Doomed to Fail - Ep 259: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: MH370

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

We're back with another plane crash! This one is a doozy and a mystery, did the captain plan this? Where was the plane for 6 hours, and where is it now? We'll talk about mental health, flying over the ocean, and how scary the ocean is in general!  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans. And we are recording in progress. Hi, Taylor. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I brought a craft to this, to this event. Good. That's a good move. I recently bought my first Lou Bowl. Wait, to crochet? Well, technically I got it for Rachel, but then she was like, you should crochet yourself. I was like, okay.

I'm excited. I've been taking a break because my arm hurts so freaking bad. I think I have tennis elbow from crocheting. That's intense. That's intense. You're really committed to your craft. I am. I am. Do you want to introduce us? Yes, let's get into it. Hello, welcome to Dumes to Fail. We bring you historical disasters and failures, and I am Taylor joined by Fars. I am here, and I'm going to tell you a Taylor. Taylor. I'm excited. I am. I'm nervous.

Part of the reason, by about the crap, brought this craft. Today, we are going to cover one of the most mysterious disasters in aviation history.

We're covering Malaysian airline flight 370, which is MH370 for short. I am fully aware that this topic has been covered

to death, but I also hear my AI buddies have been telling me that, The SEO for an episode of on MH370s great. So that's what we're doing. We're going to go through it.

We're trying to get people's attention. I really like the ones that we do that are very niche and never heard of. But once you've listened to one, then you can go back. You have a ton of episodes. This is 259. Fun fact, when I'm trying to find topics to research, I deliberately search for topics that are not covered anywhere else because I want to learn something new. And I learned that that is actually the worst way to reach an audience.

So we're pivoting that. We're pivoting and just to grab your attention, but I do want you to go back and look at other cool stuff that we've done. Please. I like the random weird stuff that we've done. Let's work great at. But we're also going to be good at this because this was a very interesting topic. It is very scary.

This gave me the level of fear I have when I think of the deep ocean in a totally different way, like above the ocean. That's exactly. exactly where my imagination went when you said that. Because I was like, fear of the ocean, plane crash. Oh my God, you're above the ocean. There's nothing there. And it's so big that you can't find a plane in it.

That's how big the fucking ocean is, which we have talked about in reference to submarines. Yeah. We're going to go through what we know happened, what we think happened. And then also talk through why things like this happen. Maybe not necessarily. We'll kind of know what the why. is we actually reference it in our German era episode but the fact that this actually happens on a more frequent cadence than I ever would have assumed so we're going to discuss that as well and discuss

the why it's not talked about more so than anything else so we're going to go out and get into it and I'm going to call out several YouTubers here because they do phenomenal work. YouTube is kind of some of these channels on YouTube are replacing like mainstream media in terms of how incredible they are of recreating things and detailing events. The first one to call out is a YouTube channel called Mentor Pilot. The tour of Mentor is Tour, T-O-U-R. And it's hosted by an active Boeing 737, a pilot who is also a flight instructor. His name is Petter Hornfeld.

He's Norwegian or some sort of Scandinavian. So there's a lot of dots over his name. there's another one that I've mentioned to you before, Taylor, called Green Dot Aviation. And they do incredible. Their recreations were fantastic. So take a look. Also, both of these teams go into very in-depth inside baseball elements of, like, how planes are operated, which fuses you can pull to do what. It gets super, super in the weeds.

And it's great for YouTube, because you need to be able to visualize it. And it's not so good for a podcasting. So I'm going to not go super into the inside baseball pieces of like he flipped this fuse and then pulled this breaker because it's just not going to be that compelling. So we'll start off of what we actually know happens. So we're going to start off with the detail of what the aircraft was. It was a triple 7200 ER, the ER, I looked up, stands for extended range. And at max takeoff fuel, it has about 8100 miles worth of fuel. can take onboard before having a stop.

The engines were Rolls-Royce Trent 892 engines, which are incredibly reliable. All jet engines are incredibly reliable, but this one particularly has a very high reliability rate. The reason I'm bringing that up is just to frame the fact that this was not a technical failure that could have caused what we're discussing here. Like it couldn't have been.

