RedHanded - Episode 337 - MH370: "Good Night, Malaysia Three Seven Zero”

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

On the 8th March 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was making a routine red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, when it seemingly vanished in the clouds. The 175-tonne Boeing 777 – and all 239 people on board – have never been seen again. And 10 years on, there are still no solid answers as to what happened. In this episode, we’ll take you through the facts and theories behind what remains the greatest mystery in the history of aviation. Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus ContentFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramXVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comYouTubeRedHandedSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile. Check out her place in the Hamptons. Huh, fancy. She's a big carbon tax supporter, yeah? Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here.

She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party. Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM,

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A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti. I'm Hannah. And welcome to a very exciting episode of Red Hounded that I've been wanting to cover for years. Because in this digital day and age, the idea that a single person could disappear and go off the grid forever feels near impossible. We recently did the Maura Murray case and I think, you know, there is that obsession with individual people going missing because we're like, how? How is that possible? How could this person just disappear off the face of the earth and we have no idea? Hell, even permanently deleting your internet search history isn't even possible.

Your most personal and embarrassing Google searches will long outlive you, I'm sorry to tell you. Whether you think you've deleted them from your browser or whether you thought you were really smart and used incognito mode because there's a little man with a trench coat and a microscope and a, what's not a microscope? Magnifying glass. A little trench coat and a magnifying glass convincing you that it's safe. We're constantly being tracked and it's all up there in the cloud or whatever. So how could a whole entire 175 ton, 160 million pound airplane just go missing mid-air? And we're not talking about Amelia Earhart's own past-o-case today.

This month is the 10-year anniversary of the strangest mystery in aviation history. The disappearance of flight MH370 and all 239 people on board. So given that it is the anniversary this year, we thought it was time that we took a little look. It was almost midnight on the 7th of March 2014 when the Red Eye flight MH370 to Beijing began boarding. Tired business people, tourists, exhausted parents and their bored children marched forward step by step in the queue at gates C1 to C3 at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. By the time all 227 passengers and 12 crew members were on board and MH370 was set to take off, it was 20 to 1 in the morning. The journey from Malaysia to Beijing was a short one, expected to take no more than six hours. Hence the term red-eye.

It's a late-night flight, but not long enough for passengers to get any meaningful sleep. I did not know that. I just thought red-eye meant night-time plane. Same. I just thought, yeah, it's just a red red eye because your eyes will be red because you're asleep and then you'll wake up and drink some horrible coffee that they give you honestly i have lesson number one that i have learned when i'm getting off a plane do not take the coffee that they give you because all that's happened to me in the past is i've taken the coffee that they've given me about oh thank you yum yum yum and i get off off and i'm standing in security and i look incredibly shifty but it's because i'm tired and the coffee has made

me agitated and then security are like what's wrong with this girl and your passport doesn't work and my passport doesn't fucking work i have looked into it though i will have it replaced before our secret thing at the end okay okay well, because it's stressful. Anyway, within 20 minutes of takeoff, the Boeing 777 reached its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Everything was going smoothly. The passengers were settled in, seatbelt signs were turned off, and cabin crew were serving the in-flight meals. 20 minutes after this, MH370 left Malaysian airspace. And as is routine, the pilot told air traffic control, good night Malaysia 370. His voice sounded calm, but everything that happened in the following 15 minutes after this message was broadcast was anything but. The Boeing 777 and all 239 people on board vanished from the radar screens of both Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic controllers, who were meant to register MH370's entry into their jurisdiction.

At 6.30am, the scheduled landing time, flight MH370 delayed appeared on the message boards in Beijing airport. The families and friends of the 227 passengers stood waiting for their loved ones at arrivals, with no idea that flight MH370 wasn't delayed. It was missing. And what awaited them was an ordeal that hasn't ended to this day, ten years on, and possibly never will. It was only an hour after the plane should have landed at 7.30am that Malaysia Airlines issued a statement that they had no idea where flight MH370 was. And at this statement, the world's collective ears pricked. And the questions began to swirl.

Had the flight been hijacked? Did the pilot crash it in some sort of murder-suicide? Did the aircraft suddenly explode and sink into the deepest, darkest depths of the South China Sea? Did aliens abduct it? Did it fly into a wormhole and end up in another dimension? And waste years of everybody's life watching lost or the classic did the russians do it come on how much of your life was wasted by watching lost significant yeah if i backed back to all the time i spent watching lost yeah probably my high school career if the number of hours we spent watching lost were in tins of beans

it could reach from here to the moon and back fuck you lost though i will say i've taken a chance and the producers of lost bring us a new sci-fi horror show that this weekend I did watch. It's called From. Right. Like F-R-O-M. And it is on Now TV in the UK. And I have binge watched two seasons bar the final episode of season two. Season three is currently filming and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. But what I enjoy the most is that it's a similar premise. The premise is that it's a small town somewhere in bumfuck nowhere US that maybe exists, maybe doesn't.

But it's basically the idea that people that drive through it get stuck there and they can't leave. And monsters come out of the woods at night. Sounds shit. It's actually pretty good. Give it a chance. I can't be held responsible for what happens in the ending. Because I didn't make it. But producers have lost me there.

