19:58):
first piece turned up in two thousand and fifteen. It
was a six ft piece of an airplane and it
felt like, no, I can't a matter of fact. I
mean looking for this and then finding it. It's like
a searching for a needle in a haystack. But it
was found on Reunion Island, um off of Madagascar, I
think off it's under the control of Mauritius. And this
(20:21):
was a really big deal for a couple of reasons. One,
it showed in controvertibly that the Southern arc was correct,
that that there, that it hadn't flown north into Kazakhstan,
that the flight had ended to the Indian Ocean. Yeah,
I mean, it showed that it crashed. That's a big one.
It showed that it had broken up like it wasn't
(20:43):
like a fire or anything like they had come apart. Well,
and it wasn't secretly landed somewhere, because some of those
conspiracies get pretty out there, right. But the other effect
that this had was that it devastated the MH three
seventy families who had been holding out hope because it
was disappeared. This airliner vanished and people were saying, no,
it actually is, and um the air based Diego Garcia
(21:06):
under US control. No, it's under Russian control and kazakh
stunt it's somewhere are people are somewhere maybe maybe there's
this hope. This dashed those hopes. And it came um
a full more than a year after the plane disappeared,
So they had been like really holding onto this hope
to desperate degree for more than a year and then
(21:27):
it was dashed. So it was a big deal when
it was found. And that was the first of several
pieces that that washed up in that area. Yeah, this
was a part of the airplane called a flap iron.
It's on the back edge of the wing and it's
a control surface, you know, the kind of kind of
flaps up and down on it. It's a great name
for it now all know. Uh and the serial numbers
(21:51):
confirmed it. So it was definitely from uh MH three seventy.
And then many other pieces have I think what dozens
at this point the pieces of plane have been found. Um.
What's creepy is other pieces have been found, but they're
not from MH three seventy. It's like, well, what planes
are these coming from? Well, yeah, that's creepy. Yeah, I
(22:15):
think maybe every is there any way to completely tag
every square inch of an airplane? I don't know, and
not necessarily with a stamp, but Um, I don't know.
I know it means some kind of technology. If there's
a you could probably attach some sort of marker to
atoms eventually, and you will be able to tag any
(22:36):
any part of any plane down to can you find
a little four inch piece of metal and you know
what it is? You just like analyze the atomic makeup
and being oh, look, mh three seventy. But that's the
future everyone, that's not too far. Once we get into nanotechnology,
that will be commonplace. Although we'll also probably be able
to make planes that don't come apart, right. Uh. So
(22:57):
the other thing that suggests to is that, um, the
plane hit and we talked earlier about when a plane
is descending into an ocean like that, it's going super fast,
and this really kind of confirms that because they didn't
find much wreckage the plane. Um, these parts probably ripped
off on the way down, and most of the plane
fairly intact hit the ocean and went south very very fast. Yeah,
(23:22):
right to the bottom, right to the bottom. So this
also dashed the hopes of the families even further in
that those four electronic location transmitters the beak of the
life beacons that were supposed to go off, and all
four failed. Some family members and a lot of conspiracy
theorists are saying all four of those failing. No way,
it means that the plane didn't didn't descend quickly, didn't
(23:46):
catch fire, didn't hit water because some of those transmitters
are supposed to go off when they hit water, but
if they broke up on the way down, Because here's
the thing is the planes if it entered a steep
decline at six miles an hour, which is about what
they think that was cruising at, if it drops from
thirty five thousand feet at six hundred miles an hour
within two minutes, it's going to just break up, either
(24:08):
on the way down or the moment it hits water.
So much so that some of these beacons that are
designed for the scenario are not going to function. And
there's another there is one beacon that is designed to
go off on impact. It's designed for that kind of thing,
but it needs fifty seconds above water it's to transmit
(24:29):
to the satellite. So they think this thing hits so
fast that that beacon might have just gone right down
underwater and not been able to transmit in that fifty seconds.
So it's an explanation that the plane came apart in
the Southern Indian Ocean. Didn't just crash in the Southern
Indian Ocean. It came into a million pieces in the
Southern Indian Ocean. Yeah, and you know, we mentioned the
(24:51):
black boxes and the previous episode. Obviously we don't have
these black boxes. They're down there with everything else. I
haven't recovered any anything like that, but they think that
they probably wouldn't tell much of a story anyway. No,
not unless there was some sort of final communications or something.
That's what it would take. It would take whoever was
in charge of the plane at that time still talking
(25:14):
and explaining. And if you were the only person alive
on this plane, Uh, who would you be talking to. Well,
let's go ahead and talk about who this might be, because, um,
all indications point that it was the captain of the
airplane himself, Captain Shaw, yep, Captain Zahariamad Shaw. That's right. So, uh,
(25:35):
the wreckage basically, I mean, there's a lot of a
lot of clues. Again, we can't say anything for sure,
but no one ever claim you know, it's unlikely it
was terrorists because one thing terrorists do, which is what
makes them. Terrorists claim responsibility. They like to brag, well,
so everyone knows who it was. No one did this,
no one even falsely did this, which happened. Sometimes the
(25:57):
same can be said for a kidnapping because there are
some theories about that that there were some important people
aboard that they wanted to disappear or something. Right, But
like if you were kidnapping somebody, you want them alive
and they can't be alive if the planes and a
million pieces in the Southern Indian Ocean, that's right, uh,
And there were only two people on that plane who
(26:19):
knew and had the knowledge and access to do this stuff,
and that was Captain Shawn, first Officer hamid Um. Also, yeah,
there's something really important to point out here to Chuck,
there was no distress call and for if if it
was a hijacking, between the time that Zahari said goodnight
Malaysian three seven zero and the transponder went off at
(26:41):
exactly the right time, right when it hit a ho
Chi Minh air Traffic Controls jurisdiction, it would have taken
a minute for terrorists to make their way into the cockpit,
which was sealed with an electronic lock. A lot super bolted. Um,
it would have taken less than a minute at a
precise moment in time for terrorists to take control of
the plane. That just would not have happened. Uh. The
(27:04):
idea that these two are working together is not very plausible. Uh.
The idea that it was UM First Officer Hamid himself
is not plausible because, like we said, this is a greenhorn.
He was just getting started in his career. He was
super happy to be to have this job, this great
job flying the Pride of Malaysia. Um. Nothing at all
(27:26):
points that he had anything to do with this. No,
it doesn't. And also it would have been much harder
for him to get um Captain Shaw out of the cockpit. Yeah,
like once you uh go take a bathroom break would
have been like I don't need to He's like no,
but seriously, go do it. I'm wondering how Captain Shawn
(27:47):
might have gotten him out. So one thing Lang was
this is a well I will keep going back to
all day long. The language. Well yeah, um he said
that Captain Shaw was known as a uh somebody who
wanted to know all the details of what was going on,
So it would have been very normal back and check
on something exactly. It would have been very normal, It
(28:09):
would have been very easy. And first Officer how Meade
would have hopped right up and gone right out of
the cockpit, leaving Shaw alone to lock the door, lock
him out. And that's all it took. That's all it took.
