Stuff You Should Know - Selects: The Disappearance of Flight MH370, Part I

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

In 2014, a Boeing 777 airliner disappeared. Despite two full years of searching an area of ocean covering more than 120,000 square kilometers, it has never been found. It is the only unexplained missing vessel in modern aviation history. Listen to this classic episode and find out more about what exactly happened.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. We've got an exciting week ahead for you on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Cat Week. That's right, to coincide with International Cat Day on August 8th, we're dedicating every episode in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed to your cute, mysterious feline companions. So tune in for core Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes on the early.

archaeological evidence for domesticated cats and the folkloric cats of the British Isles. The Weeks Monster Fact will focus on a popular cat creature and you better believe Weird House Cinema will cover some kind of head scratching cat movie. So tune in August 5th through 8 for stuff to blow your mind's cat week. Find us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bob Crawford. Host of American History Hot line a different type of podcast. You, the listener, ask the questions. Did George Washington really cut down a cherry? Were JFK and Maryland Monroe having an affair? And I find the answers. I'm so glad you asked me this question. This is such a ridiculous story. You can listen to American

History Hotline on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. It's me, Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our two-part episode on the disappearance of MH370 from back in January 2020. It is the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation history since the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and poor Fred Noonan, which is really saying something. It's astounding that with a decade of exhaustive time and attention, the plane still hasn't been found. Maybe someday when we're mapping the entire seafloor of the Indian Ocean will stumble across it. Who knows?

But until then, enjoy this harrowing mystery episode of Stuff You Should Know. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know about one of the most interesting. Interesting mysteries in modern times. Yeah. Like, it's really tough to get across what a mystery, the missing airliner MH370 is. Malaysian Airlines, Flight 370. Yeah, and this is going to be a two-parter because it's pretty robust.

Yeah. And boy, hats off to the Grabster. He really put together a lot of great research for this one. He did. I also want to give a huge shout out to one of my journalistic heroes, William Langwish. Mm-hmm. He wrote something, he writes in the Atlantic, but he's not just an Atlantic writer. He wrote, what really happened to Malaysia's missing airplane?

Big old long article on it. Those are great. And this guy is an aviation expert to begin with. But he's also, if you read a Tom Wolfe book or article or whatever, he has a really great knack for making you feel like you're there in the action. Yeah. But then he also has a knack for making you step back and think, how does Tom Wolfe know all this?

was he there? William Languish is the same way. And I will go ahead and recommend that you not, unless you are a very courageous person, read any of his work, especially the stuff about airline disasters, any time around when you're flying. Because he puts you in that plane when it's going down or whatever. He's really, really good at it. So I recommend basically anything Languich has written, go read, it's worth it for sure. Yeah, and I think this coupled with the brief times that we've touched on this kind of thing in the past. whether it was D.B. Cooper or B. Triangle, like, there's something about aviation disasters and mysteries

that are really intriguing to me. And airline forensics, it's all, just super, super interesting. It is. So you talked about airline forensics and that kind of stuff. This is lousy with it. Yeah. But the reason I was saying why it's tough to overstate, like, what a mystery MH370 is it's the only airliner that is considered disappeared, vanished.

They know where all the other ones are. They know what happened to all the other ones. It's the only major one that is just where the official investigation said, we don't know. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, in part two, we'll get to a pretty good, well, actually, I think the leading theory comes in this episode, but we kind of think we know, but it's that thing where, like, you can't definitively say. Yeah, you can't say where, and you can't say why. Right. Yeah, then the why is. Yeah.

and the wearer, both really confounding. Yeah, and the reason why air travel in the 21st century is way safer than auto travel is because any time an airliner goes down, everyone in the international community comes together, investigates it, they do so openly, the airline, the airplane, the airplane manufacturer, the everyone involved is expected to, like, tell the truth. Right. And you get it out there, and you figure out what went wrong, and then you make things safer. And then that makes air travel safer for everybody.

They couldn't do this for all sorts of reasons with MH370. And so it's a huge failing among the international community, not for lack of trying, but because it's just an asterisk out there. It's the only one. Yeah, and that's why airplanes don't crash as much anymore. I mean, growing up, it's not like it was every other week or anything, but you used to hear about airline crashes enough to where it gave you pause. Right.