It could not have been. I mean, I guess anything's possible, but the feasibility of it, I mean, it's very low. The likelihood is very low. Got it. So, MH370 was bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and it carried on board a total of 239 people. 227 of those were passengers, 12 were crew. And if you're like me, you don't know what part of the country this is or the world this is. And so I'm going to actually spell out, like, the routes in a way that hopefully,

in a non-visual format makes sense. On March 8th, 2014, at 1242 a.m., Malaysian Times, so this is the red eye. The plane took off with Captain Zahari Shah and First Officer Farouk Hamid at the helm. For context, the captain is the person in charge. The first officer is there to basically just help the captain, manage communications, fly the plane, things like that.

there's a vast experience discrepancy between the captain here and the first officer the captain is 53 years old with 18,000 flight hours the first officer is 27 years old and this flight was part of his training flight for the triple seven so very different 53 27 18,000 hours relatively new to the jet. So there's seven minutes from when they are at cruising altitude that is really, really consequential. Cruising takeoff and getting up to cruising altitude was totally routine and normal. You have seven minutes here that are incredibly, incredibly relevant. The first is the fact that there was a final A-car's transmission that was made seven minutes into the flight.

this is a text message that is sent from the plane to ground control to let them know what the status of the flight is. It says things like engine speed, status messages, things of that nature. And this is a pre-programmed thing. Right, that's automatically. You're not like automatic. It's automatic. On your phone with your thumbs. Exactly.

Got it. Then about 12 minutes later, you have the final voice transmission. So this was the handoff that was supposed to have. happened from Kuala Lumpur's area control to Ho Chi Minh area control. And that was a simple good night, Malaysian 370. It was calm. It was unremarkable. Nobody clocked anything arrived. About two minutes later, what's called an S mode or sorry, a mode S transponder stops working. And that's important because it really should never stop working because the mode S transponder is what tells everything around you that you are there in their airspace. So other planes can

note that you're there, ground control can note that you're there, all that very important information is conveyed via the mode S transponder. I'm going to kind of articulate how this plays out. So north of Kuala Lumpur is Vietnam. So south of Vietnam is Kuala Lumpur. on the tip of Vietnam is Ho Chi Minh. There's a sea. Yes, there's a sea between the two or in between the two is the Gulf of Thailand. In the middle of that space is a thing called Igari. I mean, there's a waypoint in any situation where you're navigating a plane,

but they're really critical in over water transportation. It's a single waypoint they can always count on to be there as a lat-long beacon. Got, is anybody in it? Is it just like an antenna? Yeah, I don't know if it's an antenna necessarily, but there's nobody in it. It's just a transponder. Got it. So the whole point of it is you're supposed to catch Igari, so you know you're going the right

direction, and then that routes you up to the next area of control, which in this case is Ho Chi Men. So when the plane vanished off civilian radar, both sides of air traffic control assumed, okay, well, that makes sense. If you're on the Ho Chi Minh side, you're like, oh, they're still on Qualimport control. They haven't handed off yet. If you're on Qualimpor side, you're like, oh, they just handed off to Ho Chi Min. Right. So no one's like looking for them.

Right, right. Except it wasn't invisible to everyone. The military doesn't rely on transponders because that would be a terrible way to defend a country because you need to know, even if the other person's not indicating they're coming inbound, that they're there. What the Malaysian military saw was that the plane took a sharp left turn when it hit waypointigari. So it was supposed to continue further north after hitting that waypoint up to Ho Chi Men. what they tracked is that it literally just did it wasn't so much a U-turn as it was a V back towards the Malaysian Peninsula

and it did that really soon is what you're saying. Very fast, very fast, yeah, sure. We haven't even had a drink yet. Like, I mean, like soon in the flight. It was about an hour into the flight. Okay, so we've had like one drink. Well, probably not even that

because at that point, it would have been around 1.45 a.m. So, again, it was a red eye. So most people were there sleeping. Okay, well, I just don't feel like you're not really supporting my ability to drink on an airplane, but fine. In this case, Taylor would be double-fisting. 100%. If they don't give me two, you would order one, and then I'd like take it and then it'd be holding. What's really interesting about this, and these details were kind of put together by investigators,

