So Supernatural - DISAPPEARED: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 seemed to vanish into thin air. Less than an hour after takeoff, the plane disappeared from radar—and though seven countries launched a search and rescue operation, the 227 passengers on board were never heard from again.  

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 12.42 a.m. on March 8, 2014. It was supposed to arrive in Beijing six hours later, but the plane never made it. Forty minutes after takeoff, the crew made their last known transmission when they moved from Malaysian airspace to Vietnamese airspace. They radioed a standard response to the Kuala Lumpur traffic controller. Good night, Malaysian 370. Less than a minute later,

the flight's transponder signal vanished off air traffic control's radar screen. For 20 minutes, the controller tried to hail the plane, but there was no response. The plane and all 239 people on board had disappeared into thin air. This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, we're talking about the March 2014 disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. To this day, we're still not sure what happened to the plane, the crew, or its passengers. We have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. A few years before the Malaysia flight disappeared, there was a television show called Lost.

I have a lot of feelings about that show, and I can still get very worked up if I think too long and hard about the ending and the mess of unanswered questions. But that's neither here nor there. The point is, the show was a pretty big television phenomenon. Millions of people, myself included, were invested in the fates of a plane full of people whose plane mysteriously vanished. So when Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 or MH370 vanished on March 8th, 2014, everyone kind of froze in their tracks. This real-life tragedy felt too much like a TV episode to be true, like life-imitating art. Could a plane actually disappear? I mean, this was a state-of-the-art Boeing 777 piloted by an experienced captain on a routine flight path. How could it just vanish?

Journalist William Langevich explained in his article about MH370 for The Atlantic. He said, quote, the idea that a sophisticated machine with its modern instruments and redundant communications could simply vanish seemed beyond the realm of possibility, end quote. So something bigger had to be at play. Let's start with what we know for certain. The plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, without any issues. There were 239 people on board from 14 different countries. The flight reaches a normal cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, and for the first 40 minutes, everything is fine. The two men in the cockpit are checking in over

the radio, and they're reporting everything is normal. The captain that night is a Malaysian national named Zahari Ahmed Shah. He'd been an airplane pilot since 1981 and had over 18,000 hours of flight time under his belt. Zahari was so enthusiastic about being a pilot, he even had a digital flight simulator in his house. So literally, this guy is doing nothing but flying. He goes to work and flies planes. He comes home and practices flying planes. I mean, this is his whole life. But he's not the only person in the cockpit that night. Zohari has a co-pilot named Farik Hamid. Farik had been a pilot for seven years, but he was still in training. He had about 2,700 hours of flight time and less than 40 of those were in a Boeing 777. In fact, this flight to Beijing was the final piece of his training. And that means that Farik is actually the one flying the plane this day.

Well, technically, because nowadays planes practically fly themselves. And MH370 was no different. Once they got to their cruising altitude, a pre-programmed flight plan would have kicked in. Autopilot, basically. Farik would only need to intervene if they came across some unexpected weather or air traffic. And we know they reached their cruising altitude because Zahari radioed Malaysian air traffic control about it twice.

At 1.01 a.m., he reported that they had leveled off. A few minutes later, at 1.08 a.m., he confirmed they were flying at 35,000 feet. And this is actually a little strange, because normally pilots only radio to let control know they're leaving an altitude to make sure they're all clear to move. But maybe Zahari was just a little rusty on his protocol. After all, he's usually captaining the flight,

so he's used to his co-pilot handling the radio. So yes, it's strange, but really only in hindsight. At any rate, by 1.19 a.m., they're reaching the border between Malaysia's airspace and Vietnam's airspace. When you leave one country, you have to check in with the next one, just like you would crossing any other border. But what makes air traffic a little more complicated is that every country's air traffic controller is operating on its own radio frequency. So when MH370 enters Vietnam's jurisdiction, they need to retune their radio to be able to talk to the new tower. The last transmission heard from MH370 is a conversation with the tower back in Kuala Lumpur. They give Zahari the

frequency he needs to talk to Vietnam, and Zahari confirms in a calm voice and then tells them good night. Then at 1 21 a.m, MH370 disappears off the radar screen in Kuala Lumpur. The controller didn't notice at first. He was talking to another plane when it happened. But when he realizes it's gone, he's not even that worried. He just assumes the plane is out of range and safely in the hands of the Vietnamese. But Zahary never checked in with the Vietnamese controller. And unlike the controller in Kuala Lumpur, the one in Vietnam was watching the screen when MH370 dropped off the radar. They saw it happen in two steps. First, the plane's transponder number vanished.

