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

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey Seattle, we'll see you Thursday, January 16th at the Moore Theater. In San Francisco, we're gonna be at the Castro on January 18th. When else, Chuck?

That is it, man. January 18th at the Castro, our annual trip to SketchVest. We love performing there. We have great crowds there. Go get a ticket. If you wanna come see me at Movie Crush the next night on Sunday in a small venue where you can shake my hand and hug my neck,

I would welcome that as well. Well, that's what I was setting you up for when I said, what else? I appreciate that. We'll see you guys. You can get all the info and tickets you need on sysklive.com or sfsketchfest.com. Welcome to Step You Should Know,

a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry over there and this is stuff you should know about one of the most 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 gonna 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 wanna give a huge shout out to one of my journalistic heroes, William Langwash. 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 ever read a Tom Wolf book or article or whatever, he has a really great knack for making you feel like you're there in the action. But then he also has a knack for making you step back and think, how does Tom Wolf know all this? Was he there?

William Langwash 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, anytime around when you're flying. Cause 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 Langwash 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 DB Cooper or Bermuda Triangle, like there's something about aviation disasters and mysteries that are really intriguing to me. And for an 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. But the reason I was saying why it's tough to overstate like what a mystery image 370 is, it's the only airliner that is considered disappeared, 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 and the where are both really confounding. And the reason why air travel in the 21st century is way safer than auto travel is because anytime an airliner goes down, everyone in the international community comes together, investigates it, they do so openly,

the airline, the airplane manufacturer, the everyone involved is expected to like tell the truth 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 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 up, sure. Okay, sure. Are you about to say buckle up? Yeah, okay. Buckle up because we're gonna take off on March 8th, 2014 in Kuala Lumpur. It's the very beginning of March 8th. The takeoff scheduled for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370

from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was scheduled for 1235 AM. That's right, we're in a Boeing 777-200ER. 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 six o'clock. 630. 630, in Beijing time.

And it's gonna 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. That's too shabby. Seven minutes, I'm not sitting there rocking in my seat, like let's go yet.

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 switched from the airport's air traffic

to Kuala Lumpur Area Control Center. Yeah. And 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 rewinding 15, 30 seconds to get every single detail, okay?

Because you're gonna need them for the big finish. So four minutes later, like you said, they were cleared to go to 35,000. It's talking 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. Captain Zahari Ahmad Shah is piloting 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 gonna factor in for sure. Yeah. 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 Lumpur control center, says we're at 35,000 feet.

Then seven minutes later, he radios again, says by the way, and this is not me doing him. I don't know what he sounded like, but. Kuala Lumpur, there you go. This is Captain Zahari. Yeah, 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 an 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 was an 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 1,19 a.m., Kuala Lumpur Area Control Center.

It's like 11 minutes later. Yep, said, hey, MH370, you're about to leave our jurisdiction and enter Ho Chi Minh's 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 Captain Zahari responded with, good night, Malaysian 370. Those are the last words anyone heard from Captain Zahari as far as we know. And 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 they 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 Chi Minh city. And apparently they did notice. Kuala Lumpur 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 to make contact again. So the Kuala Lumpur is, I don't know about blameless in this, but certainly less blameful than Ho Chi Minh. And Ho Chi Minh 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? It's 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 that led to the reason why MH370 may never be found. Yeah. So should we take a little break and talk about radar? Radar O'Reilly?

We'll be back right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Radar O'Reilly? Not radar O'Reilly.

Radar used by Air Traffic Control. And it's different. It is different than radar O'Reilly. This is called the secondary radar. And it sends out a little beam that it's very narrow when 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 how fast we're going, is where we're headed, and a code that says, and this is who I am. Yeah, maybe even MH370 is simple as that, something like that. That's right. That's what's supposed to show up on Air Traffic Control's radar screen.

That's so they can see, oh, here's MH370 coming toward DL1722 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 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 Minh's airspace,

the transponder stops 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 Lumpur not noticing and definitely by Ho Chi Minh not doing anything immediately in response to Kuala Lumpur. 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? There's, 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?

And that was the situation. And as Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur are starting to scramble to try to figure out where this is, apparently they called Malaysian Airlines and said, hey, do you know anything about MH370? Malaysian Airlines said, oh yeah, they're flying over Cambodia right now. And they're like, wait, 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.