So when you start, uh, we said that the report
from the Malaysian police came back as a glowing report
for uh for Shaw. When you start doing a little
digging around, that's not exactly the case. Um. Before this
(28:33):
plane disappeared, in the months before, he had separated from
his wife, he was living by himself. Apparently was having
an affair with a married woman I think a platonic affair,
but of a weird emotional affair. Yeah. He also involved
her children that he was really into. Um. He would
apparently was very big on social media. Uh. But he
(28:54):
did not leave like a Facebook post no suicide note
no suicide note no that e O. And he was
on YouTube. He did d I Y repair things on
YouTube videos, which is pretty remarkable. Um. But here's the
big clue to me and everyone else is that he,
like Microsoft, has a flight simulator that's a lot of
(29:15):
fun and if you ever played around with one of those.
Uh not for many many years. It's a ton of fun.
I've crashed tons of planes because it's really hard, as
it turns out, to fly one of these. But he
loved doing this. He loved flying these. It was one
of his hobby was flying this. Flights them so they
were able to get into the flights um that he
(29:35):
flew preceding this disappearance, and one of them really closely
matches the flight path of MH three seventy right into
the Indian Ocean. Some people might say, like, hey, listen, uh,
that doesn't prove anything. But all the other flights that
he had played around with he took from take off
(29:56):
to landing, this is the only one where he jumped
forward like a like a podcast commercial. Don't say that
he's skipping forward in time on that flight alone to
see how these fuel calculations were going to play out
and where this plane would be when it ran out
of fuel over the Indian Ocean. Flights him over right,
(30:20):
And that is so suspicious, Like I mean, it's I know,
you can speculate, but it's almost open and shut case
when you hear that, it's so suspicious. I saw one
member of the Independent Group said that this that he
left it as a bread crumb. Oh interesting, you know that,
like he wouldn't have learned anything from Microsoft Flight Simulator,
which is, to a guy in the seven seventies seven,
(30:42):
basically a game. You know that he was just basically
leaving something behind. That was That was one guy's interpretation
in the Independent group. Well, the very least he could
say if I if I'm here and I'm on this
header and I put it on autopilot, who knows, he
may have killed himself. Uh, he may have wanted that
thing to fly into the ocean for sure. So the
(31:03):
the idea is that Captain Zahari took control of the
plane by locking First Officer Hamid out of the cockpit,
turned off the electrical system, um took the the seven
seventy seven in a hard turn, back tracking and probably
going up to about forty ft at the same time,
(31:25):
accelerating the effects of depressuration depressurization in the cabin, killing
everyone on board, killing everyone on board, putting it on autopilot,
and setting a course for the Southern Indian Ocean with
a plane full of dead people for a good six
something hours. He may have killed himself at some point.
(31:45):
He may not. He may There's some data that suggests
that the plane running out of fuel and dropping from
the sky would not have hit the ocean as hard
as the wreckage suggests that it hit, and that it
might have taken somebody driving the plane into the ocean.
So he may have been alive to the very bitter end.
And if he was a seven seventies seven pilot dying
(32:06):
by crashing a plane in the ocean, I'm betting that
he wouldn't have killed himself before the crash. It just
doesn't seem right. But the idea is that he killed
his passengers and then killed himself by crashing this plane
into the Southern Indian Ocean. And this like the mind
recoils from that idea. But the problem is it's happened before.
(32:28):
Pilots have killed their passengers and yes, multiple times in
the history of air travel. Yeah, and here's the other
final clue, which to me is kind of the cherry
on top. Is that, really I found this one tough
to reah. I didn't think so, because we we mentioned
earlier he took a very deliberate path to do a
(32:49):
little fly by a Penang Island that was out of
the way and he grew up on Penang Island. And
I don't know, man, I don't think that was I
don't think that was an accident. Okay, Um, I think
a final little fly by. I mean I could see
it sure. To me, it's the simulator. Well, it's like
(33:09):
a smoking gun, both those things to me. So so
we were saying that people have done this before, right, Yeah,
German Wings flight remember that one Eli m Mozambique uh
for seventy egypt Air And that's another article you should read.
I'm not reading any of these. You got him, man,
(33:31):
He's so good than Silk Air or flight they murdered
everyone on board. Um, Like, there's no other way to
take your own life. Yeah, there's so many other ways
to take your own life that don't involve the innocent
lives of your passengers. That this is one of the
most despicable things you can possibly do. And so in
(33:53):
response a lot of people's suicide bomber, you know a
lot of people say there's no way he did this,
including his face, like they are like, no, this guy
did not do that. He was a nice guy. He
wouldn't kill a bunch of people. But if you follow
the evidence, and again, nobody can say for certain and
probably no one will ever be able to say that
it was Captain Shaw that did this. But if you
(34:14):
follow the evidence and you form your own opinion, there's
there's a pretty it's it's pretty convincing that he did. Um,
But a lot of people say no, no way, And
because they've not been able to explain what happened, it's
formed this vacuum that's being filled by conspiracy theory, and
there's a lot of them. Yeah, so we'll take our
last break here and we will um, we're not gonna
(34:36):
go too deep into those, but we will kind of
rattle off some of the leading ones right after this
(35:07):
and Chuck before we you know, rattle off some of
these these conspiracy theories. I want to say, because we
can't explain this, nobody can say that it was Captain Shaw.
There are some things you can say. It's not like
it wasn't an accident, it wasn't there was it wasn't
you know, terrorists or anything like that, but but you
can't say definitively that yes, it was Captain Shaw. And
(35:27):
if this floats your boat, this is a there's a
whole rabbit hole for you to dive down with MH
three seventy And there's a lot of other interpretations, but
this seems to be, among uh air disaster experts the
likeliest explanation. Yeah, we are not saying, to be clear
that it was Captain Shaw. Nobody can say that it was. Yeah,
we're just sort of following Acam's razor here and the
(35:51):
findings of experts like you said that. It just it's
the cleanest explanation there is. Alright, well, some things that
aren't so clean. Should we go over some of these?
This was compiled by The Week dot c O dot
UK The Week. I didn't see Yeah, I didn't see
uh any authorship though on this one. Yeah. Maybe they're
(36:13):
like the economists and they don't. It's all the economists speaking.
It's all the Week speaking, you know what I mean exactly,
they're collective. So let me see here. One of these
is that Captain Shaw parachuted out of the plane to
meet that woman on a boat. Totally unnecessary because he
and his wife had already separated. Yeah, he was living alone,
(36:36):
that's right. But that was actually written by a journalist
in a book called The Hunt for MH three seventy
by e An Higgins. What else? This one is interesting
that it was cyber hijacked. This is another book called
Beneath Another Sky colin A Global Journey into History. Uh.
And this is the suggestion that um Boeing's Honeywell interruptible
(37:00):
autopilot onboard computer was hacked and reprogrammed. Yeah, there's that
kind of that ties into another one that the c
I a UM got their hands on the plane remotely.
But the I don't know that it's true, but there's
a definite thread through conspiracy minded groups that after nine
eleven they have engineered some sort of mechanism on the
(37:22):
airliners so that they can be remotely controlled in case
they are hijacked, so nobody can fly something into the
world traits and or anything like that. Again makes sense,
It does make sense. It's it makes so much sense
that I'm like, wait, did did they actually do that?
