Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/

by IAmEveryone • 7 years ago

356 80 7 years ago

jgwil24• 7 years ago

Forensic examinations of Zaharie’s simulator by the FBI revealed that he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370—a flight north around Indonesia followed by a long run to the south, ending in fuel exhaustion over the Indian Ocean. Malaysian investigators dismissed this flight profile as merely one of several hundred that the simulator had recorded. That is true, as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone.

This seems as close to a smoking gun as we're ever likely to get.

CardenB• 7 years ago

It is kind of funny that someone in Roanoke is doing extensive analysis on MH370

kevin_thibedeau• 7 years ago

Roanoke, VA is not connected to the colony.

solidsnack9000• 7 years ago

The reference here is to the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, in present day Dare County, North Carolina.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony#Lost_Colony

rtkwe4• 7 years ago

When I was hearing that first reported it was much fuzzier and they only recovered small portions of the data for the flight which makes me much less certain of the 'he simulated the exact flight' theory.

Edit: Found a source for my memory, it's from Lemino's pretty great video: [0] "the data recovered consists of 7 coordinates ... however it's not clear if the coordinates originate from the same flight session."

[0] https://youtu.be/kd2KEHvK-q8?t=953

makomk• 7 years ago

The part about how it was "only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight" makes it sound like at some point they found evidence that the co-ordinates which supposedly made up his simulation of the exact flight couldn't have actually come from the same simulated flight - and took this as more proof that it was in fact evidence of him rehearsing for it.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

"Subtracting the fuel" is a bit weird. I think even with the fuel filed until the planned destination it would have not made it nowhere on that flight path.

Also we have the last ping + some rough estimate of additional flight time (but minutes of uncertainty are already enough to have hundreds of kms of search radius)

CamperBob22• 7 years ago

This seems as close to a smoking gun as we're ever likely to get.

One interesting counterargument is brought up in a rebuttal at https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantics-william-langewie... .

The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche, and it doesn't offer any support for any competing theories. But it does pose one question I haven't seen addressed. Why, if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into the middle of nowhere, didn't he turn right instead of left?

His route took him through populated airspace for no apparent reason. If numerous authorities in multiple countries hadn't been asleep at the switch, there would have been no mystery at all about what happened.

docker_up• 7 years ago

Maybe he was hoping to get intercepted, not be completely ignored. That would make his last flight even more epic.

Steko3• 7 years ago

The rebuttal piece mostly just flames Langewiesche

I would say it raises serious questions about the accuracy of the simulator Langewiesche relies on and his complete omission of the fact that the Malaysian government absolutely wanted to blame Zahierie, a fanatical supporter of the opposition party, but the evidence was pretty thin.

< if Zaharie wanted to commit suicide by flying into the middle of nowhere, didn't he turn right instead of left?

Which begs the bigger question of why not just fly the plane straight down into the ocean? The problem with the crazy suicide pilot theory has always been that it's become basically unfalsifiable. Plane went left? Suicide pilot wanted to go left. Plane turned right? Suicide pilot wanted to turn right. Plane turned left again? Suicide pilot must have had his reasons.

jlgaddis• 7 years ago

His route took him through populated airspace for no apparent reason. If numerous authorities in multiple countries hadn't been asleep at the switch, there would have been no mystery at all about what happened.

We might know what happened in that case... but what, exactly, do you think they could have done to change the outcome?

Say that he was "caught", jets were dispatched, and MH370 was intercepted. There's absolutely nothing that they could have done to change how the flight ends.

bloak• 7 years ago

What I read somewhere was that part of his flight took him in a sightseeing curve around the place where he was born, as if he was saying goodbye. The article says he "banked around the island of Penang", and other articles say he was born in Penang. It was dark at the time, though, I suppose.

I wonder what he was expecting to happen. The article gives the impression that he can't reasonably have expected to get to the southern Indian Ocean without being intercepted. So, if he'd planned to fly in that direction, was he expecting to be followed there by military aircraft? On the other hand, if he was expecting to be intercepted, why bother with all the trickery to remain undetected, seeing as they couldn't have stopped him anyway? We'll never know, I suppose.

Lazare2• 7 years ago

I find the counterargument unpersuasive. The situation is:

1) Someone flew the plane south

2) The senior pilot had the ability to do so

3) His marriage had failed and he was possibly depressed, which is a possible reason.

4) Nobody else had the ability to do so with the possible exception of the junior pilot, who seemingly had much less reason.

This countergument, such as it is, seems to be that we don't have a lot of data to support point 3 above, which is quite true, and indeed, one of the main points of the article: That the official report did not dig into point 3 in detail, and in fact seems to have omitted some key details.