And you just don't hear about it much anymore. It's true. I mean, it's still out there for sure. Yeah, but they seem much more rare than they used to be. Kind of like skyjackings. So we'll do our best to put you in the plane. In the passenger seat? Yeah.

Can we at least be in business class? Buckle, sure. Okay. Sure. Are you about to say buckle up? Yeah. Okay. Buckle up, because we're going to take off on March 8, 2014, in Kuala Lumpur.

It's the very beginning of March 8th. The takeoff schedule for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was scheduled for 1235 a.m. That's right. We're in Boeing 777-200-E-R. Yep. And there are 227 fellow passengers aboard, 12 flight crew. Yep. That's a lot of people.

Almost about two-thirds of the passengers are Chinese nationals, I believe. There's a bunch of other people from other countries, but for the bulk of the people on the plane were from China. That's right. And it's a late-night flight. It's expected to arrive in Beijing at about 6 o'clock. 6.30. 6.30 in Beijing time.

And it's going to fly over the South China Sea, over the Gulf of Thailand through Laos, Vietnam, and then into China to arrive at Beijing. It didn't actually take off at 1235. They took off at 1242. Not too shabby. Seven minutes, I'm not like sitting there rocking in my seat. Like, let's go yet, you know?

I might not have even noticed. And they take off and it flies up to 18,000 feet. And the air traffic control center at Kuala Lumpur says, hey, you guys are cleared to go up to 35,000 feet, which is cruising altitude for this flight, I think. That's right. And at this point, at 18,000, they switch from the airport's air traffic to Kuala Lampur area control center. Yeah.

And, you know, the reason we're mentioning all these details is because it turns out they're very important. Very important. Yeah, so these are all key. Keep rewining 15, 30 seconds to get every single detail. Okay? Because you're going to need them for the big finish. So four minutes later, like you said, they were cleared to go to 35,000. It took him about 15 minutes.

and it's here where Captain Zahari and there were two people on board flying this plane Captain Zahari and what was the other gentleman's name First Officer Farik Abdul Hamid Right And Captain Zahari Ahmad Shah is piloting in the plane First Officer Hamid This is his last training flight

After this he'll be fully certified to fly Boeing 777s Which if you're a commercial airline pilot That's pretty much the peak right there Yeah and that's important too because one of them is a very experienced pilot in his 50s. The other one is a brand new kind of greenhorn, and that's going to factor in for sure. Yep.

So, like I said, it took about 15 minutes to get to 35,000 feet, and this is when the lead pilot radios that Kuala Lampur Control Center says, we're at 35,000 feet. Then seven minutes later, he radios again and says, by the way, and this is not me doing him. I don't know what he sounded like. There you go This is Captain Zahari

Everybody sounds like Chuck Yeager Yeah I guess so So he confirmed again that they were at 35,000 feet And this is where Ed points out That this wasn't some sort of big alarming thing But what usually happens is you radio in When you leave in altitude Not when you arrive

And you also don't radio in seven minutes later And say by the way We're still at 35,000 feet Still here Like once you hit it, you're just sort of there that you're cruising altitude. Right. So it wasn't alarming or anything, but it was weird that he made those two radio transmissions.

But it was nothing compared to the weirdness that was about to take place. That's right. Shortly after that, I think at 1119 a.m. Yeah. Kuala Lumpur Area Control Center. It's like 11 minutes later. Yep. It said, hey, MH370, you're about to leave our jurisdiction and enter Ho Chi-M.

jurisdiction, go ahead and contact Ho Chi Minh Air Traffic Control and let them know you are on with them on this frequency. Yeah. I mean, if you remember our air traffic control podcast, you're handed off. Like you don't just stick with one air traffic control when you fly around the world. No. You're handed off all along the way whenever you enter the airspace of that whatever district. Precisely.