But that's the that's like step one to that conspiracy theory.
Step one is that that's that exists, and then step
two is that somebody used it to to vanish MH
(37:45):
three seventy. What else Asian Bermuda Triangle yeah, should we
just that's all you need to say. Well, this one,
I thought it was funny because it said that, Um,
when you look at where it crashed, it's the exact
opposite of the Bermuda triangle on the other side of
the globe. And then I guess someone just looked and
(38:07):
they're like, UM, no, it's actually not right. So go
ahead and throw that down the two maybe in the
general neighborhood, but definitely not on these And also there's
no Bermuda triangle. That's that's a big, big issue with that.
What do you got? Another one is that that it
was used as MH seventeen. Remember I said that two
(38:27):
four two is a terrible year for Malaysian airlines. And
the idea is that they hijacked. They meaning probably the
CIA or the U S government or some shadowy cabal
hijacked MH three seventy safely landed it in some at
Diego Garcia Airbase or somewhere under US control. UM killed everybody,
(38:48):
or maybe they were dead from hypoxia to begin with. Anyway,
UM put him in freezers and then stage this changed
the call sign from a zero or from an O
to a D on the plane um and then used
it to be shot down over Ukraine. And supposedly there's
(39:08):
reports from Ukrainian journalists and humanitarian workers and even Ukrainian
rebels saying that the corpses that fell from this this
shot down plane MH seventeen over Ukraine were already decomposing
and rotting as if they died weeks before. Um. I've
not found anybody who actually said that or anything like that.
(39:29):
But that's the whole thing, is that it was a
big false flag operation. Okay, but isn't it nuts that
Like if you can't explain something like a disappeared airliner,
people go onto the internet and write books and say
here's what really happened. And then it's this. I think
about the level of distrust we have for the people
running the show that this has an audience, Like, I
(39:51):
do not blame anybody who believes stuff like this because
we've been lied to for so long that you can
buy this. You know, that's that some from an agency
would hijack a plane, kill everybody, and then use it
to pin it on um, you know, putin controlled uh
Ukrainian forces. Come on, yeah, it was Hunter Biden. Right.
(40:14):
So here's another one that I thought was interesting and
not I'm saying it's interesting, is like, could it be?
But if you go to look at passengers on an
airplane and try and find a thread, uh, you might
want to look at the fact that there are twenty
people that worked for a company all on board called
Free Scale Semiconductor. So I hear that and I think, well,
(40:37):
we should at least look into this. Is there any
reason someone would want to tank this company or tank
twenty people that worked important people that work for this company,
And the theory is that they might have been killed
by plane crash, either for secret technology or to manipulate
stock prices. Right, And apparently that company helped the n
(40:59):
s A or this CIA or the U. S government
in general create some of its PRISM program surveillance technology,
so they were supposedly already in cahoots with shadowy agencies
within the US government to begin with. And since his
plane was headed to Beijing, China, perhaps these this company
was going over to work with China now and the
(41:19):
CIA didn't like that, so they did this pretty interesting,
as you said, interesting, Yeah, that's all it is. Yeah,
And then there are other various ones from life insurance
scams to uh false flag hijackings, to alien abductions. Apparently
five percent of Americans survey to believe it was subducted
(41:40):
by aliens believe MG three seventy was abducted by aliens.
I saw that, and my brain wouldn't accept that. I
think I just saw it as five percent Americans believe
in alien abductions. You know, I can't hear what you're about.
I've done Okay, Uh, you got anything else? Well, if
you want to know more about mhe three, set a
neat friend, meet your new hobby because it is all
(42:03):
over the internet, and follow whatever thread you like. Um.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail,
this one's a bit long, but boy is it a
good one, uh and super important one for this gentleman
and his family. Hey guys, my name is Tyler. I
live in Michigan. I got a story for you. The
Sunday before Thanksgiving, my family and I woke up and
(42:26):
I went around business as usual. I was playing a
video game with my two boys, and my wife said
she was going out to the garage to get something
and walked out the door. After about ten minutes, my
neighbor banged on the door. I opened it to see
my next floor next door neighbor pointing at my wife
laying motionless on the ground in front of my car.
Full on panic mode set in. I ran the ten
feet or so to find her not breathing, fingers and
(42:46):
face already blew, and my neighbor started calling nine one one. Luckily,
I remembered some advice from your CPR episode, not only
how much pressure to apply to the stern hum, which
is a lot, but the rhythm, and I began to
say staying alive by the bgs in my head as
I did the chest compressions. Trying to sing along while
my adrenaline was pumping was not easy, but I did
(43:08):
my best to stay calm and keep singing that part
of the song in my head. The color started coming
back to her face a little bit after I started
the E M T s and police were at my
house within five minutes and used a defibrulous uh deep
I always missed that word up defibrillator on her three times,
gave her three shots of epinephrin before they finally got
her heart beating again. Her brain went without blood for
(43:30):
twenty minutes, though, and as a result, she has been
diagnosed with brain damage. She's got a long road to
recovery ahead of her, but the doctors think she has
a good chance because of her age. Her heart had
a severe aridmia that ultimately caused cardiac arrest. I'm doing
the best I can for her and my kids while
she heals. I'm the primary provider for my family. While
my wife was a primary caregiver. Having to take off
(43:52):
for it can take care of my kids has been
really scary. But I've gotten tremendous support from friends and
family uh here in my time of need. So I
just want to thank you guys for the work you do.
Without your podcast, I likely would have been burying my
wife instead of visiting her in the hospital. This is
like Christmas time too. I wasn't prepared for this when
(44:14):
you could have given me like sorry in the hand
with the needle or something first. Uh sincerely, thank you
both so much. That is from Tyler Elliott. He said,
if you guys read this on the show, could you
shout out my best friend Justin. He got me into
the show back in the day and has been there
for me and my family every step of the way.
So Justin is the one who should be thanked. Really,
It all in a weird way comes back to Justin Man.
(44:35):
What is his name again? Tyler Elliott? And uh, I
hope your wife is recovering and the same here Tyler,
Best of luck to you man. That's a quite a
herring experience. Not only are we thinking of you, but
everybody listening to this podcast right now. I was thinking
about you too, that's right, sending out the best vibes
into the universe. Wow. Well, if you want to try
(44:55):
to top Tyler's email best of luck, good luck, you
can go on to step you Should Know die com
and check out our social links there, and you can
also send us an email yourself to stuff podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(45:17):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
San Francisco. We're coming to see you soon. Yeah, we're
gonna be there on Saturday, January chuck. And since it's
San Francisco, we're gonna be wearing nothing but appropriately placed
clumps of rice roni. It is the San Francisco treat, Yes,
and we're the San Francisco treat too whenever we're in town.
So everybody should come see us. That's right. It's part
of Sketch Fest as always. We love performing there. You
(00:22):
can go to s Y s K live dot com
for details or s F sketch Fest dot com. Uh
and if you're around Sunday night you can come see
me do movie Crush Live and a very small fun
venue where you can shake my hand. Very nice. So
come see us, everybody. You won't regret it. We're pretty
sure that's correct. And hey, another thing, this is weirdly
(00:44):
edited in real time. We're recording this in our time.