Then, the entire blip disappeared. So radar is basically echolocation, kind of like what bats use. But it can only tell you so much. Basically, it says there's something out there and it's this far away. To help air traffic control keep track of who's flying in the sky, airplanes have a more sophisticated radar system. Every flight is equipped with a transponder that sends pings directly down to the control tower on land. This means that when controllers look at their radar screens, each blip is identified by a number. So when this transponder number disappeared from this blip

representing MH370, that was concerning, but not life-threatening. When the blip vanished entirely, that was an emergency. I mean, the plane could be anywhere, which meant another plane could accidentally collide with it. So the controller in Vietnam tries calling MH370 directly to ask why their transponder isn't working, but they can't get any kind of response. After almost 20 minutes of silence, the tower in Vietnam calls over to the tower in Kuala Lumpur to see what they know. Now, according to protocol, air traffic control in Malaysia is supposed to call in an emergency flight response team. But here's where things get really wonky. For whatever reason, no one in Kuala Lumpur contacts the emergency team. And no one really does anything. Instead, Malaysia and Vietnam play

this weird game of bureaucratic hot potato. Each air tower claims that it's the other one's problem. It's not until 6.30 a.m., nearly five hours later, that anyone really acknowledges that something is seriously wrong. Until then, they were really only worried about the transponder, like this was an equipment malfunction or something. Everyone assumed that they would hear from MH370 at some point. But at 6.30 a.m., MH370 doesn't show up in Beijing for its scheduled landing, and everyone is forced to acknowledge the huge scope of the problem. They have no idea where this plane actually is.

We'll dive into the search efforts for the missing aircraft after this. Now back to the story. After Malaysian Flight 370 vanished on March 8, 2014, seven countries launched a massive search and rescue operation to recover the airplane and any surviving passengers. 34 ships and 28 planes scour the South China Sea. At first, they concentrate on the area where MH370 fell off the radar, somewhere on the border between Malaysia and Vietnam. But the search turns up empty.

No visible debris, nothing that looked like a crash site. The plane had just vanished. And that fuels all kinds of rumors and speculation. How can a jumbo jet just fall off the face of the earth? There has to be something bigger, a conspiracy or something supernatural. How can a jumbo jet just fall off the face of the earth? There has to be something bigger, a conspiracy or something supernatural. I mean, it feels like they were sucked into a black hole. Well, then finally, Malaysia's government comes forward with some new information.

They admit their own military radar had picked up an unidentified plane. It had been flying west over the Indian Ocean as late as 2.22 a.m. on March 8th. And now they admitted that that plane was probably MH370. In most other countries, if the military picked up an unidentified plane on their radar, they would have immediately launched some jets to figure out if it was a threat. But the Malaysian government just kind of shrugged it off. It wasn't until later, when they were reviewing other data, that they realized this blip was probably their missing plane. Again, this is not standard protocol for any military. So when the public finds out that Malaysia had just ignored the unknown blip, people are furious.

And I mean, who can blame them? With so many questions about what happened to MH370, who knows what would have been different had the military intervened. So not only is it a huge oversight, it also means the search team has been combing the wrong body of water for days. Any wreckage is probably going to be over in the Indian Ocean. And after wasting all this time, the chances of finding it are that much smaller. Of course, this only feeds the black hole rumors. The more time that passes without any sign of MH370 crashing, the more the world convinces itself that the 239 passengers are all alive somewhere. We just don't know how to find them. Then in the weeks following, the investigation uncovers some chatter between MH370 and a

satellite orbiting over the Indian Ocean. They find a series of pings that give more clues about where the plane was flying during its final hours. These pings don't give an exact route, but they paint a general picture. At 1.21 a.m., the transponder fails, and MH370 disappears from air traffic radar. But more importantly, shortly after the plane drops off the radar, the autopilot is switched off and the plane makes a sharp turn to the southwest heading back to Malaysia. Now, this turn is so sharp that there's no way it could have been done by a computer, even if the autopilot was seriously malfunctioning. So whatever went wrong in the first place, it confirms that someone was still alive and at the controls at that point. No one is sure why they would have made a turn like this.