And the way that it's set up is there's not supposed to be any time where you're just flying alone and then you move into the other one you're going right from one to the other you want a handoff so um captain zahari responded with goodnight Malaysian 370 those are the last words anyone heard from captain zahari as far as we know and um that in and of itself was kind of an odd transmission because typically any airline captain would have replied with the frequency said the frequency back to confirm that that was the right one but instead all he said was good night

Malaysian 370 and very shortly after that two minutes later MH370 disappeared from the radar the moment it showed up on Ho Chi Minh air traffic controls radar screens

it just vanished right without ever having made contact with them via radio frequency this should have like set off alarms with Ho Chiman city and apparently they did notice koala l'ampur didn't notice the guy was they had all this other air traffic to deal with yeah and they were out of their zone at this point yep and he'd said good night and you know everybody knows good night you can't go back on that you have to wait until tomorrow

that's right to make contact again um so the the koal lampur is i don't know about blameless in this but certainly less blameful than um hochi men hochey men and hoochie men noticed that they just disappeared from the screen, but it took them a full 18 minutes before they called Kuala Lumpur and said, hey, do you know anything about where MH370 is? Because they kind of vanished from our radar. Yeah, like, I don't know the exact process. In their defense, they were trying to get in touch. It's not like they just said, well, we'll see what happens. They got in touch with another pilot who was nearby in that airspace to contact them. And this pilot reported there was interference and static. I heard mumbling on the other end, but that's the last we heard and we lost

connection. Right. We're not even sure that he was talking to the right people. Yeah. So, I mean, they were trying to get in touch, but you're right. I think, like, sooner than 18 minutes, they should have said, by the way, this plane that just left your airspace has disappeared. Like, do you know what's going on? Right. Protocol, international protocol is five minutes. Okay. So they waited 13 minutes longer than protocol dictated. And it was so much beyond when they should have called that the controller in Kuala Lumpur actually said on the record like why didn't you call me sooner how are you just calling me about this like that may as well have been yesterday right it's missing for 18 minutes which as we'll get to later on stuff that came up in the investigation

that was just the first step in a series of missteps right that led to the reason why mh370 may never be found yeah so uh should we take a little break and talk about radar radar radar Riley? We'll be back right after this. Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. We've got an exciting week ahead for you on stuff to blow your mind. It's cat week. That's right, to coincide with International Cat Day on August 8th. We're dedicating every episode in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed to your cute, mysterious feline companions. So tune in for core Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes on the earliest archaeological evidence for domesticated cats and the folkloric cats of the British Isles. The week's monster fact will focus on a popular cat creature and you better believe Weird House Cinema will cover some kind of head scratching cat movie. So tune in August 5th through 8 for Stuff to Blow Your Mind's Cat Week.

Find us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcast. American History is full of wise people. What women said something like, you know, 99.99% of war is diarrhea and 1% is gory. Those founding fathers were gossipy AF, and they love to cut each other down. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions about American history, and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer. Hamilton pauses, and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar.

And Jefferson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. It would have been harder to fake it than to do it. Listen to American History Hotline on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noah. I'm 13, and as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast, and I explain those fake headlines like your uncle would, like your cousin would if he actually did the research. Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions.

Now you know with Noah DeBarroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it when I'm watching everything. The majority of the youth, 18 through 24, say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to fund the economy. You kidding. Politics is wild and I'm definitely not here to pay it, but I'm here to make sense of it. Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means for us.

Bring your brain. Listen to Now You Know with Noah de Barossa on the I-Heart. Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Radar O'Reilly? Not radar O'Reilly. Radar used by air traffic control. It's different. It is different than Radar O'Reilly.

This is called secondary radar, and it sends out a little beam that it's very narrow and it sweeps the area. And onboard the aircraft, they have a transponder that detects this beam and sends their own signal back that says, this is how fast we're going, this is where we're headed, and a code that says, and this is who I am. Yeah, maybe even MH370, as simple as that, something like that. That's right. That's what's supposed to show up on air traffic controls radar screen. So they can see, oh, here's MH370 coming toward DL 1722 or whatever. At this speed.