because the Malaysian military never released their actual data. What they concluded is that the flight, as it was going back, the direction across the Malaysian Peninsula, was literally straddling the Malaysian and Thai borders. Yeah, between both. And so. Like almost like it was on purpose. Well, it was deliberately on purpose. And part of the logic behind that meant I think it was green pilot aviation called out is that. that when it's straddling both boundaries, then the Thai side can look at that, the military

tie can look at that and say, it's probably just a Malaysian aircraft that veered a little bit more in our direction than not. But the same could be set on the other side with the Malaysian military. 100%. Yeah. I know what you're saying. So the final point which the military tracked the plane to was roughly 219 miles north of Guilompor, near city called Penang. And so the only reason I'm calling that out is that is the furthest tip before you kind of enter into open water. And it was, again, more like a V. So 219 miles, not that much distance, maybe a 30-minute flight for an airplane or an hour flight for an airplane.

But that's where it ended up. After that, no radar anywhere ever saw the plane again. Wow. some of this stuff getting a little bit slightly into inside baseball but I'm going to explain it quite a bit because it's really relevant

to the rest of the story is that every plane has a system in it called an in Marsat satellite so typically what that does is this is a transmission line from the plane automatically to a satellite

that will send you things like altitude speed all that good stuff so that air traffic control or anybody you needs to later on can actually track this information later. And if you're wondering why they need this, when they have that ACAR system I mentioned earlier that has text messaging, this was designed for ocean crossings where texting isn't going to work. That's the point of it. So just to say out loud, you are telling the story in the frame that you know what happened in your 100% sure of what the reason is?

this part is just factual of like what was detected and also how the plane was configured and then we're going to get into what we actually what experts think actually happened cool so a key thing about the in marsat satellite is that Malaysia Airlines subscribe to the cheapest tier of in Marsat it's called classic arrow and that interestingly enough does not include position reporting. So you have airspeed, engine speed, but not position, like Latlong in the GPS. When the ground in the planes in Marsat system exchanged, those automatic handshakes, none of the coordinates of the plane were actually being exchanged.

But in Marsat logs two things that are going to be kind of interesting when that handshake does happen in this context. So one is a thing called burst timing offset, DTO, which is how long the round trip takes from the plane to the satellite and then back down to the ground. So that can give you like a very, very rough approximation of how far that transmission had to travel. So that's one important piece. The other was called a burst frequency offset or BFO. And I had a hard time to understand this. I literally asked chat to BT to explain it to me like I'm a child.

And what it basically said was imagine you're riding your bike and your friend is riding his bike, but they're going the other direction and you have a walkie-talkie. We need to be on the same channel. But if you go really, really fast, then you might waver a little bit off that channel. And so when you think about a plane going really fast, when it transmits that data back down,

you need to account for the fact that it also probably moved further away from in space before that message was actually received. That's what those two mean, and even that I don't actually still totally understand. understand it. So another question I have for you is, can we have do this via satellites? Well, that's what the EnMarsat system was supposed to do, was, so let me actually answer that question. Actually, I'll answer this part of the question right now, which is, I think what you're asking is, can't like spy satellites or Google have picked up on this? Okay.

I don't know if the answer to that question is yes or even if it is yes, whether that could ever be revealed given the means in which that data would be collected. What I will say is that this is such an absolute anomaly that these two things I mentioned, these two values, the burst frequency offset and the burst timing offset, they were never designed to track where an airplane is in space and time. They never had been before and they never will be again because the amount. of things you would have to know to turn off within a plane to disappear is beyond the pale. They only realize that these two values could provide any sort of indication of where the plane went after the plane had already disappeared. So they were never designed for this use case. Because in any other situation, a plane is tracked.

Yeah. The documented sequence here is that on the InMarsat side of things, was that the satellite terminal logs on, having been off the network, and the satellite did Texas log on request, and that was kind of how these little bursts ended up happening. What's really important is that you can't track these things with any degree of precision, because again, you're doing a lot of weird, rough math. Because you don't know, you literally don't know what the speed of the airplane is because it's been disabled.

You don't know the direction it's going. It's been disabled. You don't know any of this. all you know is that this handshake occurred and the handshake took this much time to get from the plane to the satellite and from the satellite back down to the ground. So what ends up happening is that investigators use this arc methodology. But like, okay, the handshake happened here. So this strip is like one of the arcs where the handshake happened. Then it happens again later on, so on and so forth, down the globe, right?