But I do enjoy that pretty much in episode one they're like could we all be dead could we just be trapped in purgatory and they're like no for all of these reasons viewers please trust us again with your viewing time so spoilers on lost but i don't If anything, you should listen to my spoilers and don't watch it. I'm re-watching American Gods. Oh, yes. You do speak very highly of it. I think it is so underrated. Yeah.

Kristen Chenoweth's in it. Who's that? I'm not even going to bother. Don't. But yes, when you finish that, check out From. Okay, I will. I think you will enjoy it anyway where were we so basically yeah did the aliens do it did they end up in

lost uh did the russians do it now these are all theories and questions that have been discussed over the past 10 years since mh370 went missing some more seriously than others. But still today, the world is at a loss for what actually happened. Speculation is all we have. The first theory to go out of the window was that an explosion had caused MH370's comm system to turn off, which immediately ruled out a bomb or an accidental catastrophic failure. Because within a week of the aircraft vanishing, the first solid lead emerged. Up until this point, the last known communication with the plane took place at 1.20am over the South China Sea, as it left Malaysia's airspace and entered

Vietnam's. Good night, Malaysia 370, were the last words heard from the pilot. Based on this, search efforts were primarily focused in that area of the South China Sea. But then came the revelation that military radar had picked up on an unknown aircraft, which may have been MH370. And if it was MH370, then the radar was indicating that the aircraft had flown thousands of miles off course and had made a U-turn back over the Malaysian peninsula. And then, on the 15th of March, the Prime Minister of Malaysia held a press conference and confirmed that this was indeed the case, thus immediately ruling out the theory that the aircraft had exploded at 1.20am and giving rise to a host of more sinister theories, like hijacking. Yeah, because if it's not been blown to smithereens, something else is going on. But who? And why?

Well, the media went wild with speculation immediately after Malaysia Airlines released some very troubling discoveries about the passenger manifest. There were a total of 14 different nationalities on board, mainly Chinese. But on closer inspection, it was found that two of the passengers were not who they claimed to be. Italian national Luigi Moraldi was watching the news on TV when he saw his name listed among the passengers on MH370, as was Austrian-born Christian Kozel. Now, Luigi's passport had been stolen while he was on holiday in Asia six months earlier, and Christian had had his passport stolen two years before, in Thailand. And now, two Iranian nationals, 19-year-old Porya Noor Mohammed and 29-year-old Mohammed Reza Delwa, had bought these passports in Thailand

and somehow managed to get on board MH370 using those passports. The media went wild. Iranians? Fake passportsports this surely had to be terrorism and i do think that was a very plausible line of investigation but it did turn out that the pair had no obvious history or links with terror organizations and it was concluded by interpol after a lengthy investigation into this that while they were definitely illegally traveling under fake passports to reach Europe, they probably hadn't been connected to a plot to blow up the plane. Also, the plane hadn't blown up. And if you hijack it, you're going to tell people because,

yeah, if it's a terror attack committed by two Iranians using fake passports, a secret one isn't very useful for making your political point. We'd have known if it was a terror attack, surely. Yeah, like name one terror attack in the history of the world where they haven't been like, that was us, by the way. Yeah. Please, can we have what we want? It's incredibly pointless.

So I think basically the investigators, all they can do is methodically go through every possibility. It didn't explode, even though it looked like it could have been terrorism because of these Iranians on board. It probably wasn't because nobody claimed it. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud.

In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery+. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts,

or Spotify. Start your free trial today. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music,

or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. That then placed all eyes on the two pilots of MH370. And the media started a smear campaign against both of them, long before the investigation had even begun. The co-pilot was Fareek Abdul Hamid, an outstanding pilot by all accounts, who'd logged over 2,763 hours of flight time. And that flight was a significant one for Fariq, because it was going to be his final supervised flight on a Boeing 777. Nothing about Fariq or his life suggested that he was suicidal or had any terrorist motivations. He was happily engaged to another pilot and his colleagues described him as conscientious and respectable.

Farik even coached a five-a-side youth football team. Not to mention the fact that Farik lacked the experience and knowledge required to pull off such a sophisticated hijacking, which then put the spotlight on the captain of the MH370, a 53-year-old Zahari Ahmad Shah. Tabloids made all sorts of claims about him. His wife and kids had left him, his diary was blank after February 8th 2014, and he had distant relatives in Pakistan, implying therefore that he must have had links to terrorism. The media also

honed in on a theory that Zahari was upset about the fact that the leader of Malaysia's People's Justice Party had been sent to jail the day before the plane vanished. Both of the pilots' homes were raided and searched. Nothing suspicious was found in Fareek's home. But in Zahari's house, police found a high-tech flight simulator and discovered that he'd also recently deleted some files. The FBI managed to recover these and found that he'd been recently deleted some files. The FBI managed to recover these, and found that he'd been practicing landing a Boeing 777 in Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, and a US military base in Diego Garcia. But just two weeks later,

Malaysian authorities announced that there was nothing incriminating about any of it. And similar to his co-pilot, on the surface, Zahari's life really didn't point to anything that suggested that he had suicidal or any sort of fanatical ideas. He was a loving grandfather, a keen cook, a hobbyist model builder, and a DIY enthusiast, who was well-liked by all of his flying students. Yes, he had some strong political views and was happy to debate with anybody who wanted to. And yes, he had a flight simulator at home. But all of his colleagues insisted that Zahari lived for, quote, food, family and flying. What do you live for, Hannah?