Right. They have all this information. And that's called secondary radar. Primary radar is what you think, where it's like, you know, it's a blip on a screen that this big radar ray is bouncing off of and receiving information back from. But it's just, you see it's physically there. This has far more information. And that's why air traffic control around the world. uses. Right. And this is very key because just a few seconds after it made that switch over into

Ho Chi-Men's airspace, the transponder stopped sending information. That transponder that's supposed to say who you are, where you are, and how fast you're going, just stopped. It vanished. And this is when the ball was dropped by a little bit by Kuala Lampur not noticing and definitely by Ho Chi-Men not doing anything immediately in response to Kuala Lampur. Right. So primary radar, the radar that you typically think of when you think of radar, there are very few places in the world where you can't be tracked by someone on radar. It's fairly old technology. It's been around for a while. But the places where you can't be tracked can be vast over the ocean in the desert, over extremely mountainous or wooded areas. There are places where you can't really put a radar tower.

and you can disappear from radar, right? I think what I'm trying to say here is if you take your plane out of radar range and you turn off your transponder, you can make a modern airliner as big as a 777 vanish where people don't know where it is. And that's a really, I think,

hallmark point or trait to this mystery that kind of like gets people a little unnerved is, wait a minute, Like, this is the 21st century. This happened in 2014. Right. What do you mean there's times and situations where an airliner can disappear and people don't know where it is?

Yeah. And that was the situation. And as Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala and Pooh are starting to scramble to try to figure out, you know, where this is, apparently they called Malaysian Airlines and said, hey, do you know anything about MH370? And Malaysian Airlines said, oh, yeah, they're flying over Cambodia right now. And they're like, where, what are you, how are you seeing this? after an hour, finally, Malaysian Airlines is like, no, we're just referring to the flight plan.

They should be over Cambodia right now. What do you mean you can't find them? What's going on? Yeah, but because of that primary radar, the secondary radar wasn't functioning, like we said, because the transponder was off. But the primary radar did track them for about an hour after those communications dropped

because of the Malaysian military was able to track it with the primary radar. Yeah, apparently it flew through the primary radar of five different countries, and the only one that bothered to track it was Malaysia's Air Force. Yeah. But they didn't do anything about it. They didn't follow up to see who it was.

They didn't scramble any jets to go see if everybody was okay. They just knew that there was an unidentified plane flying through Malaysian airspace, and the Air Force didn't do anything about it. This is embarrassing enough that the Air Force didn't reveal this to anybody for a while, which was a really important point, because during this time, about an hour, about an hour and a half after the takeoff and an hour after the thing disappeared from transponders, the Malaysian Air Force was tracking MH370, and it saw that it seemed to have taken a turn. Yeah, I mean, they know what happened at this point for a little while.

It made a sharp turn. That was not part of the planned flight plan. No, not at all. This is where things definitely took a metaphorical. and literal turn. Yeah. It headed southwest at that point, crossed over the Malay Peninsula, over Malaysia, again, and then parts of Thailand.

Then it made a right turn. This is very key, near the island of Penang, just put a pin in that. Then headed west by northwest toward the Andaman Sea, and then at 222 a.m., vanish from radar, from that primary radar as well. Right. So the Malaysian Air Force saw this happen. on its radar, it didn't tell anybody for a while. The flight plan had it leaving Malaysia,

crossing over the Strait of Malacca, into the peninsula where Thailand is located into China, right? Just away from Malaysia. From what the Malaysian Air Force saw, this thing doubled back on itself and then went in some totally different directions. Almost the opposite direction it was supposed to be going in. And like you said, it dropped off of the radar,

And that was the last time anyone saw it on radar. But that's not the last time we were able to track MH370. And that's thanks to a satellite network that's run by an outfit called InMarsat. Yeah, so in Marsat, if you've ever been on a plane and you've enjoyed the benefits of watching movies streaming or connected to your computer via Wi-Fi, that is because of satellite communication. these airplanes are equipped with a system and it transfers data and all their voice communications via satellite and some of this data from the plane

is automatically shared with these ground tracking stations which is a really big deal so not only are they letting you watch movies and doing all that but it's sending this automatic data on a regular on the reg basically from that satellite to these ground stations right so they think by this time actually I believe they know by this time

MH370s navigational systems entertainment systems a bunch of its systems have been turned off the only thing that was still operating was this satellite link I guess beacon yeah it's called a satellite data unit

okay so the satellite data unit which was capable of contacting and receiving contact from the MRSat satellites. Now, at the time, no one knows that this is happening, right? Like, there's no sound being made. There's nobody tracking this. This all came out much later when M.Rsat realized they were sitting on a bunch of data. But during different points over the next six, seven hours, the satellite and the satellite data unit talk to each other under a few different

circumstances. And because of this, this company, M.Rsat, which is located in or has, headquartered in Great Britain, but literally covers the globe. Not just with airline stuff, but maritime thing, which I think where they were originally founded to do, is to enable maritime communications. Okay. Like, you know, satellite phone, you're calling through M-Marsat. Yeah.