But remember that the person flying the plane, Farik, was still a trainee. For now, they assume that's probably the explanation. Sometimes inexperienced pilots can get confused in the air. But they're also not as concerned with the why right now. They're more focused on figuring out where the plane went as soon as possible so they can recover any survivors. The satellite pings also reveal that MH370 flew for hours after it fell off the radar. After turning, the flight passes over the island of Penang, which is off the northwest coast of Malaysia. Then it climbs to 40,000 feet and flies up the Malacca Strait toward the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Finally, it turns southwest toward the Indian Ocean.

After that point, it flies out of range of any radar. But according to satellite pings, it was in the air another six hours until at least 8.19 a.m. We don't know exactly where it was for all this time. We just know that the plane was clearly flying and operational. And then our best guess is that at 8.19, the plane ran out of gas and crash landed. So with this new information, the search and rescue team adjust their search area to a specific arc in the Indian Ocean. But I mean, we're still talking about a huge field. And they're a few days late to the the party so they don't find anything. But some people are encouraged by the fact that the plane was in the air for so much longer than they thought. It could have flown another 3,000 miles and maybe we haven't found any debris because the plane

didn't actually crash. Maybe it just flew to an unknown location. Because whatever did happen to MH370, there were a lot of things to suggest that it was deliberate. On the night of the disappearance, air traffic thought that there was a malfunction with the transponder. But what if someone switched it off on purpose? Like, say, to keep air traffic control from seeing the plane make a U-turn. So this is when a new theory emerges. MH370 was hijacked. Here's one of the biggest details to support the hijacking theory. There's evidence that the plane was deliberately depressurized after it turned back toward Malaysia,

lowering the amount of oxygen inside. You know when they say if there's a loss of cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will drop above your seat? after it turned back toward Malaysia, lowering the amount of oxygen inside. You know when they say if there's a loss of cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will drop above your seat? Well, there's only enough oxygen in the ceiling masks to last about like 15 minutes. So if the plane was depressurized for long enough, everyone on board would pass out and eventually die from hypoxia. So if someone had hijacked the plane, depressurizing the cabin would be a really great way to make sure none of the passengers or crew were able to fight back. I should note though that at no point during these seven hours of flying time did anyone on

board try and contact loved ones. So if someone had been conscious during all these zigzags, wouldn't they have noticed something was wrong? Still, this wasn't a perfect theory. First of all, no terrorist group ever took credit for MH370's disappearance. And typically, I mean, that's the point of hijacking, to grab the world's attention and make some kind of statement. Well, whoever did this, if they did, certainly got the world's attention. It was all over the news for weeks, but no one ever came forward to brag or to say what they did or even why they did it. And there wasn't anyone on the passenger list that sparked any red flags as potential terrorist operatives. Every person on the plane, including the crew, was investigated by the

Chinese government with the help of the FBI. It turned out there were two Iranians on board traveling under fake names and stolen passports, but they weren't rebels. They were political refugees on their way to Germany for asylum. So eventually, the hijacking theory loses steam. And instead, it's widely accepted that MH370 must have flown out to the open ocean and ran out of gas, as strange as that is. As far as the debris, no one can really explain why they haven't found any. But based on the satellite pings, everyone feels sure this is what happened. Except for a journalist named Jeff Wise. He doesn't buy it, so he keeps studying the disappearance long after the rest of the world has moved on. In 2019, Wise publishes a book called The Taking of MH370. In it, he argues that this was a sophisticated hijacking, not some kind of accident. So obviously, much of what we know about MH370's final hours comes from the satellite pings.