Two days previous melted out of my ear. Well, we
wanted to kind of front load this with a listener
mail because of what's going on in Australia. All this
was sort of happening, been happening for a little while,
but over the holiday break when we weren't in here
and had a chance to do something. Um. This is
(01:06):
from Sally M. Guys who live in Sydney, New South Wales.
You've probably been hearing about the catastrophic wildfires that are
being happening across the country since September. Having lived in
California before, I thought I knew what to expect. However,
this has been truly unprecedented. Uh. Minor inconveniences for us
have been happening, but compared to what so many other
Aussies and our wildlife is experiencing. Yet another example of
(01:29):
the far reaching effects of this emergency. Uh, there's so
much need in Australia, and I thought this stuff you
should know Army might be primed to help out. This
from Sally M. And this is uh something that you
know has been on our radar for a little while,
but obviously, UM, being across the world, America's becoming more
aware and engaged thanks to social media in recent days
(01:52):
and weeks. It's just devastating to see what's happening there.
We've always had such incredible support from Australia and and
we had a chance to visit there, just charmed by
the people and by the beautiful country and it's just heartbreaking.
So we want to direct people to quite a few
places because there are lots of ways that you can
give money to help out. Um, do you have some.
(02:15):
I've got some too, Yeah, I've got a bunch, all right,
go ahead, I mean you can do the the usual,
the Australian Red Cross, the Salvation Army Australia, St Vincent
De Paul's Society. Um, there's a something called Food Bank
in Australia. Those are some pretty good places to start. Yeah,
And you know, we're huge fans of animals and held
koalas and petted kangaroos while we were there and to
(02:37):
see these images of these animals and needs just been
really tough. So the World Wildlife Fund is always a
great place to start. There's an organization called Wires Capital
w I R E s UH, the Port Macquarie Koala
Hospital U, the r s p c A of New
South Wales is all going to help out our animal friends.
(02:59):
And if you want to help the firefighters directly, the
New South Wales Rural Fire Service has set up funds
for the families of volunteers fighting the fires who have
died fighting the fires. Yeah, so do what you can.
It is a dire situation right now, and I think
people can come together and spare a few bucks. Every
(03:19):
little bit helps. Yea, and Australia, we are thinking of you.
The whole world is sending you good vibes and hanging there.
All right, So finally let's get on with the show.
Welcome to Stuff You should know, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(03:43):
I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and
this is part two of two about Image three seventy,
the most mysterious disappearance of any airliner in the history
of modern aviation. That's right. We won't do a full recap,
but where we're picking up now, wait, you want to
do a full recap twenty minutes easy. We are at
(04:05):
the point where the plane has crashed, and we're going
to pick up with post crash investigations, which, um, like
many airline crash investigations were bungled, and was bungled in
a lot of ways. Oh yeah, So Ed points out
that like kind of oddly that there are a lot
(04:28):
of crash investigations you can point to that, you know,
kind of deferred towards the airline manufacturer when they were
at fault, or tried to do some cover up or
was not great, none of them from what I can tell,
to this one. This is very very not good. And
the seems to be the roundly, roundly accepted reason for
(04:50):
the whole thing being bungled was that Malaysia at the
time was the dictatorship and you could disappear if you
weren't doing your job very well or if you offended
the people in charge, and a crash of a Malaysians
Airline flight in particular was kind of a dicey thing
to talk about because Malaysian Airlines was the pride of
(05:11):
Malaysia and it was a at the time, a government
largely government owned and controlled airline, a state owned airline.
It was the Malaysia was the majority owner of stock
and it was publicly traded. Malaysian Airlines was, but they
owned the majority of it. They called the shots and
after two fourteen was proved to be a terrible year
(05:33):
by any airline standards, because not only was MH three
seventy did vanish. MH seventeen was shot down over Ukraine
the same year. Just less than six months later, the
Malaysian government set about buying back all of the shares
that were outstanding of Malaysian Airlines and took it off
of public listing, made it a fully stayed owned company.
(05:56):
So they certainly didn't want the bad press no short
follow now. So there's a lot of people who say
the Malaysian government covered this up, not because they did
anything nefariest, but because they were worried that something embarrassing
was going to come out. And this is not a
government that could handle embarrassment very well, and so they
literally obfuscated the the investigation into what happened at mhe. Yeah,
(06:23):
so the first problem here is, uh, we know now
that this plane crashed in the South Indian Ocean, and
it took a week before they were looking in the
South Indian Ocean, so the first twenty four hours was
in the South China Sea between Malaysian and Vietnam. Um
they ended up hooking up and uh creating a joint
(06:43):
Agency Coordination Center. Are actually Australia's who created that, and
they led the search efforts because it was close to them,
and uh they found no trace even after they did
all this ocean floor mapping UM search. You know, they
had that seventh arc Pegg searched all along there and
(07:03):
twenty thousand square miles. Yeah, which is you know, even
if you find that seventh arc and you know it's
somewhere in here, that's still a vast, vast area. And
this thing is on the bottom of the ocean at
this point, and we should say it. By this time,
Australia has stepped up and been like, well this happened
not too far from US. I guess where the closest
major country, certainly Western democracy in this in this area. Um,
(07:28):
we'll we'll head this up. Malaysia will help you out.
And they footed a lot of the bill, which was
pretty cools from Yeah. And I think it was the
most and still is the most expensive search in aviation history. Yeah,
which is kind of surpresent. You think that more would
have been spent, but I think they usually find them
(07:49):
sooner than this. This was not found. They searched for
two solid years for this thing in UM, just on
that seventh arc. There's a lot of people who at
the time we're like, no, you know how it forms
a circle. Well, there's a northern arc in a southern arc,
and some people said, no, northern ark somewhere, it's in Kazakhstan.
The southern arc was in the Indian Ocean. Most people said,
(08:10):
it's probably the southern arc um so that's where they searched,
and they still didn't find it. Yeah, and it took
so long to even get there. By that point, there
were a lot of things. If you had that first
twenty four hours, it's sort of like a a murder investigation.
Those that first day is so key. The first forty
eight is forty eight let's say I'm making I'm there
(08:30):
and down to buddy. Okay. So Malaysia then heads up
what's called the Joint Investigation Team. Uh, the US was involved, China, Britain,
and France. This was the one that was meant to
follow the protocols of just the internationally agreed upon accident
investigation to make for for everybody. And Malaysia did not
(08:53):
help out very well. No, so they issued the Malaysian
Ministry of Transport issued a preliminary and a final rep wort.