And in total there are seven arts, which means that there were seven handshakes that they know of for sure before it stopped doing any handshakes. Right. And it stopped doing handshakes because that the handshake was turned off. It stopped doing the handshake as a plane disappeared. Right. Because the plane would have crashed at that point. There would have been no ability for it to do a handshake. Got it.

So they couldn't, no one could turn off the handshake ability. That's just if it just doesn't exist anymore. So we don't know for sure what happened. One part of it is that as part of the mechanism of shutting off parts of the plane, auxiliary power had to get deployed. The auxiliary power is tied to NMarsat. And so what that means is like a RAM air fan is dropped underneath the plane. And that could powered on enough for a handshake, but not enough to transmit information.

What I mentioned earlier, there's seven arcs. That's a critical piece because that's a lot. last place in time you can possibly track the airplane too so we're gonna we're gonna talk about that quite a bit here i did some questioning online of like what is what is an arc in this context what could it possibly represent in terms of space and what it can represent each of these arcs can represent roughly a 12 mile wide patch that is 16,800 miles long Oh my God. Right.

So it doesn't really pinpoint much. There's a lot of wiggle room here in terms of like where this plane could have landed. And there's also like, you know, this is obviously obvious, but like another dimension to this because it goes under the water. There's that too. You know, it's like it's not just, oh, it's this, it's landed in this piece of land. It could go. It's out of the ocean. When it breaks down, trade whatever they're called, currents can grab the piece of the plane move it.

So, yeah, that's also a huge factor. Yeah. So 16 months after the plane disappears, in July of 2015, a flapron, which is like the back part of the wing, it washes ashore on Reunion Island and the Indian Ocean. And the serial numbers track back to this plane. over the following years, about 40 pieces of debris, well, possible debris. We don't know for sure, not all of them anyways. There were cataloged from Union Island to Mozambique, to Madagascar,

to Mauritius, to Tanzania and South Africa. And I went and looked at those places on a map. And yes, they are squarely like all regions that border the Indian Ocean. So that narrowed it down to the plane absolutely went down to Indian Ocean. Also, it's worth noting that, like, not we don't. know for sure all these pieces, all these 40 pieces are from MH370, but hopefully it is because otherwise a bunch of plants are

crashed the ocean. Right. I mean also, I'm surprised that things just float. Yeah. They actually found one of the more eerie parts of it is they found this, you know that plastic piece that goes around the TV casing on the back seat? They found

one of those. I hate that. I know. I know. I kept looking at that. I was like somebody was looking at that probably. So, anyways, we're now at the search phase. We still don't know exactly what happened. We're the search phase. We're looking at from 2014 to 2017 where an Australian-led search crew searched roughly 46,000 square miles of the seabed, found nothing. Then you go to 2018, a company called Ocean Infinity searches around 15,500 square miles of a different part of the seabed, again, finds nothing,

all within the seven arc. March 25th, or sorry, March, March of 20, March of 20, 2025 through January of 2026, Ocean Infinity returns under a no-fee, no-fine-no-fee contract with the Malaysian government for $70 million if they can actually find the wreckage. They can't. They actually, in that case, only did about half their search. They covered about 9,300 square miles before the ocean got too bad, too rough, and they had to call it off. And nothing was found. The Malaysian government has tried doing this again many, many times. They actually try to get ocean affinity out there again, and they said their vessels that were dispersed elsewhere, and they couldn't do it.

But I assume it's also because it's a little futile. Yeah, it's hopeless. Yeah. The Malaysian investigation at MH370 was released on July of 2018, and that's kind of the closest thing we have to authoritative document on this. Their conclusions were simply the aircraft diverted from its flight path. the transponder signals ceased for reasons that could not be established. The subsequent turns were consistent with manual control inputs, i.e., this was not a system failure, and this was not autopilot. There was no evidence of mechanical fire, failure, or structural problems in the maintenance records of the plane.

The team could not determine the cause of disappearance and could not exclude unlawful interference by a third party, which is the last part we're going to hone in on. So one side quest here that the media harped on for the for a long time in the first few weeks of this is that they did discover in the manifest. There were two Iranian men on the plane who were on there with stolen passports. It was Italian and Australian passports. And there was a lot made out of that. Ultimately, the investigator is determined these guys were just seeking asylum. They were trying to flee Iran. That was basically what was going on there.