Oh, God. What are the three Fs? Monday morning is not the time to ask me that question. I'll get back to you when I've got that Friday feeling. Fair enough. That Friday feeling. However, if anybody on that flight was capable of pulling off what happened to MH370, Zahari was the best bet. He'd been a pilot since 1981, had over 18,000 hours of flying experience

and was one of the best pilots in the country. Which is why when authorities concluded their investigation after three months they ruled out everybody on board MH370 as a suspect except for Zahari. And we will come back to that. Now, we need to point out that there is nothing clear cut about this case. So much misinformation was coming from the press, the airline, and even the Malaysian authorities. Malaysian airlines were keen to do as much damage control as possible to keep their stock prices from tanking. So they did their best to brush off any suggestion that one of their pilots could have been responsible. Now, a lot of people do say that this is because Malaysian Airlines

is now a state-owned airline. So Malaysia seems to have been very keen to do as much damage control as possible because it's intimately linked to the state itself. Though that doesn't get them off the hook entirely, because it was revealed later that Malaysia had been notified about MH370 having gone off course in a westward direction on the day the plane went missing. But for whatever reason, they kept this information to themselves for almost a week and focused the search efforts in the South China Sea, knowing full well that the plane wasn't there and there was no way the plane could be there.

Then came some new profound revelations about the actual route that MH370 had taken. Once the aircraft had left the area monitored by the military radar, it continued to passively communicate with a satellite above the Indian Ocean. This satellite was run by a British company called Inmarsat. Inmarsat are in the business of providing satellite communication for planes when they're beyond the range of ground radar systems. What this satellite does is send what's known as a ping to the aircraft once every hour to see if it automatically responds, which is called a handshake. And after combing through the enormous amounts of data,

Imarsat learned that MH370 had actually responded for up to six hours after it was believed to have vanished. However, this data received from MH370 by IMASAT was never intended to be used to track the location of a plane, and it had never been done before. All that data can show you is the distance the plane was from the satellite at the time of a handshake occurring, but it was possible to use this information to roughly calculate the flight's path. In the simplest of terms, this was done by utilising the Doppler effect.

Is the Doppler effect why motorbikes sound quieter when they're going away from you? Yeah. Okay. I learned that watching Malcolm in the Middle. Anyway, based on the difference in speed, the signal came from the aircraft to the satellite at each point. Similar to how the whistle from a train gets louder as it approaches you, or a motorbike, as I just said. And it gets fainter as it gets farther away. So if you're the satellite, and the train is MH370, and the whistle sound of the train is the ping,

with data from each of the seven pings received and some very complex mathematical equations, it was possible to determine where MH370 was at the time of each ping. On the 24th of March, so 16 days after the flight vanished, the Prime Minister of Malaysia held a press conference. He announced that Inmarsat had concluded that MH370 flew south after passing over the Malaysian Peninsula. This was not what anybody wanted to hear. If MH370 had gone north, then it would have been over land and there would have been a higher likelihood of survivors. But having gone south, it only left the possibility that MH370 had crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, which would make the survival rate likely zero.

The plane probably flew until all the fuel had been exhausted, and since there was only enough to keep it flying for seven and a half hours following takeoff, after its changing course, it couldn't have gone much further than the Indian Ocean. So it's a good bet that that's where it ended up. And this theory added up with the last time that the aircraft pinged in Marsat's satellite, which was around 8.20am, because the next attempt, the following hour at 9.15am, the handshake failed. Following this announcement by the Prime Minister,

the family and friends of the passengers and the crew of MH370 lost all hope that they'd ever see their loved ones again. Some expressed their grief in very understandable emotional breakdowns. Others did so in equally understandable displays of anger and suspicion. Many believed that the Malaysian authorities were not telling them everything that they knew. 239 people had just suddenly been declared dead based on one mathematical calculation with absolutely no physical evidence.

After all, there were no bodies and there was no sign of any wreckage. It was a very hard and bizarre pill to swallow and the world wanted answers. Now, like we said earlier, the majority of the passengers on board had been Chinese. And within a day of this news that everybody was going to be declared dead,

the Malaysian embassy in Beijing was surrounded by angry protesters. The pressure to get to the bottom of things was on. And it really didn't help that millions of dollars had been wasted scouring around 1.8 million square miles in the wrong location because Malaysia hadn't admitted to knowing that MH370 had gone off course. But within Marset's new information, the new search area was now the Southern Indian Ocean, about 1,800 kilometers off the Western Australian coast. The search effort was comprised of 43 ships and 58 aircraft and 14 different countries,

covering an area larger than the continental United States. And as one Australian pilot who was involved in the search put it, we're not looking for a needle in a haystack, we're still looking for the haystack. The odds were definitely against them. Months passed as Australian-led search teams narrowed down the search area to 120,000 square kilometres of seafloor. That's 46,000 square miles. But still, they didn't find a single clue as to where the aircraft or its passengers were. Then, just when it seemed like things couldn't get any worse for Malaysian