Right? So they've got this whole constellation of satellites. And when MRSET heard about MH370, they were like, I'll bet our satellites were tracking this thing in some way should perform, and it turns out that they were right. Yeah, and this is important here. There's four different ways or circumstances

where that satellite data unit on the plane is communicating with the satellite in space. Whenever you're making a data transmission or a voice transmission, whenever someone on the ground tries to contact the plane there's something that happens every hour if no one has made either one of these contacts for an hour you get a check-in called a handshake

that's just like you're still here shake hands buddy yeah just want to make sure you're logged on it's kind of like when you watch too much Netflix and Netflix sends a message saying are you still there loser yeah have you finished all the tub of cookie dough yet yeah and then it has a thing that says go outside right or actually it does It says watch another one. Right. Watch some more.

Why not have some more cookie dough? It's the same thing. It's sending a message to the plane's satellite data unit saying, like, are you still logged on? Right. And then the final thing, and this is super key, is whenever you first log on to the satellite system, that thing on the plane, whenever it kind of checks in and links up, that is very key because what can also happen, if that thing goes down and then reboots, it treats that as a new login, So it'll make another ping, basically, that it's logged on to the system.

Right. So M.Rsat goes back and looks at their data and says, okay, so here's a couple of things. Right now, this is, I think, within the first, like, few days. Everybody is looking in the South China Sea for MH370 because that was what was along its flight plan. The Malaysian Air Force hasn't revealed yet that it tracked MH370 turn around and go the opposite direction of what its flight plan was, was where it was scheduled to carry it. Yeah. And M. Marsat is now saying,

wait a minute, this thing didn't crash like an hour and a half after takeoff. This thing turned around and flew into the Indian Ocean for six or seven more hours because our satellite was talking to the plane. At various points. During this time. Yeah, and we should point out, too,

after Air France Flight 447, which crashed in 2009, this is when En Marsat really kind of beefed. up their system. They added more ground stations and they added a lot more capability to add storage for this data because they know that this can really help out in situations like this. That was a big one too. Do you remember that one? Oh, yeah. So that one was the first one that really opened people's eyes where it was like, wait a minute, when we're flying over the ocean, like no one knows where we are. Yeah. And they were like, no, actually not really. And they, I think that's why M.Rsat was like, we've got to build more ground stations. to bulk up our data, data storage, all that stuff. We've got to add more satellite capabilities. And in doing so, they made it so that you could be tracked when you're over the ocean,

even if you didn't want to be, as seems to have been the case with MH370. So it was a huge difference between 2004, was it 2004, 2009? 2009 and 2014, just five years. The thing proved itself. These upgrades they made were substantial. But Air France Flight 447, in and of itself, another. Languiche gem that just put you in the seat of this terrifying plane crash. That one in particular, they knew where the plane was, and it still took two years to recover

the black boxes and figure out what went wrong. Yeah. Which is terrifying, and if you know what happened to that one, basically the controls that got ripped away from the pilot, and it just went right into the ocean. Yeah. And they're still down there, apparently. There was a big debate over what to do with these people. when they started raising them,

they were perfectly preserved because they're so deep in the pressure and the anaerobic situation and, yeah, the temperature just kept them perfectly preserved, but as they were raised up into warmer waters,

the decomposition over two years just happened immediately. So I think the French government said they have to stay there. It's now a memorial. Do not try to raise anybody. And they're still down there strapped to their seats.

Jeez. Which when you just do not think about that the next time you get on a plane. I know. It's a terrible thing to think about it. I can tell you first hand. You've gotten so much better over the years, but I'm sure this is going to be a setback.