So here's what we think happened. This is a stuff that most people tend to agree on, and it's kind of four specific details. One, the transponder stopped because of human action. It would not have stopped on its own because it's also strange it happened to stop at the most advantageous time for disappearance of the plane to have happened, meaning when they would have made that transition from Faw Lumpur to Ho Chi Men. That's one. two, the aircraft turned back and flew a deliberate track for at least an hour under control. Because like I said, it straddled the line between Thailand and Malaysia very deliberately. It couldn't have just like floated on that line.

To the point I mentioned earlier, too, at Igari, it wasn't a U-turn. It was a V-turn. It was a sharp, sharp turn that they did. The third point is that it flew south. for roughly six hours, and it had to have come down in the Indian Ocean, somewhere around that seventh arc, again, 12 miles wide, 16,800 feet across. And the last point being that it had to have come down because it ran out of fuel, because knowing the capacity of that ER, that's what the likely outcome was.

Right. So there are some things that support the theory around the fact that there is, this was most likely a murder suicide by the captain. And why we conclude that several points. The timing of ATC handoff is the single best moment for the plane to disappear. We mentioned that earlier. And you have a captain who is incredibly experienced in how the systems work between this handoff from Ho Chi men or Wall and Porta Ho Chi Men. The transponder and the A-Carza texting thing, we know that that was deliberately silenced. The turns were manual inputs,

and you have the simulator, which feels like a smoking gun. Yes. So, in 2016, roughly two years after the flight goes down, New York Magazine, they worked off of a confidential Malaysian police document that reported that the FBI had recovered six deleted data points from a Microsoft flight simulator

that was on the captain's hard drive. they recovered those deleted sessions and they found that it contained a route northwest up what's called the malacca strait and then south into the southern indian ocean later forensics on the deleted data found that it had happened about five weeks before that flight so five weeks before this flight the captain had kind of like done this route that we think he did but there's some arguments against it so one of those arguments is there's no evidence this guy was suicidal. His family doesn't say he was suicidal. They have no indications of that. His family tends to think that he's being scapegoated. The ATSB's own careful phrasing about the flight simulator data was, quote, the possibility of planning, but not a plan.

So this could have been a thing, but it could not have been. Right, because you're allowed to, like, fuck around on your flight simulator. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. One thing that they also noted is that. on the flight simulation session that they actually recovered, they found that the fuel loading and departure procedures that we think he undertook here were also consistent with someone who's going from Kuala Lumpur to Jetta, and the captain was on a route to go to Jetta before

the accident actually happened. And I looked this up, you would actually fly across the Indian Ocean to get to Jetta. So, like, there's some things going against it, against this theory as well. Right, because he would have, like, he was already doing it. Maybe he was just actually practicing. Right. Had he ever done that before? Like that route before? This isn't like the first.

He'd done the route before. A flight is on that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that also seems kind of compelling against the captain having done this is that in every other situation where a pilot has killed his plane. Yeah. Thank you. Passengers.

That was the deliberate action that took like a second to execute. It was not like a six hour long thing, right? Because that is a weird. That's really creepy. Six hours. Yes. It is very weird and very creepy. And I want to find it.

I remember this thing from the 90s where there was a TV show where the aliens knew the world was going to end. So they interfered on a bunch of planes intercepted them and took people out of the planes by hooking up the plane to. a UFO and then saving them and then every and then they put like fake people in the planes so there all these planes crashing but really they're being rescued by UFOs I'm going to put that into the internet and see what that is but in that that that gave me that weird feeling where you're just like hovering over the ocean or that one plane where that one guy was walking around in it by himself do you remember that plane crash I happen to talk about that okay cool because like that's that's such

a weird six hours such a long time to be alone on an airplane so So, yeah. Because we're assuming everybody is dead or can't breathe. I'm going to get into that. Okay. So there's a second hypothesis, which is there's a catastrophic event that happened on board that turned this into a ghost flight. Because, again, we still have the seven arcs.