Airlines, they did. On the 17th of July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was making its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The aircraft vanished from all radar systems as it was flying over eastern Ukraine, about 31 miles from the Russian border. However, unlike MH370, it wasn't a mystery as to what happened to that plane. That Boeing 777 had been blown to pieces mid-air and the wreckage had fallen over the Donetsk Oblast region of Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 members of crew on board. Intelligence services quickly figured out that the aircraft had been hit by a surface-to-air missile, fired by a pro-Russia separatist group. The Russian government of course denied any responsibility, but in November 2022,

a Dutch court ruled otherwise. They announced that Russia had had full control over the separatist forces fighting in Ukraine at the time, and after a trial in absentia, two Russians, Igor Gherkin and Sergei Dublinsky, and a Ukrainian separatist, Leonard Karchenko, were all found guilty of murdering the 298 passengers. As far as we know, all three men are still at large in Russia and will likely never serve their sentences. Which makes the case of MH370, our story today, the second deadliest incident involving a Boeing 777. But the search for MH370 held its place as the most expensive search in aviation history, estimated at a total cost of $155 million. Yet, to this very day, the majority of the aircraft has never been found.

And we say majority because in July 2015, a small section of the wing called a flapperon, which is made up. That sounds incredibly fake. It sounds like when you watch those anti-aging cream adverts and they use fake science to confuse you. Yeah. Anticrecium. Now filled with anticrecium to put on your face to anti-your creases.

So the made-up flapper on left phalange was discovered by members of the public on Reunion Island, 170 kilometres from Mauritius or thereabouts. I actually met a lovely couple from Reunion Island when I was traveling. They were like, oh, you should come stay with us. You should come stay with us. And obviously we never did. But very nice couple.

And the guy swam every single day. And he was like, I did this every single day back home. It's great. It's the only way to start your day. I googled Reunion Island, the most dangerous place for shark attacks on the planet and i was like francois what the fuck and he's like yes fine they're not gonna bite you and i'm like they definitely will they definitely do but yeah scary times probably why it didn't go even though i'm fascinated so since that flapperon was found in the shark capital of the world, about 40 small pieces of MH370 have been located by locals on the coast of South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar and several small islands.

But nothing else. The official government-led search for the aircraft was abandoned in 2017. The following year, a private US marine company, Ocean Infinity, resumed the search, based on drift data from the debris found. But they too gave up just after a year of no results. However, just last year, the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that the location of the crash site could be determined. Scientists believe that they can do this by studying the barnacles found on the debris of MH370. Apparently, by looking at how the shells have formed on the barnacles, scientists can figure out the temperatures of the sea where they've come from. That's so fucking cool. I was going to say

how incredibly boring they must be to have at parties. Tell me more about the barnacle shell, Dave. Yeah, you don't want to hang out with them at your barbecue. But if your plane goes down or your boat goes missing, tell me all about the barnacles. So, these very ocean detectives, not boring scientists, these scintillating party guests were able to plot a drift route, hopefully leading back to the original crash site. And it does sound like a long shot, but there really don't seem to be many other options at this stage. Ocean Infinity has said that they want to resume their search efforts in 2024, pending authorisation from the Malaysian government. Until then, we likely won't get any more answers.

So in the years since MH370's tragic disappearance, like in the aftermath of any major catastrophe with no clear explanations, conspiracy theorists have, of course, run amok. Basically everything, from the moment MH370 vanished from air traffic control radars is up for debate and theories have ranged from like we said UFO abductions, the idea that the plane flew through a wormhole or Russian hijacking and even claims that the US shot it down have circulated. Now if we were to run through all of these theories this episode would be as long as the entire Lost saga and you would hate us just as much. So we've decided to run through what we believe is the most likely scenario. It is also the theory believed by the majority of investigators

and experts in the field of aviation today. But we should preface this by reminding you all that this is just of course course, a theory, and therefore very speculative, with no solid evidence whatsoever. It's simply the theory that we believe follows Occam's razor, and it is the one that is most supported by the existing evidence and requires the least number of assumptions to be made. The pilot did it. First of all, Zahari Ahmad Shah was going through a very rough time in his personal life, and many who knew him believed that he was clinically depressed. His wife had left him, and although he still spoke to his kids,

they were adults living lives of their own. Zahari had even told some of his friends that he spent much of his free time just pacing around his house, waiting for his next flight. And when he wasn't pacing, Zahari was using his home flight simulator. That's how you know he got a divorce, because he's just like, I'm going to buy a massive flight simulator and put it in our house. She wouldn't have allowed that. He's like, now I can do it, live the bachelor pad of my dreams. When the Malaysian government finally released their lengthy report on the investigation into MH370's disappearance, it seems that they left out one critical detail. In 2016, some confidential documents were leaked from the Malaysian authorities' investigation,

revealing the following. One month before the aircraft vanished, Zahari had carried out a simulated flight way out into the southern Indian Ocean. And he used a fairly similar route to the one that MH370 is believed to have taken, although his simulated flight ended about 900 miles away from the actual search area. But the very fact that we now know that the Malaysian government deliberately withheld this information from their report should make us all very suspicious. Yes, Zahari was by many accounts a very friendly and very helpful family man who made YouTube videos about home DIY and loved to cook. But that doesn't mean much. Pilots carrying out murder-suicides is not unheard of. Just a year after MH370, the co-pilot of German wings flight 9525 deliberately crashed the plane into a mountain in France,

killing all 150 people on board. That is absolutely fucking terrifying. Yeah. I saw a tweet the other day. I'm not a nervous flyer. I saw this tweet that was like, oh, it's absolutely fine, just a million things have to go right at once

for this to stay in the air. We shouldn't be allowed to do it. I don't think we should be allowed. I mean, again, I'm also not a nervous flyer. And there is all the stats about like, oh, you know, just walking down the street or driving your car is a lot more dangerous than crashing out of a plane. But I'm like, when it happens, you're dead. There's no chance. So now let's be party poopers and get into the scenario that we think is the most likely.