No, I'm hanging in there. All right, good. If it happens, it happens. Like, that's the way I kind of view it. Well, there's certainly nothing you can do about it. This isn't something that you guys are going to play in my memorial or my funeral, my last words. But if you're, if I go down in a plane crash, my number was up.

Right. And everyone else would be like, It's so weird. He always talked about it. Yeah, right. This was his word spear. He's such a freak. There was actually, I had a tweet once that said, if I ever go down on a plane crash, I'm going to shout, I wish I were to spend more time at work.

I'm not sure I get that. Well, you know, it's like no one ever says it in their deathbed. They wish they'd spend more time at work. Well. I got it. An ironic funny on the way down. Yeah, I'll make people laugh. Good for you.

Give them their last laugh. So this, where they're getting all this information. was from a ground station in Perth, Australia, a place we have been to. It was quite lovely. Lovely town. That's right. It was great. Anyone ever tells you, don't go to Western Australia.

You tell them that's BS, because Josh and Chuck said it's great. Yeah. All right. Very stupid. So BS stands for. So they had a lot of data, like we said, because they had beefed up their storage capabilities over the past five or six years. Right.

And they have a couple of... of types of data, something called burst timing offset and burst frequency offset. BTO is, it measures how long that a signal takes to reach a satellite, you know the speed of the signal, so you know exactly how far that plane is from the satellite at that exact moment. It's very easy to kind of understand. Right. First take into account, MRSAT has, oh, here was a, here was a ping, here is a ping, here is a ping, here is a ping.

right now they're digging in to analyze these pings and just the quality of them the timing of them all this stuff because they're like i'm pretty sure we can figure out where this plane was and maybe where it went if we really drill in and do some incredible math and figure out just kind of the nature of these pings yeah and what they're trying to do here is to narrow it down into an arc instead of a circle well i think that's just naturally what happened oh yeah you're right you're right i'm sorry Because Ed explained it in a very easy way, if you tell someone, hey, I'm 100 miles from Atlanta, then you draw a circle around Atlanta that's 100 miles, and you could be at any point along that circle. Right. But if that phone call was from Athens, which is not 100 miles from Atlanta, but it's, you know, 65 or so.

Okay. But if you said you're from some other city in Georgia, then you would know where you were, and if you knew how fast they were going, then you could really, it doesn't become a circle, then it becomes an arc. Right, the number of points on that circle where that person could possibly be. Yes, it's smaller. Yeah, much smaller, maybe by half, maybe by two-thirds.

And yet, so the circle becomes an arc. And because of that burst timing offset, they could establish those arcs, and there were seven of them, I believe. Yes. No, they could establish the circles. Yeah, the circle. Because of the other one, the BFO.

The BFO, the burst frequency offset, those are more complicated. They involve the Doppler effect and basically tell the satellite or the satellite data tells in Marsat, we're going in this direction because the, you know, the Doppler effect when an ambulance siren is coming to you. And then it passes you. Right, it changes in pitch because of the relative distance and the direction that it's going. traveling, they could tell from this ping, this satellite ping, not even a data

transmission, just a ping which direction the thing was headed and roughly how fast it was going. And so they were able to create seven arcs. And after the seven arcs, the seventh arc was created by a ping that took place at 819

a.m. And after that there was another there was a log on request, a handshake request that the SDU failed to respond to, and they think that in between 8.19 a.m. and that last log-on request at 9.15 a.m., the plane finally crashed, probably from running out of fuel. Yeah, and they think the 819 was from one of those reboots that I was talking about when that system comes back on after power failure.

Right, which will come into play pretty soon. All right, so let's take another break here. Okay. All right. We'll be back with the leading theory right after this. Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.