We still have the handshake. So we know the thing was flying for that period of time. A possibility here is that a fire or some rapid decompression occurred that incapacity at everyone and the thing just, on autopilot until its fuel was depleted and then it just crashed. And to your point, this actually has happened before. So in 2005, Helios Flight 522 had the cabin oxygen set to manual rather than automatic. And because of just the Swiss cheese effect, multiple checks missed this.

And eventually the plane flew to cruising altitude with no radio communication from the cockpit. Greek fighter jets were dispatched, and they went up to the side of this plane, and they saw the captain and the first officer had been slumped over the controls, but there was a woman, a flight attendant, who had gotten the bottled oxygen, realizing what was happening. It was waving at them, like, trying to get the attention. This is all witness. The fighter jet pilots witnessed all this.

And then they couldn't do anything. I mean, there's something to instruct her on. She's not going to land a plane on her own at that point. and so the plane just crashed. But like that situation where one person was alive and walking around these bodies wearing an oxygen, terrifying, terrifying, stuff. Yeah.

The theories that support this are that it accounts for the long, straight, southern flight, the total absence of communication for six hours and the presumed rapid descent. The last presumption, the rapid descent part, comes to the fact that all the debris that was recovered indicated that the plane did not glide to the ground. Like this was not a ditching attempt where he was safely trying to place to play on the ground.

This was a catastrophic crash because all the broken up pieces indicate that. The things that work against that theory, it does not account for the deliberate turn back across Peninsula because we do know that he did that. And the navigation up the Malacca Strait or the SACOM power interruption and the reboot that happened causing the first arc in the handshake to occur within Marsat. Okay. So in this hypothetical, if a hypoxia situation had occurred, it could have only happened after all that happened, which then you'd say, why would that happen? Why would that ever happen in the first place?

Right, exactly. Again, callback. Going back to episode 190 entitled Suicidal Pilots, German Wings Flight 9525, we've seen something like this before. that was that was not done intentionally to hide the disappearance of the plane like we have in this situation but in that situation again a pilot decided that he was going to die by suicide take the plane with him and ended up killing 150 people when he flew into the Swiss Alps or sorry the French Alps and here's a part that's gross too this happens this has happened quite a bit it happened in 1984 97, 99, 2013, 2014-15, 2022. 2022.

and 2025. But here's why I'm bringing this up now is because we don't know a lot of this stuff. The reason we don't know a lot of this stuff is because a lot of times in countries where this happens, they don't want to say that's what happened. That's what I was going to ask.

I was like, where is this happening? Yeah, investigators assume this is what's happening, but they can't prove it in the country that's responsible for the investigation, won't confirm it. And so I have a whole listing of all. all these where it's all just disputed claims. And because they're disputed, nobody's going to go out there and say this is actually happening with a some degree of frequency. The most recent was June of 2025

with Air India 171. You might remember this one. This is where the one guy survived. Yes, he was walking down the streets. Right. So that was in that situation, what ended up having, that was a Boeing 787. That crashed 32 seconds after takeoff. And it flew into, a hostel. Again, 241 out of 242 people aboard died. And then 19 others on the on the ground. The report for that said that seconds after liftoff, both engine fuel control switches moved from run to cut off. So somebody reached over and flipped the switch from get fuel and put their hand off. The CV. The CV, the cockpit voice recorder recorded a pilot asking the

other why he moved the switch and he replied that he had it but he did obviously and he did and he did there was a Wall Street Journal report from investigators who like looked at the report and was like this could only happen if it was done

intentionally like it's almost inconceivable for not to be done intentionally so here are the likely theories of what happened to MH370 and I'm piecing this together from experts from various different parts because nobody's saying this conclusively, right? So someone's coming from other triple seven pilots

or friends of the captain, there's investigators, all that kind of coming together. So the theory is the captain sends the first officer out of the cockpit to run an errand. There was a quote from the Atlantic from a friend of the captain who said, yeah, this guy was, he was also a triple seven pilot. He says this guy was super seasoned

and the first officer was super junior. He could have told him to go get a coffee and he would have ran out the door immediately and done that for him. The captain then presumably locked the door to the cockpit. Green Dot Aviation is the one that called this out. The captain then deliberately depressurized the plane to incapacitate everyone. This was something said by a guy named Larry Vance, who's an air crash investigator as part of a panel he did for 60 minutes. Go ahead. I just want to say that I really hope that people were just passed out.