This version of events is incredibly told in an amazing YouTube documentary by Green Dot Aviation. And we really do suggest that you guys go and have a look at it because it blows Netflix's shambolic documentary, The Plane That Disappeared, out of the water. But we will come back to that later on. So for now, here we go. And remember that this is just a theory, but it is the best one that we have, we think, and you will see why. But it is a theory all the same. We're going to explain it as if it actually happened to connect the evidence. Yeah, like any other way to explain this makes no sense. We have to talk you through it as if this is exactly what happened, just so we can point to the evidence that matches. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made, a seductive city where many flock to get rich,

be adored and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainy Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime,

The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom, but I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace,

from law and crime, this is The Rise and Fall of Diddy. Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery+. So on the 8th of March 2014, 53-year-old captain Zahari Shah and his 27-year-old co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid were in the cockpit of MH370, ready to make the routine flight to Beijing. Malaysian Airlines runs this flight twice a day, every day. So routine is definitely the word. Frake was excited as, like we said earlier, this was his final supervised flight of a Boeing 777, after which he'd be cleared to become a main pilot. Zahari, however, had no intention of going to Beijing. At 40 minutes past midnight, Zahari taxied down the runway and took off, and the fates of the 238 people on board were sealed. As usual, MH370 flew northeast, over the Malaysian Peninsula, and over the South China Sea. Twenty minutes later, Zahari reached a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet,

and notified air traffic control that all was well. Zahari was then given permission to take a shortcut to a waypoint called Igari. Waypoints are specific geographical locations used as points of reference in aviation navigation, and Igari is one of the few waypoints in the world that lies on the borders of five different airspaces, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore. At 1.19am, as Zahari approached Aghari, leaving Malaysian airspace behind, he uttered the now infamous words, Good night, Malaysian 370. This was the last verbal communication made between MH370 and the ground.

And this is where the speculative scenario begins. Zahari gets his co-pilot out of the way by asking him to go and make a cup of coffee. And when he obediently does so, Zahari gets his co-pilot out of the way by asking him to go and make a cup of coffee. And when he obediently does so, Zahari locks the cockpit door and gets ready to do something David Blaine could only dream of. He was about to make a 175-tonne aeroplane disappear. Soon after MH370 reached Degare, the pilots should have sent Vietnamese air traffic control a message like this. Ho Chi Minh Control, Malaysia 370, flight level 350, good morning. That would have been standard protocol. But they didn't do this.

And Vietnamese air traffic controllers didn't notice either. They were busy dealing with the planes already in their airspace. They weren't expecting MH370 for another few minutes. And this moment of limbo was the perfect moment for Zahari to do what he was about to do next. 90 seconds after MH370 reached Degari, Zahari turned off the plane's transponder. That's the communication system between MH370 and air traffic control. The switch for the transponder is as simple as a knob on a car radio. It's located between the pilot's seats. Pilots, however, are not even taught how to turn this off in training

because there isn't a single good reason that they would ever need to. Why is it there? There are a lot of things about planes i don't understand do you remember being able to go into the cockpit when you were a kid oh my god we lived in such a simple at home pre 9-11 thanks for ruining it for all the kids of today yeah because yes absolutely i remember we used to fly every single summer to india every single year for six weeks. And every single time we'd fly British Airways and they would come and get you.

And they'd be like, do you want to come sit in the cockpit? And you'd go and you'd wear a little captain's hat and you'd look at everything. And the captain would be like, do you want to be a pilot when you grow up? Blah, blah, blah. And then you'd go back to your desk and listen to Andy Peters talk on BA radio and colour in your little thing with your crayons. Can you imagine now? Kid cockpit just shot air marshals I'm almost certain that I was on a plane on Christmas Eve and the pilot like dipped the plane and said that santa was on on the roof oh my god fucking hell yeah it's like oh we've got a visitor jesus christ a simpler time so if he turned the transponder off it was in that second that mh370 vanished from the radar screens of air traffic controllers in Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia.

But also in that second, Zahari dropped a breadcrumb that wouldn't be found for years. As the host of Green Dot Aviation explains, the dial for the transponder on a Boeing 777 has three settings. One, fully on, which transmits all the plane's information regarding its altitude and position, etc. Two, altitude off, which transmits everything but the plane's altitude. And then three, fully off. And as Zahari turned the dial to fully off, it passed the altitude off selection. And in that microsecond, plane's position but not its altitude were transmitted to the ground. If the transponder was turned off due to an electronic catastrophe this wouldn't have happened. It would only have happened if the transponder had been turned off manually.