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 or 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. 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. Put a pin in that. Then headed West by Northwest toward the Andaman Sea and then at 222 AM, vanish from radar, from that primary radar as well. Right, so the Malaysian Air Force saw this happen on this 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. That's thanks to a satellite network that's run by an outfit called Inmarsat.

Yeah, so Inmarsat, 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 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, MH370's 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 MRSAT 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 MRSAT,

which is located in or 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. Like, you know, satellite phone, you're calling through MRSAT, right? So they've got this whole constellation of satellites.

And when MRSAT heard about MH370, they were like, I'll bet our satellites were tracking this thing in some way or shape or form, 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. It'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 you're still there. Yeah, 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 doesn't. 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, 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 MRSAT 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 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 scheduled to carry it. And MRSAT 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 MRSAT 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. And they were like, no, actually not really. And I think that's why MRSAT was like, we got to build more ground stations, we got to bulk up our data, data storage, all that stuff.

We 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.

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 Langouache gem that just puts 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 got ripped away from the pilot and it just went right into the ocean. 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. 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 they, 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. Geez. 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,

I can tell you firsthand. You've gotten so much better over the years, but I'm sure this is gonna be a setback. No, I'm hanging in there. All right, good. Yeah, 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 gonna play in my memorial, in 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, that's so weird, he always talked about it. Yeah, right. This was his worst fear.

He's such a freak. There was actually, I had a tweet once that said, if I ever go down in a plane crash, I'm gonna shout, I wish I were to spend more time at work. Well, I'm not sure I get that. Well, you know, it's like no one ever says that in their death bed, they wish they'd spent more time at work, well.

I got it, then 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've 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. And they have a couple of types of data, something called burst timing offset and burst frequency offset. BTO 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 taken into account, MRSAT has, here was a ping, here was a ping, here was a ping, here was a ping. Now they're digging in to analyze these pings

and just the quality of them, the timing of them, all this stuff, because they are 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, 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. But if that phone call was from Athens, which is not 100 miles from Atlanta.

But it's, you know, 65 or so. 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. No, they could establish the circles. And because of the other one,

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 MRSAT, we're going in this direction because 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 traveling, they could tell from this ping, the 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 AM. And after that, there was another, there was a logon request, a handshake request that the SDU failed to respond to and they think that in between 819 AM and that last logon request at 915 AM, the plane finally crashed,

probably from running out of fuel. Yeah, and they think that 819 was from one of those reboots that I was talking about when that system comes back on. Which will come in 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. On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

["I'll Be There For You"] All right, so the leading theory, and this is, the more I read this, the more it was Occam'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 so in my belief. It is that someone on board, and should we, 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 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 Lumpur's airspace into Ho Chi Minh'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, but what they got was 18 minutes of confusion. I mean, it tripled what they were counting on. Exactly.

Best case scenario. The other thing was that the turn that the MH370 made was so abrupt that an autopilot wouldn't have done that. 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 Southwest from the North, traveling the Northeast, the turn was to the Southwest.

So just the turn alone, which came after the transponder was turned off, shows that it was under human control. It was a person piloting the plane, making it turn. Right, and that rules out things like mechanical failure or fire. Everything from meteor strike to squall line to any kind of weather, all that 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 golfer plane, pain steward 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 postmortem 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 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 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, that again, it was just the plane flying itself. Right.

These logon requests by that SDU unit on the plane, it was another big clue there, because there was a logon request made at 1.43 AM, 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 logon request. Right.

So someone purposefully disabled these systems. Right. So 1.43 AM 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 shut off, it could have depressurized the plane. If that happens, then hypoxia 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 logon request that the systems were off for an hour. So even if that were the case, then the masks run out 10 minutes later and the people die of hypoxia, the passengers, 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 a 777 could stay aloft at. So the drop down masks would have been totally useless to begin with. There's not enough oxygen coming through to offset that kind of height and 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 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. I'll be like, try to take it away from the TSA. You can't do it. Here's another thing is that that SDU log-on request at the end, it suggests that it was turned back on.

And the thinking here is that whoever did this 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. 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, 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 MR-Sat 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 flight did not crash, that there was probably a hypoxia event among the cabin, that it was deliberate, and that the plane kept flying, not that it did not crash, but 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.

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, 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 failsafe. And this means that all four of them failed, which, again, some people think, 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. I think we don't do Lister Males 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 Mary while you're waiting. Agreed. Well, anyway, in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you

can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links. And you can also send us an email to stuffpodcastdyeheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

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