We've got an exciting week ahead for you on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Cat Week. That's right, to coincide with International Cat Day, on August 8th. We're dedicating every episode in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed to your cute, mysterious feline companions. So tune in for core Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes on the earliest archaeological evidence for domesticated cats and the folkloric cats of the British Isles. The week's monster fact will focus on a popular cat creature and you better believe Weird House Cinema will cover some kind of head scratching cat movie. So tune in

August 5th through 8th for Stuff to Blow Your Mind's Cat Week. Find us on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. American History is full of wise people. What women said something like, you know, 99.99% of war is diarrhea and 1% is gory. Those founding fathers were gossipy AF, and they love to cut each other down. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions about American history, and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer. Hamilton pauses, and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was

Julius Caesar. And Jefferson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. It would have been harder to fake it than to do it. Listen to American History Hotline on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noah. I'm 13, and as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast, and I explain those fake headlines like your uncle would, like your cousin would if he actually did the research. Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions.

Now you know with Noah de Barroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it. When I'm watching everything. Sheesh. Majority of the youth, 18 through 24, say they trust Republicans more than Democrats from the economy. You kidding.

Politics is wild and I'm definitely not here to tame it. But I'm here to make sense of it. Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means for us. Bring your brain. Listen to Now You Know with Noah DeBarossa on the IHeart Radio. app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right. So the leading theory, and this is, the more I read this, the more I read this, the more it was Ackham's razor, kind of staring you in the face. Yeah.

Because we'll get into some of the kind of cockamamie theories, and there are many of them. But this one is the simplest, and it's probably what happened. It's the one I believe. It is that someone on board, and should we tease this out? Yeah. Okay. Someone on board took control of the plane, disabled that transponder, and then started flying in the other direction, back across my mind.

Malaysia, then put it on autopilot until it ran out of gas and it crashed into the ocean. Yeah, about the southern Indian Ocean, which is where the southern seventh arc was. Right. One of the reasons this makes a lot of sense is because that transponder going off at the exact moment when the plane transitioned from Kuala Lampur's airspace into Ho Chi Men's, it would be an incredible coincidence if that was just an incredible coincidence. That in and of itself says that there was a human. factor involved. Like someone knew what that meant. Right, exactly. So it was somebody who knew

how to do that, when to do it, and the timing of it was just too spectacular for it to have been an accident. Yeah, because what they probably counted on is exactly what happened was there was a period of time. They might have figured five minutes, which is what you said the standard was. Right. But what they got was 18 minutes of confusion. Yeah. I mean, it tripled what they were counting on. Exactly. The best case scenario. Yeah.

The other thing was that the turn that the MH370 made was so abrupt that an autopilot wouldn't have done that. No. If you put a plane on autopilot and it turns, it would make a much wider turn. This is a hard kind of backtracking turn that it made to its left to the south. southwest from the north you traveling the northeast the turn was to the southwest so just the turn alone which came after the transponder was turned off um shows that it was under human control it was a person piloting the plane making it turn like right and that rules out things like uh mechanical failure or fire everything from meteor strike to a squall line to any kind of weather it was all that was is ruled out by

the fact that this turn took place clearly under human control. Right. That also rules out hypoxia. If you remember the very eerie crash with a golfer plane, Payne Stewart on that private jet. I don't really remember that. Can you kind of refresh my memory? That was in 1999, and I think the post-mortem on that one was that this private plane, essentially everyone on board died of hypoxia, including the pilots, and it flew for a

number of hours on autopilot it was a ghost plane essentially wow yeah so they they don't think that hypoxia affected whoever was in control of the plane because it made that turn yeah it was a very deliberate turn and then it followed a more an even more deliberate flight pattern after that this was not random movements of a plane where somebody who is suffering from hypoxia but still alive would make. These weren't confused decisions. They were difficult to understand decisions, but they weren't random and confused behavior.

They were deliberate. That's right. So one of the pilots or both of the pilots suffering from hypoxia is ruled out. And the fact that they were deliberate turns also rules out the idea that both of the pilots were dead. Right. That, again, it was just the plane flying itself.

Right. these log-on requests by that STU unit on the plane it was another big clue there because there was a log-on request made at 143 a.m. And that basically says that the power on the plane's electrical system was shut off for a period of time in between that transponder disappearing and that time of that log-on request.

Right. So someone like purposefully disabled these systems. Right. So 143 a.m. would have been about an hour after takeoff, just over an hour after takeoff, after the transponder was turned off with perfect timing between Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh, but also before the turn

that the Malaysian Air Force tracked. That's right. Or at about the same time. Right. The other thing that could have happened when the transponder and the SDU were shot, shut off. It could have depressurized the plane. If that happens, then hypoxie is the fear. Those oxygen masks are going to drop down, but you only get about 10 minutes of oxygen as a passenger.