Dun dun dun. And this is why people who understand aviation and who are creating videos and content like green dot aviation are so helpful because we don't understand things we have to take the experts guidance on this but that is fascinating the idea that only by turning it manually through those selections it would have created that breadcrumb that's so interesting and also like i know we've said that they're not trained on how to turn it off it seems pretty easy yeah it's just a knob they're like it's just first day of flight school first day of pilot school that's the transponder but do not don't touch that in fact i'm just gonna put a little sticker do not touch not for you but yeah it's really interesting And the only way it could have disappeared from the radars of air traffic control on the ground is if he had turned it off. And by

turning it off manually, he goes past that selection, which gives that breadcrumb. Really, really interesting. So at this point, let's assume Farid is still busy fixing the cups of coffee for himself and Zahari. And again, we are speculating here. Would a co-pilot go and make coffee or do they have an air steward that does that for them? Is he in the loo? We don't know. But we have to assume that for some reason he is not in the cockpit. The co-pilot isn't in the cockpit. So also at this point, although air traffic controllers now couldn't see MH370 on their screens, the airline still knew where the plane was. And this is because of something called ACARS.

Now ACARS is an acronym that stands for Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System. It automatically sends technical information about the aircraft every 30 minutes via satellite to Boeing, Rolls-Royce and the airline, which in this case was Malaysian Airlines. This technical information includes the amount of fuel left and the plane's position on its flight route. And there are two ways to turn a car's off. The first is the simplest, which is to flick the switch. But doing so would definitely notify the ground that a car's was being turned off, which would no doubt send up some sort of red flag.

The second way is to literally pull the plug on the engine's electrical generator so that Akars would go dead immediately. The latter is what Zahari would have had to do. And so just like that, the plane would have vanished. And Zahari could have done this in a matter of minutes. As a pilot of over 30 years with again 18,000 hours of flying experience he was certainly capable of it. Zahari's next problem came in the form of the 238 people behind him on the plane. At 35,000 feet the air pressure is one quarter of that at sea level which means there's also only one quarter of the oxygen in the air pressure is one quarter of that at sea level, which means there's also only one quarter

of the oxygen in the air as there would be at sea level. The reason we can breathe on board airplanes at 35,000 feet is because the plane has machinery which compresses the outside air, warms it up and pumps it in. If that didn't happen, exposure to the outside thin air would result in a deadly condition known as hypoxia. All Zahari needed to do was let out the compressed safe-to-breathe air out of the plane and pump the thin air in. To do that, he needed to open two outflow valves underneath the Boeing 777, which is possible from the cockpit. So, Zahari fitted himself with an oxygen mask next to his seat and flicked the switches, stopping the engines pumping compressed air into the plane. Then he changed the setting on the

cabin's air pressure control to manual, allowing him to control the airflow inside the plane. Zahari then opened the two outflow valves and that was the point of no return. A gust of cold, thin air would have swept through the passengers' cabins, oxygen masks would have dropped from the ceilings, and hypoxia would have started to set in. At this moment, Zahari would have made his extreme U-turn by banking the plane left as much as possible. Anybody not in their seats would have been sent flying to the left side of the aircraft as they slowly fell unconscious from the lack of oxygen.

What Sahari was trying to do by turning so hard was to avoid the airspace of Thailand. He knew they wouldn't see him on the air traffic control radar, but there was a chance that he'd be spotted by primary radar. Now primary radar is the most fundamental kind of radar, which involves a radar dish that emits signals into the sky and picks up what's bounced back. It wouldn't tell you anything more than the size and distance of what the signals were bouncing off, though.

But if the Thai military realised that there was an aircraft in their airspace without permission, they would have reacted. And Zahari would have known this. After just managing to make a tight enough U-turn to avoid tight airspace, Zahari flew MH370 back over the Malaysian peninsula. He now needed to avoid alerting the Malaysian air force, and also being thwarted by his own co-pilot. The passengers of the plane would have at this point had their oxygen masks on, but were likely reassured that the worst was over. The cabin crew may have explained that the flight had experienced decompression and that they'd reduced altitude to get to a breathable level. The co-pilot, Farik, however, would have been more suspicious. The pilot's guidelines in

case of depressurisation do not mention turning the plane around in some sort of sharp, crazy U-turn. You're just meant to reduce altitude. Farik would have needed to attach his oxygen mask to a portable oxygen tank, of which there were 15 on board, to make his way back to a cockpit. Little did Farik know that the cockpit door was locked and Zahari had no intention of letting him back in. And little did the rest of the plane know that their oxygen masks would

only supply them with oxygen for 20 minutes. And Zahari had absolutely no intention of descending before those 20 minutes were up. The 15 portable oxygen tanks on board for the cabin crew, however, held about 45 minutes worth of oxygen. So at this point, Farik would have been the only member of the crew using a tank. The rest of the cabin crew would have been sat using the 20-minute supply waiting for the plane to descend. This descent, to safe breathing levels, is meant to take just about 10 minutes. Farik would have then pressed what is essentially the doorbell for the cockpit, and Zahari would have seen this on his central screen. To open it, he would have simply needed to turn a dial.