It's why we think the plane went south out into the Indian Ocean. Except to Wise, the fact that the satellite pings existed at all was a huge coincidence. He found them incredibly suspicious. For one, the piece of airplane equipment that pings the satellite, it's called the SDU, it had actually been switched off when MH370 first disappeared off air traffic control's radar screens. It was later switched back on just a few minutes after the plane flew out of range of the military's radar. So basically, once the plane was free from any kind of tracking, instead of just disappearing completely, someone rebooted the SDU. But why would you do that? Why go through all the trouble of disappearing only to leave this trail of breadcrumbs. Wise believes

that it was a false trail, intentionally planted to throw the investigation off course. Basically, the public needed an explanation, otherwise they would never stop looking for the plane. These satellite pings gave them a path to follow, out to sea. If you use the same data but assume the plane flew north instead of south, you'd end up in Kazakhstan instead of the Indian Ocean. But why steal a plane and fly to Kazakhstan? Wise argues that the whole thing was an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors orchestrated by Vladimir Putin. This isn't just some random blame game. In March of 2014, Putin would have appreciated a diversion. Russia was in the middle of invading and illegally annexing Crimea.

It was all over the news, and on March 6th, President Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for the attack. Just over 36 hours later, poof, MH370 vanishes. Suddenly, every major network has wall-to-wall coverage on the plane's disappearance. The Russo-Ukrainian war is old news. It's like that one business adage, if you don't like what's being said about you, change the conversation. But there are a few problems with Wise's theory. First, it seems unlikely that MH370 could have flown north for so many hours and over so many different countries without anyone noticing an unidentified airplane on their radar.

Also, a third-party hijacker doesn't fit into the timeline of events. Only two minutes passed between Zahari telling the tower in Kuala Lumpur goodnight and the plane disappearing from the radar screen. It seems unlikely that the hijackers would have been able to execute that timing so perfectly. Even if hijackers had managed to unlock the cockpit door, they wouldn't have been able to do it quietly. The electronic deadbolts make a distinct noise when they're open, so right away Zahari and Farik would have known that someone else had unlocked the door. They would have immediately sent a distress signal. Instead, journalist William Langevich lays out a new theory. He believes

that this was an entirely different kind of hijacking, one that happened from within the cockpit. We'll dive into the motives behind one pilot's desperate act after this. Now let's get back to the story. For over a year, no new answers emerged in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 370. The search grid had covered thousands of miles of ocean and seafloor, and it had turned up nothing. No crash site, no debris. Until July 29, 2015. That's when a piece of debris finally washed ashore in Rai Yun Yon, a small island about 400 miles east of Madagascar

in the Indian Ocean. A beach cleanup crew found a nine foot by three foot piece of metal. It was a fragment of an airplane wing called a flapperon. And based on its serial numbers, it belonged to MH370. It was a bittersweet discovery. In the 16 months following the disappearance, several family members had held onto hope that the missing passengers might still be alive. But that flaperon seemed to confirm what many government agencies had assumed for months. MH370 had crashed into the Indian Ocean and its passengers were never coming home. Over time, more pieces of debris washed ashore along the East African coast in Mozambique and Madagascar. Right away, Jeff Weiss sees this as further proof of a conspiracy. He thinks the debris washed up after it was planted by the Russians.

He even tries to prove this by having the barnacles on the Flaperon examined, insisting that they're not big enough to have been growing for 16 months. But assuming that's not the case, it seems like MH370 crashed into the water at a violent speed and shattered on impact. This would help explain why Search and Rescue still hadn't been able to find a crash site. There may be too many tiny scattered pieces to pinpoint where it actually happened. But the fact that the airplane shattered at all still points to something more suspicious than just an accident. So as I said, it's believed that MH370 ran out of gas and hit the water at a really high speed, around 170 miles per hour.

Then, as William Langevich put it, the airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water. But the thing is, if the plane had simply run out of gas, it would have dropped parallel to the water. And the only way for it to reach something like 170 miles per hour was if it was perpendicular, ready to take a nosedive, which means someone was still controlling the plane right up until the end. And when the engines start to sputter out, that someone tipped the plane forward, sending it nose first into the ocean. All of this means that it's possible that the disappearance of MH370 wasn't a hijacking or an accident. It might have been a mass murder suicide event. I know this is a horrible thought, but it has happened before. In October of 1999, Egypt Air Flight 990 crashed off the coast of Nantucket.