The preliminary report um ED describes as more or less
a reprint of the Boeing seven seven seven manual just like, well,
here there was the plane, which I think is kind
of standard to have technical information, but this is the
(09:14):
whole report. Uh. And then the second one, the final report,
basically pointed out where air traffic control failed along the way. Yeah,
and I saw in that languish article UM that that
they were politically speaking the easiest targets they were not
going to. There wasn't going to be any backlash by
(09:36):
kind of taking them to task, especially taking the ho
Chi min air traffic controllers to task too. They should
have been taking the task. Eighteen minutes is a very
long time to let an airliner in your jurisdiction just
be disappeared, so that that was a big problem. But
the Malaysian Air Force also UM should have been criticized
for covering up the fact that they hadn't done anything
(09:58):
for an hour that they were tracking this this unidentified
UM airplane in their airspace and let an entire search
multi national search be mounted in the South China Sea
like a couple of days before they were like, um,
actually we we think they went this way, you know,
because it takes a long time to even as symbol
(10:20):
that kind of search squad. So I think if they
searched for two days and didn't get start till a
week later. That's like four days just a like move right,
you know. And so in that time, an oil slick,
a debris field, all that stuff can just vanish, and
an airliner really can in an area the size of
the Indian Ocean, especially even when you know where to look,
(10:43):
can just disappear. And that is why a lot of
people say we will probably never find m H three seventeen.
There's there's another couple of reasons why too, are we
gonna get to this? The police in Malaysia and this
bore a little bit of fruit. They conducted some background
check on everyone on the plane, uh, and they did
(11:03):
find two passengers who were Iranians that had stolen passports.
Apparently they were just seeking political asylum though although that
does factor into some of the conspiracy theories that pop
up later on. Yeah, anytime you have two Iranian nationals
traveling under fake passports on him plane that disappeared, some
people are going to say, sure, I don't know about
(11:23):
that one, Yeah, exactly. Um. And then here was the
one thing about their final report from the police, UH
is they described Captain Sahari basically saying like this guy
was great, nothing wrong, he was a great pilot. Uh uh,
nothing to alarm anybody here about Captain Sahari And that's
(11:46):
in the final report and we'll get to him. But
that does not appear to be true. No. Um, So
after the search after two years, in a hundred and
sixty million dollars and a hundred and twenty thousand sorry
a square kilometers, I think it's a square miles. Still
(12:06):
a lot of square miles searched. Um, the Australians, the Malaysians,
and the Chinese that made up the tripartite um Commission
that we're kind of running the show in this search
said officially, we don't know what happened. All we can
say is that we believe MH three seventy ended somewhere
(12:28):
in the Southern Indian Ocean. That was that's the official
stance on what happened to a vanished airliner that they said,
we don't know, And that's as far as we're gonna go. Yeah,
and I do want to point out quickly there was
one private agency called in um or I think volunteered,
called Ocean Infinity from Texas. Yeah, they performed a search
(12:49):
basically pro bono. If they find the plane, they get paid.
But just as a sort of a nerd in this way,
I looked into that company. They're awesome. Yeah, it's really
cool man they are. They call it cbed Intelligence, and
it's it's like James Cameron style stuff. The resources and
the toys that these dudes play with, it's pretty pretty cool. Yeah,
(13:13):
they'll have a mothership at least, this is what they
did for the MH three seventy search. They have a mothership,
and I think the mothership goes through and maps the
underwater terrain in three D first, and then that forms
their search area. They release some autonomous drones. Yeah they
look like torpedoes, but they're drones that can be controlled
from this mothership and they go through and scan using
(13:35):
sonar like in detail the sea bed. It's so cool
and rus photography. It's like really cool stuff. It works
really well. Ocean Ocean Infinity has a great track record
finding stuff there. Who I would call they found like
a missing submarine from Argentina. They found a bunch of
other things. I would call them too. By the way,
we should get them on the we should hire them
out for the Tybee Island nuke. We totally should. I'm
(13:57):
surprised they haven't just done that for fun. Yeah, as
a matter of fact, I think they should solve the mystery. Yeah,
the broken era or the empty quiver. And they're like,
we spent how many multimillions of dollars just to say
we solve that mystery? Right? No, No, they're from Texas,
so anytime they find something, they don't think about that.
(14:17):
Instead they just shoot their six shooters into the air.
About that, right, So that's fine, that's a good enough
for them, let's pay enough. But Ocean Infinity, Yeah, they
know what they're doing, and they still couldn't find There
were some things that were found in the search Number one.
This was uncharted um territory and now huge swaths of
(14:37):
it are now mapped. They found an underwater volcano, an
enormous one that they had no idea existed before. They
found a couple of shipwrecks from the nineteenth century that
had just been totally lost. But they still found no
trace whatsoever of MH three seventy, despite two major searches
and an official finally, an official final report from Australia
(15:00):
is saying we don't know we will probably never know.
All we can say is that the flight ended almost
certainly in the Southern Indian Ocean. That's right, And um,
we should shout out the Independent Group. Uh, this is
an online group of enthusiasts Internet. Yeah, who got together
to try and figure this out. And uh Ed even
(15:20):
pointed out, like, you know, you hear Internet sluz and
you're like, come on, get off the tinfoil hat. But
it turns out that these people a lot of more.
There were engineers, they worked in aviation formally or currently,
and they were really interested in trying to help and
I think ended up helping in a lot of ways. Yeah,
and even even beyond like tinfoil hats, Internet slus can,
(15:41):
they've done things like identified John does and Jane does. Um,
they've done a lot of cool stuff. But typically they're
not qualified in what they're doing. They're just very interested
in and very dogged in their pursuits. Right with the
Independent Group, these are actual like people with PhDs and
electrical engineering and secondary radar and satellites and the stuff
(16:06):
that they're they're doing. They just all happened to come together,
bound by their common interest in the search for this plane.
And if you go and read, I will give you
a thousand dollars if you can make it through one
of their blog posts. It's so dan and so scientific,
but they're so legitimate. The Australian government when they wrapped
up their search, maybe at some point during it they
(16:28):
actually acknowledged and thank the Independent Group for their work
because they were relying on it to some extent. Yeah,
and I'm sure like no one ever and this kind
of thing or search and rescue, no one ever wants
this to happen. But this is their chance to really
get involved and try and do some good. Who the
Independent Group? Yeah, sure. They also agitated for um more
(16:50):
transparency in this stuff, and I think they got their hands. Well.
They went around about way um the they made friends
with some of the family of MH three seventy, just
by the families um hearing about what they were doing.
And from one of the families they got the raw
M Marsett data. At a time when M Marsett was
saying this actually belongs to Malaysia or Malaysian Airlines, we
(17:13):
can't release it. Malaysia was saying, well, no, M Marsett
has to release it. They just went around both and
got the raw data, and we're able to really do
some much better calculations than they had before with the
raw m Marsett data. All right, so let's take a
break and we'll go start up our own Internet sleuthing concern.
Get that ramped up. What are we going to get
(17:33):
to the bottom of puppies? Sure? Okay, why are they
so darn cute? That sounds like us? All right, we'll
be right back, okay, Chuck. So, um we at wreckage?
(18:09):
Not quite yet. I want to talk about the Yeah,
we are at wreckage. I think they'll tie in nicely
to I was gonna say, yeah, I mean because this
thing disappeared. That is not to say there were no traces,
because we have pieces of this plane. Now. There are people, um,
sort of like these Internet slues that are captured by
(18:30):
a story such that they will spend a large portion
of their life trying to solve it and looking for
stuff and savings. Yeah, sure, a lot of money. I think.