But he didn't. Zahari was focused on carefully balancing the flight's path along the borders of Thailand and Malaysia. That way, if either country's military noticed the MH370, they would assume it was being handled by the airspace controllers of the other country. It was genius. Meanwhile, Farid could now have been aware that something was horribly wrong. The cabin was depressurised, they weren't descending,

and he was locked out of the cockpit. He would then have used the emergency code which unlocks the cockpit door. This code allows cabin crew to enter the cockpit in case the pilot falls unconscious, so it's a manual override for the pilots inside not letting them in. However, Zahari would have turned the dial for the door to the deny setting, which renders this code useless. Now of course you can see here that it's like the people that build the plane, the engineers, are trying to think of every possibility because the purpose of this dial is obviously to allow the crew to stop would-be hijackers

who have somehow found out the emergency code from entering the cockpit. Only now, it was being used by a hijacker pilot to keep his co-pilot out. And so, when he was denied access, even with the emergency code, it would have dawned on Farid that his colleague co-pilot inside the cockpit was not unconscious

and that what was happening now was deliberate. It's now 1.30am. The 227 passengers and 10 members of cabin crew only had 5 minutes of oxygen left before hypoxia would set in and MH370 became their coffin in the sky. Zahari, however, had 26 hours worth of oxygen left in his tank. It was only at that point that Vietnamese air traffic control noticed Malaysian Flight 370 had never checked into their airspace. And what's more, they couldn't even see it.

But despite guidelines stating that air traffic controllers are meant to make a report when an aircraft takes more than five minutes to respond, Vietnamese air traffic control did nothing. Sahari was heading southwest over the Malaysian peninsula. The cabin crew and passengers would now have been unconscious. Farik, however, would have been in a panic, and Sahari would have been watching him on his security camera monitor. Once Sahari reached the end of the peninsula,

he was approaching the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and the last thing he wanted to do was enter that airspace. So, he turned right and made his way along the Malacca Strait, a narrow stretch of water between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, allowing him to remain in Malaysian airspace. And as Zahari made this turn, Fareek's mobile phone connected briefly with a phone tower on the ground as he attempted to make a call.

The call didn't go through, but it did get a signal for a second, and this was recorded. At 2am, Malaysian airlines were notified that Vietnam was unable to contact MH370 and that they couldn't see it on their radar screens. The system told Malaysian Airlines that the plane was currently in Cambodian airspace, but this, of course, was a red herring.

The Malaysian Airlines dispatcher was unaware that the tracking system they were looking at was not a real-time update of MH370's location. It was simply telling them where the plane should have been if everything was going as planned, so they didn't worry about it too much just yet. Little did they know MH370 was nowhere near Cambodia, and its passengers and crew were by this point either unconscious or dead. This included co-pilot Farik. And it wouldn't be until much later that morning that they'd know just how bad the situation truly was.

Sahari knew, although he'd taken every precaution to not be detected so far, that records of primary radar could be used to plot his flight path during an investigation. But once he passed the island of Sumatra, if he made a left turn out towards the open southern Indian Ocean, there wouldn't be any chance that MH370 could ever be found. The Indian Ocean is huge, and Zahari still had almost six hours worth of fuel on board, and hours and hours of oxygen left for him. However, what Zahari didn't know was this. When he turned off the engine's electrical generators to, in turn, turn off the plane's ACARS system, this also turned off the cooling systems for the cockpit's CPU. And this would have caused them to begin overheating,

and Zahari would have needed to switch them back on if he didn't want to lose control of the plane. Zahari would have turned the electricals back on to prevent this once he was certain he was out of range of the military radar. But in doing so, unbeknownst to him, the plane began sending and receiving pings with the Inmarsat satellite above the Indian Ocean, which is how, if you remember, investigators were able to eventually calculate MH370's real flight path. But whether Zahari knew that or not isn't really important. By this stage, his plan was almost complete. He then made a southward turn towards the open expanse of the southern Indian Ocean,

just as he had on his flight simulator a month before. This was the swan song of a suicidal murderer. Terrifyingly, when authorities recovered the deleted files from Zahari's flight simulator, they found a simulation flight Zahari had made on the 3rd of February to the southern Indian Ocean. He had set the date on the software to the 21st of February, which also happened to be the same night Zahari had flown flight MH370 to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. But he deleted the file the night before and flew the plane to Beijing as scheduled. It would seem that the 21st of February had actually been his first choice, but something had made him hold off until the 8th of March. Now flying into the abyss,

Zahari would have increased his altitude to make his fuel and final hours last as long as possible. This would have allowed him to fly out into the southern Indian Ocean as far as possible, making it even less likely that the wreckage would ever be discovered. But why did Zahari go to such lengths to make it as hard as possible to find the wreckage? If he did it, he planned to die as well.

So what did it matter? Maybe Zahari wanted to spare his family the shame of everybody knowing for certain that he had killed all those people and himself. It's really the only explanation that makes any sense. In his final few hours, Zahari may also have placed the plane on autopilot, taken off his oxygen mask and allowed hypoxia to take him away. And so MH370 would have become a ghost plane, flying further and further out over the Indian Ocean, until it exhausted all of its fuel and crashed into the water, disintegrating on impact. And this is believed

to have been at some point between 8.20am when the last handshake was recorded with the Inmarsat satellite and 9.15am when the plane didn't respond. It does seem like, as you said, that's the only theory that makes any sense because he goes through a lot of effort when he could have just bashed it into the ocean. So much effort, planning and i don't know i guess there's there's two theories here right i i do believe that the reason that he goes to so much effort to cover his tracks and to get the plane as far out into the southern indian ocean as possible so that it's not recovered is probably to protect his legacy let there always be some question mark over what truly happened protect his family to some extent blah be some question mark over what truly happened.