That's the way to go. That's presumably actually what happened. That's the part that I definitely hope is true that you're just like, oh, I'm falling asleep on this red eye, and then you just never wake up and like, you're fine. You're not fine because you're dead, but like you don't know what's happening. Yeah, no. The captain could manipulate the pressurization valves manually, meaning the passenger's mass, they would only get 20 minutes of,

air supply. The tanks for the captain are different. The cockpit is different. And so he could have oxygen for hours without running out. So he could turn it off for the whole plane, put his mask on. Everybody behind him is dead within

10 minutes at most. Right. And then he can refreshize the plane and he's fine. What's interesting is we know for a fact that the crew only oxygen tank was topped off that morning, which was called out by another triple seven captain saying that's really weird because from what we found at the logs,

the tank wasn't low enough to require a top off. It wasn't at that stage where it needed a top off. So this would be something that you would never call for on your own. Like this would just like this would not be a normal part of service doing. So who asked for that, the captain or who didn't know? The captain. The cabin was repressurized after he was certain the crew was dead and out of oxygen. and the flight just carried on with 200 plus dead bodies behind him in the plane.

That's a really, really creepy part. That also comes from Larry Vance, the air crash investigator. Then the active pilot at the control, in this case, presumably the captain, is there just flying the plane without his mask on for six hours until the fuel is exhausted and it crashes shortly after that seventh handshade, or the, the seventh archa handshake occurs. That's the presumed theory of how all this kind of came together. Again, no idea where this thing actually hit the water. It's never been found. And I would presume that at this point it would never would get found.

And then again, can you remind me during those six hours, no one was looking for them? Or had they already been, like, alerted? I don't know that. They had to have been alerted, right? I actually don't know. Yeah, I didn't figure that part out. I should have.

That would have been in good detail because at some point, Ho Chi men must have been like, we don't know where this plane is. Right. Like we should expect them to check in or we should be able to see it somehow. One thing to note is from a geography perspective, that part of the peninsula from Igari waypoint

that he crossed over to get to Penang was pretty down. like it wasn't that much distance and it's also worth noting that not a lot of countries like we're kind of used to this in the US like if someone enters US airspace like fighter jets are on them immediately right that's what I assume

but that's not the case in a lot of other parts of the country especially parts that are not like wealthy I guess and in when Malaysia saw it like this was not like a scramble the jets let's go figure out what's going on this plane and again this guy being very experienced as a Malaysian pilot would have known these details.

They were like, there's budgets to consider. And they're like, we're not going to scramble the planes for no reason. And so they let it kind of go along its way. I would assume by the time Ho Chi Men was like, there's something bad happening. He was probably already off the peninsula and on his, like on the, over the Indian Ocean. Yeah.

So that's the theory. That's what the work in theory is. I was, as I was researched this, I was like, look, if this guy was that smart that he knew all the ways that you could make a plane disappear with all the satellites tracking it and all that stuff going on. And we're looking at the seventh arc and we searched the seventh arc for somewhere around 75,000 square miles of seabed. What's to say that maybe like he didn't turn around and go backwards towards the sixth arc, you know? Mm-hmm. Why would he do that? I mean, if the whole point was to hide the plane and to hide what he did,

then maybe he knew that the seventh arc would hit. And he would say, okay, let's turn this around because they're going to assume I'm somewhere at the seventh arc or past the seventh arc, but not behind the seventh arc. So why don't I go back to the sixth one? Right. So he knew where to hide at the sky, if possible. Well, hide where it would have made impact. What do you mean?

I mean, if he can crash anywhere. Because if they're tracking it from, so if the plane only had, if the plane only was able to track, if we're only able to track the plane's handshake from the first arc, then you would know that it crashed

somewhere around the first arc. But then in the second arc, so there's another handshake, then there's a third, then a fourth, then a sixth, then a seventh. That's why the presumption is that the plane is, somewhere under the ocean around the seventh arc or shortly past the seventh arc.

But if you're trying to actually do this deliberately in a way that hides what you were doing, I don't know. Maybe you know your fuel is exhausted. You know that this is the last handshake you're ever going to have within Marsat. Maybe you just turn the plane around and go towards a sixth arc because you're really trying to hide what you did and make sure that you throw them off the scent. Yeah. Because the presumption wouldn't be that somebody would do that, right?