I think by people you really mean person. Now there
are a lot of other people. There was one man
called Zahid Raza who searched for years and he was
murdered in Madagascar. So he was. His job was as
(18:53):
the Malaysian Council to Madagascar's like the ambassador to Madagascar. Yeah,
and the conspiracy minded will say, now this guy's finding stuff,
and they took him out. So there was a dude
who did leave his life in I think Seattle and
moved well, actually just started moving around the world, which
(19:13):
he did normally anyway. But his name was Blaine Gibson. Yeah.
He factors big into that William Langwish article. He talks
about him a lot. But he just became moved by
this and decided that he was going to go start
finding wreckage. And he has I think a third of
the debris found from MH three seventy has been personally
(19:34):
found by Blaine Gibson. Just globe trotting, basically, but he
figured out if it was the Southern Indian Ocean, then
this wreckage is probably going to start to show up
somewhere around the southern the southwest coast of Africa, um
South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar. And he was right. And the
(19:58):
first piece turned up in two thousand and fifteen. It
was a six ft piece of an airplane and it
felt like, no, I can't a matter of fact. I
mean looking for this and then finding it. It's like
a searching for a needle in a haystack. But it
was found on Reunion Island, um off of Madagascar, I
think off it's under the control of Mauritius. And this
(20:21):
was a really big deal for a couple of reasons. One,
it showed in controvertibly that the Southern arc was correct,
that that there, that it hadn't flown north into Kazakhstan,
that the flight had ended to the Indian Ocean. Yeah,
I mean, it showed that it crashed. That's a big one.
It showed that it had broken up like it wasn't
(20:43):
like a fire or anything like they had come apart. Well,
and it wasn't secretly landed somewhere, because some of those
conspiracies get pretty out there, right. But the other effect
that this had was that it devastated the MH three
seventy families who had been holding out hope because it
was disappeared. This airliner vanished and people were saying, no,
it actually is, and um the air based Diego Garcia
(21:06):
under US control. No, it's under Russian control and kazakh
stunt it's somewhere are people are somewhere maybe maybe there's
this hope. This dashed those hopes. And it came um
a full more than a year after the plane disappeared,
So they had been like really holding onto this hope
to desperate degree for more than a year and then
(21:27):
it was dashed. So it was a big deal when
it was found. And that was the first of several
pieces that that washed up in that area. Yeah, this
was a part of the airplane called a flap iron.
It's on the back edge of the wing and it's
a control surface, you know, the kind of kind of
flaps up and down on it. It's a great name
for it now all know. Uh and the serial numbers
(21:51):
confirmed it. So it was definitely from uh MH three seventy.
And then many other pieces have I think what dozens
at this point the pieces of plane have been found. Um.
What's creepy is other pieces have been found, but they're
not from MH three seventy. It's like, well, what planes
are these coming from? Well, yeah, that's creepy. Yeah, I
(22:15):
think maybe every is there any way to completely tag
every square inch of an airplane? I don't know, and
not necessarily with a stamp, but Um, I don't know.
I know it means some kind of technology. If there's
a you could probably attach some sort of marker to
atoms eventually, and you will be able to tag any
(22:36):
any part of any plane down to can you find
a little four inch piece of metal and you know
what it is? You just like analyze the atomic makeup
and being oh, look, mh three seventy. But that's the
future everyone, that's not too far. Once we get into nanotechnology,
that will be commonplace. Although we'll also probably be able
to make planes that don't come apart, right. Uh. So
(22:57):
the other thing that suggests to is that, um, the
plane hit and we talked earlier about when a plane
is descending into an ocean like that, it's going super fast,
and this really kind of confirms that because they didn't
find much wreckage the plane. Um, these parts probably ripped
off on the way down, and most of the plane
fairly intact hit the ocean and went south very very fast. Yeah,
(23:22):
right to the bottom, right to the bottom. So this
also dashed the hopes of the families even further in
that those four electronic location transmitters the beak of the
life beacons that were supposed to go off, and all
four failed. Some family members and a lot of conspiracy
theorists are saying all four of those failing. No way,
it means that the plane didn't didn't descend quickly, didn't
(23:46):
catch fire, didn't hit water because some of those transmitters
are supposed to go off when they hit water, but
if they broke up on the way down, Because here's
the thing is the planes if it entered a steep
decline at six miles an hour, which is about what
they think that was cruising at, if it drops from
thirty five thousand feet at six hundred miles an hour
within two minutes, it's going to just break up, either
(24:08):
on the way down or the moment it hits water.
So much so that some of these beacons that are
designed for the scenario are not going to function. And
there's another there is one beacon that is designed to
go off on impact. It's designed for that kind of thing,
but it needs fifty seconds above water it's to transmit
(24:29):
to the satellite. So they think this thing hits so
fast that that beacon might have just gone right down
underwater and not been able to transmit in that fifty seconds.
So it's an explanation that the plane came apart in
the Southern Indian Ocean. Didn't just crash in the Southern
Indian Ocean. It came into a million pieces in the
Southern Indian Ocean. Yeah, and you know, we mentioned the
(24:51):
black boxes and the previous episode. Obviously we don't have
these black boxes. They're down there with everything else. I
haven't recovered any anything like that, but they think that
they probably wouldn't tell much of a story anyway. No,
not unless there was some sort of final communications or something.
That's what it would take. It would take whoever was
in charge of the plane at that time still talking
(25:14):
and explaining. And if you were the only person alive
on this plane, Uh, who would you be talking to. Well,
let's go ahead and talk about who this might be, because, um,
all indications point that it was the captain of the
airplane himself, Captain Shaw, yep, Captain Zahariamad Shaw. That's right. So, uh,
(25:35):
the wreckage basically, I mean, there's a lot of a
lot of clues. Again, we can't say anything for sure,
but no one ever claim you know, it's unlikely it
was terrorists because one thing terrorists do, which is what
makes them. Terrorists claim responsibility. They like to brag, well,
so everyone knows who it was. No one did this,
no one even falsely did this, which happened. Sometimes the
(25:57):
same can be said for a kidnapping because there are
some theories about that that there were some important people
aboard that they wanted to disappear or something. Right, But
like if you were kidnapping somebody, you want them alive
and they can't be alive if the planes and a
million pieces in the Southern Indian Ocean, that's right, uh,
And there were only two people on that plane who
(26:19):
knew and had the knowledge and access to do this stuff,
and that was Captain Shawn, first Officer hamid Um. Also, yeah,
there's something really important to point out here to Chuck,
there was no distress call and for if if it
was a hijacking, between the time that Zahari said goodnight
Malaysian three seven zero and the transponder went off at
(26:41):
exactly the right time, right when it hit a ho
Chi Minh air Traffic Controls jurisdiction, it would have taken
a minute for terrorists to make their way into the cockpit,
which was sealed with an electronic lock. A lot super bolted. Um,
it would have taken less than a minute at a
precise moment in time for terrorists to take control of
the plane. That just would not have happened. Uh. The
(27:04):
idea that these two are working together is not very plausible. Uh.
The idea that it was UM First Officer Hamid himself
is not plausible because, like we said, this is a greenhorn.