The cockpit is going to have a lot more oxygen than that. But we do know for a fact from that log on request that the systems were all for an hour. So even if that were the case, then the masks run out 10 minutes later and the people die of hypoxia of the passenger. shortly after that. The thing is, is they believe that not only was MH370 still at cruising altitude, it probably actually climbed to 40,000, maybe a little over 40,000 feet. It's basically the maximum that 77 could stay aloft at. So the drop-down masks would have been totally useless to begin with.

There's not enough oxygen coming through them to offset that kind of height and to depressurized cabin. That's meant for a much lower altitude. And the reason why I found it very disconcerting to learn that there's only like 10 or 15 minutes worth of oxygen coming out of those masks. I mean, is the idea there that a plane crash doesn't take longer than that? The idea is that it's used for an emergency transition down to a much lower altitude where you could breathe without a pressurized cabin, and that that takes less than 10 or 15 minutes. You can do that much more quickly, a few minutes. So basically you're going to start flying with your own oxygen tank.

Basically. Okay. I'll be like, try to take it away from you. right you can't do it uh here's another thing is that that stu log on request um at the end it's it suggests that it was turned back on and the thinking here is that whoever did this um it probably didn't care at that point because it was too late because everyone on board was dead right so the idea behind all this is that the power was shut off and they know that the power was turned off because the log on request

came at a certain point, right? So that means that the power had been shut off and it was coming back on. And they think that it was to depressurize the cabin and be a very easy way to depressurize the cabin just turn off all of the power. And then maybe whoever did this, and we'll get to that, it was like, I want to get back down

to normal cruising altitude here. So I can fly this plane without wearing a mask maybe or just in a less stressful environment. Right, exactly. Maybe go get a bite to eat or something like that. There's a lot that can be done in a pressurized cabin. And then there was that final arc, the seventh one, that log on request, was probably the plane running out of fuel.

And this I thought was super interesting. So the plane runs out of fuel. Those engines shut down. But there's still air pumping through those turbines, and that's going to spin the turbine. And that's certainly not going to be enough to fly your plane, but it could be enough to act as a generator. and power up the auxiliary power system.

That's right. Super, super interesting. Yeah, so in the running out of fuel, electrical goes down, those air ram jets come on, and the auxiliary power system comes on, the thing logs back on. Just enough to get that going again. Right, exactly.

So let's just, before we stop for this episode, Chuck, let's just kind of recap what M.Rsat has been able to figure out from seven pings between its satellite and the satellite data unit. seven pings they dove into these things so deeply that they were able to figure out that the that the flight did not crash that it um the there was probably a hypoxia event among the cabin that it was deliberate and that the the plane kept flying um not that it kept flying for at least six more hours and finally did probably crash in the southern indian ocean all from seven little pings between the plane and the satellite. That's right. And then the final little clue here from the satellite is the ELT, emergency transmitter, failed. It's emergency location transmitter. And that's linked to a different satellite system. And one person, if you're conspiracy-minded, might say, well, you know what? This means it didn't actually crash into the ocean. But these ELTs apparently have a pretty low success rate. And when you dive into the ocean with no power, it's at tremendous speed. and that would have been enough probably to destroy the plane instantly and this ELT. There's another, so there's four, I think, on the plane.

Did you say that? I didn't say four. So I believe there is four on the plane. One of them, like they can be disabled. It's not a black box, by the way. No, no, no. This is just a beacon that pings a satellite, but it's a different satellite from MRSat. So it's like an extra fail safe.

And this means that all four of them failed, which, again, some people think, that's that's evidence right there that this thing didn't actually crash we'll talk about that in the next episode about that all right uh i think we don't do list our mails on a part one no so just strap in and i hope you can hold off from researching for a couple of days on this one maybe you have a bloody merry while you're waiting agreed well anyway in the meantime if you want to get in touch of this you can go on to stuff you should know dot com and check out our social links and you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast diheartradio dot com Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio.

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