The presumption would be you just keep going until the fuel exhaust, then you crash where you crash. Right, that like something would happen. What do you think, what do you think happened? I think he did it. I think the captain did it. I think it's really creepy. I think you'd have to have like some really, really dark desires to want to do that because the whole ghost flight thing of like all these dead people behind you. It's like, man, that's really eerie.

And that happens so fast, you know? So, like, all of a sudden, everyone's dead and you can't take it back. Yeah, you can't take it back. And, I mean, that was one thing I also researched as part of this, is like they only put about 20 minutes of oxygen in those tanks for the pastures, because if depressurization happens, that's, like, an immediate drop level. Like, that's, like, you don't think, you don't do anything before you drop. as far down as

people, oxygen happens because otherwise you're all dead anyways. So anyways, those are the theories, those are the counter theories

and we are now at year 12, still don't have anything more than theories, still do not have more than those 40 pieces of the plane, and we'll see.

I'm really impressed that like any pieces of any plane got anywhere. I would assume that upon impact, a lot of it just broke up. Yeah, and it's like, and I mean, it also like moves so quickly, you know, so it's not like, unless, like, I'm thinking like, if part of it is like on the floor of the ocean, like the Titanic, you know, or I'm thinking of it like is it exploded into a million pieces, which is probably the case. And then as soon as those pieces hit the ocean, they're going to go miles apart.

Like, it's going to be crazy. Did anyone ever hear anything? Mm-mm. That's interesting. Because I feel like you would hear that boom. in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I don't know. I mean, I don't know.

I feel like there's tons of trackers and stuff. You know, I don't know. That's what I feel like a satellite would have picked up on or something. Yeah, I assume there's things that the government's around there or the U.S. government know, but you can't just can't reveal it. It's like the time they let the world think that the Titan was still on the bottom of the ocean when it actually imploded. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's terrible.

Those poor people. But to your point, the one saving grace is a lot of those people, I mean, would have been asleep when their oxygen was cut off. And by the time your oxygen is cut off, you're passed out and you just die. And then, yeah, you don't know what's happening. So that's the one saving grace, I would say. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I remember my cousin, Lindsay, was in Japan when that happened.

And she came to L.A. and she flew Malaysian Airlines a couple weeks after. And she was like, it was great. I had like three rows to myself because no one else wanted to fly Malaysian Airlines. She was my ticket was $4 and I had a million rows to myself and it was great. There's a silver lining in every disaster, right? Oh, that's terrible. I also like, I mean, obviously I watched the documentary and like there was like that, like maybe they were accidentally bombed.

Did you think about that at all? No, none of those. Like, again, so many of the. these are competing theories. And the governments at stake don't want to say too much because they don't want the blame to land on them. And so anybody saying the plane got bombed, it's so completely not provable because no country would ever say they did.

We didn't have bombs pointing at you when like we did, you know, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. But anywho, that is what I got. I would love to hear from folks who, this is one of those things that I think it's so intriguing that a lot of folks are tracking for or seen a lot of documentaries about it.

If you have ideas or thoughts, we'd love to hear from you again at doom to phelpot at gmail.com. Tell us what you think, and we'd love to read it out on the air. Yeah. Documentaries are so sad too because you meet the families and they're like,

this is terrible. I fast forward those parts. Honestly, it's so sad. Like there's like a dad who lost his wife and a couple sons. Ugh, oof. Yeah. Terrible. Terrible. And then we also talked about, I'm sorry, I know you finished, but I have another thought.

We also talked about in the German wings thing that like, if a pilot needs to see a psychiatrist, they usually don't because they can get put on like medical leave and they're probably not going to come back. So they just don't. So I included a piece on that in this that I deleted later because we covered it so extensively in the German air. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's a huge, huge piece of it as well. Yeah. That is scary. Do you have any list for Mail Force? Nope, nothing new, but please send us an email.

Like Far said, Dumb to FailPod at gmail.com. Let us know what you want to hear. Find us on the socials. We have lots of playing crash episodes, so this is one of many. Tell your friends. Maybe that's playing crashes. Who doesn't? Okay, bye.

Thanks, Taylor. Thank you. Bye, all. You know, You know, Thank you.