Like MH370, it was an overnight flight that disappeared off the radar in the early morning hours. And like MH370, it gave no distress signal and the last transmission to the tower said everything was normal. They simply bid JFK good morning. Then at 1.48 a.m., one of the co-pilots said a prayer, cut the power, and pushed the control yoke forward, pointing the nose of the plane toward the water. Less than two minutes later, Flight 990 plunged into the ocean, killing all 217 people on board. It happened again in 2013. A Mozambique Airlines pilot intentionally flew his plane into the ground, killing all 33 people on board. It happened again in 2013. A Mozambique Airlines pilot intentionally flew his plane into the ground, killing all 33 people on board. And in 2015, a German pilot waited for his co-pilot to use the bathroom, then locked him out of the cockpit. He flew the plane into the side of a

mountain, killing all the passengers and crew. Journalist William Langevich lays out the following case for MH370's murder-suicide theory. First and foremost, we know that whatever happened to MH370, it was a deliberate act. Nothing other than human intervention explains the transponder switching off, the U-turn, and the cabin pressure. Langevich thinks one of the pilots depressurized the plane

and incapacitated the passengers and crew. But the one place that would have been protected from depressurizing was the cockpit. The oxygen masks in the cabin only last for 15 minutes, but the ones in the cockpit last for hours, which makes sense. In a case of an emergency, you want to make sure the guy flying the plane has plenty of oxygen. It would have been easy for one of the pilots to wait until he was alone in the cockpit before depressurizing the cabin and disabling the electrical system. And this could all be done within a two-minute window. Then they manually turned the plane around and flew for over an hour until

they were out of radar range. After this, they could have restored cabin pressure, took off their oxygen mask, and turned the electricity back on, which would have tripped the SDU to ping the satellites. At this point, the person flying the plane was likely the only one on board still alive. But which pilot was it? The rookie or the veteran? Based on the evidence, Zahari is the most likely suspect. We know Zahari was fanatical about flying. He even had that flight simulator in his house. Is it really so inconceivable that he learned how to turn the SDU off and on?

It turns out there is a way that you can do it from inside the cockpit. You have to shut down most of the plane's electrical systems, but it is possible. You just have to know how. And the flight simulator that he had actually provided some clues of its own. When investigators took a closer look at Zahari's simulator, there was one test flight that stuck out to them. According to an article in New York Magazine, about a month before the disappearance, Zahari flew a simulated flight along a path that was really close to the presumed route of MH370. Now, it wasn't identical, but it was close enough to feel kind of like a dry run. And even stranger, in all the other simulated flights Zahari had done, he always flew the entire route. He sat in front of the

simulator from takeoff to landing, no matter how many hours it took. Except in this simulated dry run of MH370, Zahari didn't finish it. It was the only one that he fast-forwarded through manually. And at each point, he noted the fuel level running the simulation until he ran out of gas. When investigators spoke with Zahari's friends and family in Kuala Lumpur, they uncovered details to suggest that the pilot may have been clinically depressed. And on the day of the disappearance, it would have been easy enough for him to send Fariq out of the cockpit to check something. Fariq would have died with the rest of the flight crew and passengers, leaving Zahari free to carry out his

final flight undisturbed. In a lot of ways, Malaysia Airlines 370 feels like the case of the century. I mean, this is literally something that only happens on TV. And maybe that's why we're still so obsessed with it. We can't accept that a plane could simply vanish. Hardly anyone believes the theories that the plane was sucked into the Bermuda Triangle or a black hole or some kind of time warp. But how insane is it that the two theories that we actually are left with that have the most evidence are still really off the wall? Either this was a massive diversion tactic ordered by Vladimir Putin or a mass murder suicide. But even those two answers, neither of them are actually satisfying, especially to the hundreds of family members left behind. Instead of closure, they'll just have more questions,

like why didn't the Malaysian military do anything about that blip? And why did they let Cruz look in the wrong place for so many days? Even if we do find the black box, it won't have those answers. And it won't tell those families where their loved ones went. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audiochuck originals.