But what of it? At most this is an argument that we shouldn't rule out the junior pilot, but no evidence is advanced, however weak to suggest he was to blame. And the author does themselves no favours with trivial logic errors like this:

this flap could only be activated for takeoff or landing by command of the pilot. It could not be independently moved by the autopilot. After several weeks of detailed scrutiny, investigators concluded that the flap had not been deployed, and therefore the jet had plunged into the ocean once its fuel was exhausted without any human intervention. Langewiesche, suggesting the opposite...

If the flap had been deployed, we would know that the pilot was alive at the end. Since it had not been deployed, we don't know if the pilot was alive at the end. Langewiesche explicity gets this right; Irving gets backwards.

If you can't even construct an internally consistent argument, your attempt to debunk others will come across as lacking.

HelloMcFly• 7 years ago

I had no particularly noteworthy interest in the topic beyond empathy for the families at the time. Yet I found this a compelling read. The descriptions and details made the whole thing pretty easy to follow.

tptacek2• 7 years ago

Langewiesche is one of the great narrative journalists of the last 30 years; a contemporary and colleague of perhaps better-known writers like Mark Bowden (Blackhawk Down), but I think probably the best of them. It's worth tracking his previous stories down.

mrpippy• 7 years ago

William Langewiesche is a pilot himself, and has written many other articles over the last 2 decades detailing accident investigations (among other things). As much as the technical details, he often explains the organizational and political circumstances that are just as interesting. Some that stick with me: the late-90s ValuJet and EgyptAir crashes, and the Space Shuttle Columbia.

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/william-langewiesche

https://www.vanityfair.com/contributor/william-langewiesche

jgwil24• 7 years ago

He is my favorite author on the subject of aviation. Lots of great reads here. Two standouts for my money are "The Devil at 37,000 Feet" and "The Human Factor."

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/air_crash200901

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...

bklyn11201• 7 years ago

The Turn: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/langew/turn.ht...

Congo from the Cockpit: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/07/congo-flights-afr...

IAmEveryone• 7 years ago

“On the afternoon of last January 15, a flock of Canada geese flew about 3,000 feet above the Bronx in a loose echelon formation, tending to their own business as usual, with nothing special in mind. Much about those particular geese will never be known—for instance, where they came from, and where they were headed, and why—but it is likely that they were large, well fed, and self-satisfied. Evidently they were also fairly dumb. Their stupidity cannot be held against them, since they were just birds, after all, but geese are said to be adaptive creatures, and it is hard not to think that they should have had better sense than to go wandering through New York City’s skies”

[…] ”There was also an official collision with a fish, though the fish was in the grasp of an osprey at the time.”

jonathanberger• 7 years ago

His book The Outlaw Sea is also a great read if you enjoyed this article and might find nautical incidents equally interesting.

onychomys• 7 years ago

I'm about halfway through his book Sahara Unveiled, and it's also wonderful.

rezendi• 7 years ago

Strongly seconded.

aglionby• 7 years ago

This article reminded me of a long-form article I read on here (below) about a maritime disaster that was similarly well written. Not surprised that it turns out to have been written by Langewiesche as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16757343

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w...

SolaceQuantum• 7 years ago

Amazing prose here. The description of the death of the passengers, and the final moments of within the cockpit before the plane ran out of fuel, were chilling in their capacity to imply a peaceful bliss in the wake of hundreds of needless lost lives.

dillondoyle• 7 years ago

I had the same thought! Something about how the author describes the rush of air, the security and known 'homeliness' of the cockpit resonates with me.

Im sitting in airport lounge about to hop on a transatlantic. Dreaming of drifting to sleep up in the air and never waking up is a bit scary but also peaceful (I am not suicidal, thanks). travel is definitely an easy escape and repetitious in my life. I like routine and always book the same seat, same flight to get to Europe, etc. There's comfort there for me and I really identify the way the author describes the peacefulness of a nighttime long haul flight.

ziddoap• 7 years ago

There is a really well put together video[1] by a YouTuber, who goes by the name of Lemmino, covering this topic (among others).

I highly suggest it if this story interests you! And if you like his style, his Cicada 3301 video is also a fascinating watch.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd2KEHvK-q8

LandR• 7 years ago

That Cicada stuff is crazy!

warp• 7 years ago

I was reading about ADS-B, FlightAware and Aireon [1] earlier.

Apparently they've completed a network of satellites in January 2019 and can now monitor (ADS-B equipped) aircraft anywhere over earth?

Does anyone know more about how this works, does that mean we will never have a MH370-like situation again because nowadays aircraft can be tracked much better?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aireon

rtkwe4• 7 years ago

Depends on how it's set up precisely, ADS-B will still require power from somewhere. At some point in MH370's flight all the power systems were turned off for a bit so unless it's connected to it's own battery and ADS-B would still be disconnected.

saluki2• 7 years ago

y, it should be required for all airliners to have a tracking system that can not be disabled from inside the plane, and has a backup power system. For situations like this, hijackings, etc.