He was just getting started in his career. He was
super happy to be to have this job, this great
job flying the Pride of Malaysia. Um. Nothing at all
(27:26):
points that he had anything to do with this. No,
it doesn't. And also it would have been much harder
for him to get um Captain Shaw out of the cockpit. Yeah,
like once you uh go take a bathroom break would
have been like I don't need to He's like no,
but seriously, go do it. I'm wondering how Captain Shawn
(27:47):
might have gotten him out. So one thing Lang was
this is a well I will keep going back to
all day long. The language. Well yeah, um he said
that Captain Shaw was known as a uh somebody who
wanted to know all the details of what was going on,
So it would have been very normal back and check
on something exactly. It would have been very normal, It
(28:09):
would have been very easy. And first Officer how Meade
would have hopped right up and gone right out of
the cockpit, leaving Shaw alone to lock the door, lock
him out. And that's all it took. That's all it took.
So when you start, uh, we said that the report
from the Malaysian police came back as a glowing report
for uh for Shaw. When you start doing a little
digging around, that's not exactly the case. Um. Before this
(28:33):
plane disappeared, in the months before, he had separated from
his wife, he was living by himself. Apparently was having
an affair with a married woman I think a platonic affair,
but of a weird emotional affair. Yeah. He also involved
her children that he was really into. Um. He would
apparently was very big on social media. Uh. But he
(28:54):
did not leave like a Facebook post no suicide note
no suicide note no that e O. And he was
on YouTube. He did d I Y repair things on
YouTube videos, which is pretty remarkable. Um. But here's the
big clue to me and everyone else is that he,
like Microsoft, has a flight simulator that's a lot of
(29:15):
fun and if you ever played around with one of those.
Uh not for many many years. It's a ton of fun.
I've crashed tons of planes because it's really hard, as
it turns out, to fly one of these. But he
loved doing this. He loved flying these. It was one
of his hobby was flying this. Flights them so they
were able to get into the flights um that he
(29:35):
flew preceding this disappearance, and one of them really closely
matches the flight path of MH three seventy right into
the Indian Ocean. Some people might say, like, hey, listen, uh,
that doesn't prove anything. But all the other flights that
he had played around with he took from take off
(29:56):
to landing, this is the only one where he jumped
forward like a like a podcast commercial. Don't say that
he's skipping forward in time on that flight alone to
see how these fuel calculations were going to play out
and where this plane would be when it ran out
of fuel over the Indian Ocean. Flights him over right,
(30:20):
And that is so suspicious, Like I mean, it's I know,
you can speculate, but it's almost open and shut case
when you hear that, it's so suspicious. I saw one
member of the Independent Group said that this that he
left it as a bread crumb. Oh interesting, you know that,
like he wouldn't have learned anything from Microsoft Flight Simulator,
which is, to a guy in the seven seventies seven,
(30:42):
basically a game. You know that he was just basically
leaving something behind. That was That was one guy's interpretation
in the Independent group. Well, the very least he could
say if I if I'm here and I'm on this
header and I put it on autopilot, who knows, he
may have killed himself. Uh, he may have wanted that
thing to fly into the ocean for sure. So the
(31:03):
the idea is that Captain Zahari took control of the
plane by locking First Officer Hamid out of the cockpit,
turned off the electrical system, um took the the seven
seventy seven in a hard turn, back tracking and probably
going up to about forty ft at the same time,
(31:25):
accelerating the effects of depressuration depressurization in the cabin, killing
everyone on board, killing everyone on board, putting it on autopilot,
and setting a course for the Southern Indian Ocean with
a plane full of dead people for a good six
something hours. He may have killed himself at some point.
(31:45):
He may not. He may There's some data that suggests
that the plane running out of fuel and dropping from
the sky would not have hit the ocean as hard
as the wreckage suggests that it hit, and that it
might have taken somebody driving the plane into the ocean.
So he may have been alive to the very bitter end.
And if he was a seven seventies seven pilot dying
(32:06):
by crashing a plane in the ocean, I'm betting that
he wouldn't have killed himself before the crash. It just
doesn't seem right. But the idea is that he killed
his passengers and then killed himself by crashing this plane
into the Southern Indian Ocean. And this like the mind
recoils from that idea. But the problem is it's happened before.
(32:28):
Pilots have killed their passengers and yes, multiple times in
the history of air travel. Yeah, and here's the other
final clue, which to me is kind of the cherry
on top. Is that, really I found this one tough
to reah. I didn't think so, because we we mentioned
earlier he took a very deliberate path to do a
(32:49):
little fly by a Penang Island that was out of
the way and he grew up on Penang Island. And
I don't know, man, I don't think that was I
don't think that was an accident. Okay, Um, I think
a final little fly by. I mean I could see
it sure. To me, it's the simulator. Well, it's like
(33:09):
a smoking gun, both those things to me. So so
we were saying that people have done this before, right, Yeah,
German Wings flight remember that one Eli m Mozambique uh
for seventy egypt Air And that's another article you should read.
I'm not reading any of these. You got him, man,
(33:31):
He's so good than Silk Air or flight they murdered
everyone on board. Um, Like, there's no other way to
take your own life. Yeah, there's so many other ways
to take your own life that don't involve the innocent
lives of your passengers. That this is one of the
most despicable things you can possibly do. And so in
(33:53):
response a lot of people's suicide bomber, you know a
lot of people say there's no way he did this,
including his face, like they are like, no, this guy
did not do that. He was a nice guy. He
wouldn't kill a bunch of people. But if you follow
the evidence, and again, nobody can say for certain and
probably no one will ever be able to say that
it was Captain Shaw that did this. But if you
(34:14):
follow the evidence and you form your own opinion, there's
there's a pretty it's it's pretty convincing that he did. Um,
But a lot of people say no, no way, And
because they've not been able to explain what happened, it's
formed this vacuum that's being filled by conspiracy theory, and
there's a lot of them. Yeah, so we'll take our
last break here and we will um, we're not gonna
(34:36):
go too deep into those, but we will kind of
rattle off some of the leading ones right after this
(35:07):
and Chuck before we you know, rattle off some of
these these conspiracy theories. I want to say, because we
can't explain this, nobody can say that it was Captain Shaw.
There are some things you can say. It's not like
it wasn't an accident, it wasn't there was it wasn't
you know, terrorists or anything like that, but but you
can't say definitively that yes, it was Captain Shaw. And
(35:27):
if this floats your boat, this is a there's a
whole rabbit hole for you to dive down with MH
three seventy And there's a lot of other interpretations, but
this seems to be, among uh air disaster experts the
likeliest explanation. Yeah, we are not saying, to be clear
that it was Captain Shaw. Nobody can say that it was. Yeah,
we're just sort of following Acam's razor here and the
(35:51):
findings of experts like you said that. It just it's
the cleanest explanation there is. Alright, well, some things that
aren't so clean. Should we go over some of these?
This was compiled by The Week dot c O dot
UK The Week. I didn't see Yeah, I didn't see
uh any authorship though on this one. Yeah. Maybe they're
(36:13):
like the economists and they don't. It's all the economists speaking.
It's all the Week speaking, you know what I mean exactly,
they're collective. So let me see here. One of these
is that Captain Shaw parachuted out of the plane to
meet that woman on a boat. Totally unnecessary because he
and his wife had already separated. Yeah, he was living alone,
(36:36):
that's right. But that was actually written by a journalist
in a book called The Hunt for MH three seventy
by e An Higgins. What else? This one is interesting
that it was cyber hijacked. This is another book called
Beneath Another Sky colin A Global Journey into History. Uh.