Protect his family to some extent, blah, blah, blah. But I think very similarly to how we would see like fantasy-driven serial killers, which is all of them, the idea that the planning is as important as the execution of the plan. I think you see that here with Zahari. The idea that he's at home with his flight simulator, he's planning these routes, he thinks he's so smart, he's thought of every little possibility. He's like, I take a hard turn here so the tires don't see me,

I go here, I go here. Like, I think that is as part what got him off as what he ends up maybe doing. And I think the route that he takes and the U-turns he takes and the precautions he takes there is also so no one can stop him from completing the task at hand. But yeah, I think taking it out as far as possible was maybe also, like we said, because he wanted to take his mask off and not actually be the one that drove it into the water so

that he could just go out passively. But yeah, multi-reasons, I think. Multi-faceted reasons for why he did what he did. So there you have it. After researching various theories as to what happened to MH370 and the 239 people on board, this is what we found to be the most plausible. Because of the evidence we have, like the pings and the co-pilot's phone getting momentary signal. But again, this is just speculation. As avionics expert Richard Godfrey has said, there unfortunately is no smoking gun proving Zahari's guilt. This is what he had to say. Most of the evidence points to a murder-suicide by Captain Zahari Shah, although the evidence

is insufficient to stand up in a court of law, which is possibly what Zahari's plan was all along. We know the likely truth, but nobody will ever be able to prove it. Now, as for the shambolic three-part Netflix documentary MH370, The Plane That Disappeared, the first part of the documentary does outline the theory that Zahari may have been responsible, but barely. It goes on to say that he was such a nice guy, it wasn't too likely that he was the killer. Okay, Netflix. They've got to have a hook. They do. They do have to have a hook. I

think it's boring for them to say the same thing that everybody else is saying. So they're like, I don't know, he just seemed like such a nice guy. Could he have done it? Okay, so the second part of the doc entertains the theory that two Russians hijacked the plane by climbing into the main equipment centre, accessible by a hatch on the floor of the first class cabin. The documentary goes on to say that these Russians then took complete control of the aircraft, faked satellite location data and landed the plane in Kazakhstan. Aviation experts, however, have pointed out that it's not possible to control a plane from the MEC and satellite location data is transmitted live and cannot be manipulated. And also the plane would have been picked up by the radar systems of nine countries on its way

to Kazakhstan. Also, why would they have done this anyway and then kept completely silent about it? It makes no sense. I think this is what Netflix does. You're absolutely right. They always want to have an angle and it's like that S of sam documentary that they put out i forgot about that where they're like maybe there wasn't just one son of sam maybe it was sons of sam and everyone was like nope no because david berkowitz told you he's also the man that told him the fucking dog next door told him to kill all those people and then later said, I was just kidding. I was just pretending to be crazy. So yeah, that's their second theory. Their third theory is, I have to say, even more ludicrous. French journalist Florence de Changy proposes that MH370 was shot down by the US government. Why? Changxi believes that the plane was carrying some special

Motorola equipment to Beijing and that the CIA didn't want the Chinese to get their hands on this. So they murdered 239 innocent people to prevent this from happening. Apparently. Not to mention that this would also have required

a lot of people to have known about this and kept their mouths shut about such an atrocity for almost a decade, which hardly seems likely. Also, none of the evidence whatsoever backs up this theory. The other, less bizarre yet flawed theories involve a catastrophe on board, such as a complete electrical failure or a fire in the cockpit, but the evidence we do have is more than enough to make us question those ideas. For one, the perfectly timed manoeuvres of the plane which stopped it from being detected by military and civilian radars seems too far-fetched to have been a coincidence. And also, the fact that the electricals turned back on at the perfect time. And as for the theories involving

a terrorist hijacking, well, these would have had to be the most sophisticated and meticulous hijackers of all time. And also, the most pointless hijackers of all time as well, because no demands were made, no messages were sent. And in almost a decade, no group has ever claimed responsibility. So our old friend Occam's razor would suggest that a highly skilled pilot in the grips of clinical depression pulled off this audacious, yet very much achievable, atrocity. And this is what the evidence seems to point to. But, as we have said until we are blue in the face and suffering of hypoxia, we'll never know for sure. So yeah.

Is that what pilots are thinking about while we're all asleep? How to murder us all yeah and get away with it i mean maybe it's like the call of the void yeah hard to hard to avoid thinking about it because there is a lot of power i mean you could with this level of careful planning murder everybody on your entire boeing 777 and i don't know do psych evals that pilots go through adequately tell anybody who needs to know whether they're a-okay to be flying that plane i don't know but it is terrifying but remember this is a very rare case this is one story well actually i don't know then there was the german actually, I don't know. Then there was the German wings thing. I don't know, guys.

It's scary, but, you know, so is everything. I don't know how to round this off in a positive way. You can't put me either. Be the right level of afraid. There you go. Cool. Cool. And don't listen to this on a plane.

No, don't. If you're listening to this on a plane, it's too late. You're finished. Unless you're like one of those weird people that reads the last page of a book first or whatever. What? No one does that. Apparently it's people that do that. I don't get why. Are you one of those people? If so, have a safe flight. I'm Jake Warren and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part,

Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me, and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America.

But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudian Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.