Also seems like streaming black box data and even cock pit recordings would already be something that is standard. As a backup/additional data to the physical black boxes. That could be accessed right away or even in real time.

stephen_g2• 7 years ago

The pilot can switch off the ADS-B transponder, so assuming that MH370 was intentional (which seems to be the best explanation), no, this could still happen.

NelsonMinar• 7 years ago

Langewiesche's a great author but this article doesn't add much in the way of new information from all the writing of the past three years. One off the record source about the pilot's mental state, that's about it. I happen to agree with his speculative conclusion, deliberate action by the pilot, but there's not really anything significant and new here to support it.

apendleton• 7 years ago

I'm not sure that was the point? I imagine given that you know enough to be able to make that claim that you've followed coverage of this incident pretty closely. As someone who hasn't, and mostly came at it from an "oh yeah, that thing, whatever ended up happening there?" perspective, I found this article to be an engaging and informative summary of what has happened in the years since and what we now know.

hurrdurr2• 7 years ago

Yeah, this was definitely the case for me. This article summarized all the things that I was wondering about over the years regarding this tragedy.

I also agree that the speculative conclusion reached at the end is the most likely scenario, e.g., pilot suicide with everyone on-board.

CathedralBorrow• 7 years ago

Not every article needs to add new information, some can provide value in summarizing the current information in a digestible way.

kelnos2• 7 years ago

I thought it was valuable. I'd on-and-off casually followed news of the disappearance for months afterward, but I don't think I'd read anything before that ties everything known together. The writing was also excellent and gripping.

fareesh• 7 years ago

I remember watching the American news media go crazy over this airplane for around 1 month every night.

The CNN anchor Don Lemon asked one of the 6 guests on his panel whether it was possible that the plane had been sucked into a black hole.

llao• 7 years ago

Dear god, you were not joking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVd7k1Uw6A

i386• 7 years ago

If I were the guest I would have said yes and seen how long I could keep that interview going

isostatic• 7 years ago

A small black hole would destroy our entire universe apparently

mehrdadn• 7 years ago

Can't help but wonder if he mixed up black holes with the colloquial "air pockets" or something.

catacombs• 7 years ago

It was actually Oceanic Flight 815 come to life.

airstrike• 7 years ago

I always thought Don Lemon was an idiot. Thanks for giving me the final proof I needed.

FWIW, I'm neither American nor a Republican. I just really think the guy is an idiot.

melling• 7 years ago

He also once blamed a rape victim:

https://time.com/3596105/don-lemon-bill-cosby-rape-myths/

PhantomGremlin• 7 years ago

I just really think the guy is an idiot.

I don't watch CNN and don't know Lemon. But here's a possible alternative explanation (hardly a defense):

Wikipedia says he graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism. He probably didn't pay much attention to science in high school, and almost certainly wasn't required to take any science classes in college.

So, he might not even understand science as simple as F=ma. In his defense I'd bet that if you surveyed the adult population, the majority couldn't tell you what F=ma means.

The above is a long way of saying that most journalists aren't literate in science. And, we know that black holes are "sexy". Many books have been written about them. Many movies made that feature them as key plot points.

So, why not ask about black holes as a possibility? It's as plausible an explanation as whatever it was that happened to that airplane in the Lost TV series of about 10 years ago.

Having said all that, yeah, the guy is probably an idiot. As are quite a few TV journalists.

writeslowly• 7 years ago

Back when this happened, me and a friend spent some time coming up with the most ridiculous conspiracy theories about how the plane disappeared , just for fun. The best one that I could invent with was that MH370 flew right next to another plane in order to appear as a single, really big plane on the radar.

A few weeks later my stupid conspiracy theory was all over the media thanks to a blogger who proposed the same thing (but not as a joke, apparently) [1][2][3]

[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-03-19/reality-check-could-m...

[2] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/03/5-not-so-crazy-malays...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26609687

mbostleman2• 7 years ago

>as soon as MH370 disappeared from secondary radar, it turned sharply to the southwest, flew back across the Malay Peninsula, and banked around the island of Penang. From there it flew northwest up the Strait of Malacca and out across the Andaman Sea, where it faded beyond radar range into obscurity. That part of the flight took more than an hour to accomplish and suggested that this was not a standard case of a hijacking.>>

What about this suggests that this was not a standard case of hijacking?

jgwil24• 7 years ago

From the article:

Was this a hijacking? A hijacking is the “third party” solution favored in the official report. It is the least painful explanation for anyone in authority that night. It has immense problems, however. The main one is that the cockpit door was fortified, electrically bolted, and surveilled by a video feed that the pilots could see. Also, less than two minutes passed between Zaharie’s casual “good night” to the Kuala Lumpur controller and the start of the diversion, with the attendant loss of the transponder signal. How would hijackers have known to make their move precisely during the handoff to Vietnamese air traffic control, and then gained access so quickly and smoothly that neither of the pilots had a chance to transmit a distress call? It is possible of course that the hijackers were known to the pilots—that they were invited into the cockpit—but even that does not explain the lack of a radio transmission, particularly during the hand-flown turn away from Beijing. Both of the control yokes had transmitter switches, within the merest finger reach, and some signal could have been sent in the moments before an attempted takeover. Furthermore, every one of the passengers and cabin-crew members has been investigated and cleared of suspicion by teams of Malaysian and Chinese investigators aided by the FBI. The quality of that police work is open to question, but it was thorough enough to have uncovered the identities of two Iranians who were traveling under false names with stolen passports—seeking, however, nothing more nefarious than political asylum in Germany. It is possible that stowaways—by definition unrecorded on the airplane’s manifest—had hidden in the equipment bay. If so, they would have had access to two circuit breakers that, if pulled, would have unbolted the cockpit door. But that scenario has problems, too. The bolts click loudly when they open—an unambiguous sound that would have been familiar to the pilots. The hijackers would then have had to open a galley-floor hatch from below, climb a short ladder, evade notice by the cabin crew, evade the surveillance video, and enter the cockpit before either of the pilots transmitted a distress call. It is unlikely that this could have happened, just as it is unlikely that a flight attendant held hostage could have used the door keypad to allow sudden entry without firing off a warning. Furthermore, what would the purpose be of a hijacking? Money? Politics? Publicity? An act of war? A terrorist attack? The intricate seven-hour profile of MH370’s deviation into oblivion fits none of these scenarios. And no one has claimed responsibility for the act. Anonymity is not consistent with any of these motives.

mbostleman2• 7 years ago

Yes, but none of that relates to the hour long series of turns that ended with the plane pointed towards the Indian Ocean. The quote I pasted referred to these events as not being indicative of a standard hijacking. Maybe it was just a poorly worded conclusion. There are definitely other reasons - primarily the anonymity and lack of any money changing hands.

markbnj2• 7 years ago

I enjoyed this write up by Langewiesche, but the one thing that bothered me was the credence lent to the depressurization event without disclosing what if any evidence there is that it happened? Is there some? In the article he simply says "circumstances suggest" by which I assume he means the climb to 40k feet.

kelnos2• 7 years ago

Shutting down most/all of the electrical systems on the plane suggests depressurization. Also it just makes sense to do so; a plane full of dead people can't engage in heroics to save the day. And he might have seen it as the humane thing to do, rather than leave people in fear for hours up to the actual crash.

But agreed that there's no hard evidence for this, or even for much of the entire story. Just a bunch of circumstantial evidence that suggests a lot.

Lazare2• 7 years ago

There's a fairly obvious argument here:

1) It seems pretty clear the plane took hours to crash

2) If the cabin was full of healthy, alive passengers, they could have done something during that time. (It's not a certainty, but it certainly seems plausible. Armored cockpit doors aren't meant to withstand dozens of super motivated people, including cabin crew, with literally hours of time on their hands.)

3) Apparently nothing was done, so apparently it wasn't full of healthy, alive passengers.

4) Although a number of things could have killed or incapacitated the passengers in the cabin, depressurisation is fast, reliable, under the control of the pilot, and doesn't require any elaborate assumptions about third parties or deus ex machina. There are other possibilities that have been discussed elsewhere (poisoned food, perhaps), but Occam's razor suggests depressurisation.

I think that's what the author was getting at with the "circumstances suggest". Given what is known about the plane, depressurisation is the most logical explanation for one of the mysteries.

tptacek2• 7 years ago

Depressurization also circumstantially connects with the otherwise unexplained climb to 40,000 feet, and with the disconnection and reconnection of the electrical system.

markbnj2• 7 years ago

I agree that it's a likely theory and fits much of what's known, but there can be other reasonable explanations for the things mentioned above. The aircraft was already assigned 35k feet, was a climb to 40k feet really necessary to ensure the passengers and crew would be incapacitated? Might he not have been trying to avoid traffic in established flight corridors, since the transponder was not operating and he wasn't talking to anyone? Anyway, to be clear I'm not challenging the overall conclusion. It's the best theory I personally have heard, but I am also not an expert on any of this. I just felt like the article didn't make it clear enough that the depressurization event was complete conjecture.

franzb• 7 years ago

By the same author, one of the most terrifying story I've ever come across:

A Sea Story https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-s...

garmaine• 7 years ago

Thanks for that, now I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight.

ablation• 7 years ago

Langewiesche is an excellent writer and journalist. The Outlaw Sea is a brilliant compilation of these articles.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?

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