And this is the suggestion that um Boeing's Honeywell interruptible
(37:00):
autopilot onboard computer was hacked and reprogrammed. Yeah, there's that
kind of that ties into another one that the c
I a UM got their hands on the plane remotely.
But the I don't know that it's true, but there's
a definite thread through conspiracy minded groups that after nine
eleven they have engineered some sort of mechanism on the
(37:22):
airliners so that they can be remotely controlled in case
they are hijacked, so nobody can fly something into the
world traits and or anything like that. Again makes sense,
It does make sense. It's it makes so much sense
that I'm like, wait, did did they actually do that?
But that's the that's like step one to that conspiracy theory.
Step one is that that's that exists, and then step
two is that somebody used it to to vanish MH
(37:45):
three seventy. What else Asian Bermuda Triangle yeah, should we
just that's all you need to say. Well, this one,
I thought it was funny because it said that, Um,
when you look at where it crashed, it's the exact
opposite of the Bermuda triangle on the other side of
the globe. And then I guess someone just looked and
(38:07):
they're like, UM, no, it's actually not right. So go
ahead and throw that down the two maybe in the
general neighborhood, but definitely not on these And also there's
no Bermuda triangle. That's that's a big, big issue with that.
What do you got? Another one is that that it
was used as MH seventeen. Remember I said that two
(38:27):
four two is a terrible year for Malaysian airlines. And
the idea is that they hijacked. They meaning probably the
CIA or the U S government or some shadowy cabal
hijacked MH three seventy safely landed it in some at
Diego Garcia Airbase or somewhere under US control. UM killed everybody,
(38:48):
or maybe they were dead from hypoxia to begin with. Anyway,
UM put him in freezers and then stage this changed
the call sign from a zero or from an O
to a D on the plane um and then used
it to be shot down over Ukraine. And supposedly there's
(39:08):
reports from Ukrainian journalists and humanitarian workers and even Ukrainian
rebels saying that the corpses that fell from this this
shot down plane MH seventeen over Ukraine were already decomposing
and rotting as if they died weeks before. Um. I've
not found anybody who actually said that or anything like that.
(39:29):
But that's the whole thing, is that it was a
big false flag operation. Okay, but isn't it nuts that
Like if you can't explain something like a disappeared airliner,
people go onto the internet and write books and say
here's what really happened. And then it's this. I think
about the level of distrust we have for the people
running the show that this has an audience, Like, I
(39:51):
do not blame anybody who believes stuff like this because
we've been lied to for so long that you can
buy this. You know, that's that some from an agency
would hijack a plane, kill everybody, and then use it
to pin it on um, you know, putin controlled uh
Ukrainian forces. Come on, yeah, it was Hunter Biden. Right.
(40:14):
So here's another one that I thought was interesting and
not I'm saying it's interesting, is like, could it be?
But if you go to look at passengers on an
airplane and try and find a thread, uh, you might
want to look at the fact that there are twenty
people that worked for a company all on board called
Free Scale Semiconductor. So I hear that and I think, well,
(40:37):
we should at least look into this. Is there any
reason someone would want to tank this company or tank
twenty people that worked important people that work for this company,
And the theory is that they might have been killed
by plane crash, either for secret technology or to manipulate
stock prices. Right, And apparently that company helped the n
(40:59):
s A or this CIA or the U. S government
in general create some of its PRISM program surveillance technology,
so they were supposedly already in cahoots with shadowy agencies
within the US government to begin with. And since his
plane was headed to Beijing, China, perhaps these this company
was going over to work with China now and the
(41:19):
CIA didn't like that, so they did this pretty interesting,
as you said, interesting, Yeah, that's all it is. Yeah,
And then there are other various ones from life insurance
scams to uh false flag hijackings, to alien abductions. Apparently
five percent of Americans survey to believe it was subducted
(41:40):
by aliens believe MG three seventy was abducted by aliens.
I saw that, and my brain wouldn't accept that. I
think I just saw it as five percent Americans believe
in alien abductions. You know, I can't hear what you're about.
I've done Okay, Uh, you got anything else? Well, if
you want to know more about mhe three, set a
neat friend, meet your new hobby because it is all
(42:03):
over the internet, and follow whatever thread you like. Um.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail,
this one's a bit long, but boy is it a
good one, uh and super important one for this gentleman
and his family. Hey guys, my name is Tyler. I
live in Michigan. I got a story for you. The
Sunday before Thanksgiving, my family and I woke up and
(42:26):
I went around business as usual. I was playing a
video game with my two boys, and my wife said
she was going out to the garage to get something
and walked out the door. After about ten minutes, my
neighbor banged on the door. I opened it to see
my next floor next door neighbor pointing at my wife
laying motionless on the ground in front of my car.
Full on panic mode set in. I ran the ten
feet or so to find her not breathing, fingers and
(42:46):
face already blew, and my neighbor started calling nine one one. Luckily,
I remembered some advice from your CPR episode, not only
how much pressure to apply to the stern hum, which
is a lot, but the rhythm, and I began to
say staying alive by the bgs in my head as
I did the chest compressions. Trying to sing along while
my adrenaline was pumping was not easy, but I did
(43:08):
my best to stay calm and keep singing that part
of the song in my head. The color started coming
back to her face a little bit after I started
the E M T s and police were at my
house within five minutes and used a defibrulous uh deep
I always missed that word up defibrillator on her three times,
gave her three shots of epinephrin before they finally got
her heart beating again. Her brain went without blood for
(43:30):
twenty minutes, though, and as a result, she has been
diagnosed with brain damage. She's got a long road to
recovery ahead of her, but the doctors think she has
a good chance because of her age. Her heart had
a severe aridmia that ultimately caused cardiac arrest. I'm doing
the best I can for her and my kids while
she heals. I'm the primary provider for my family. While
my wife was a primary caregiver. Having to take off
(43:52):
for it can take care of my kids has been
really scary. But I've gotten tremendous support from friends and
family uh here in my time of need. So I
just want to thank you guys for the work you do.
Without your podcast, I likely would have been burying my
wife instead of visiting her in the hospital. This is
like Christmas time too. I wasn't prepared for this when
(44:14):
you could have given me like sorry in the hand
with the needle or something first. Uh sincerely, thank you
both so much. That is from Tyler Elliott. He said,
if you guys read this on the show, could you
shout out my best friend Justin. He got me into
the show back in the day and has been there
for me and my family every step of the way.
So Justin is the one who should be thanked. Really,
It all in a weird way comes back to Justin Man.
(44:35):
What is his name again? Tyler Elliott? And uh, I
hope your wife is recovering and the same here Tyler,
Best of luck to you man. That's a quite a
herring experience. Not only are we thinking of you, but
everybody listening to this podcast right now. I was thinking
about you too, that's right, sending out the best vibes
into the universe. Wow. Well, if you want to try
(44:55):
to top Tyler's email best of luck, good luck, you
can go on to step you Should Know die com
and check out our social links there, and you can
also send us an email yourself to stuff podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(45:17):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
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