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

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

In the absence of an official explanation of why flight MH 370 disappeared in 2014, conjecture and conspiracy theories have filled the vacuum. 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. San Francisco, we're coming to see you soon. Yeah, we're gonna be there on Saturday, January 18th, Chuck, and since it's San Francisco, we're gonna be wearing nothing but appropriately placed clumps of rhizoroni.

It is the San Francisco treat. Yes, and we're the San Francisco treat, too, whenever we're in town, so everybody should come see us. That's right, it's part of SketchFest. As always, we love performing there. You can go to sysklive.com for details, or sfsketchfest.com, and if you're around Sunday night, you can come see me do Movie Crush Live

in a very small, fun venue where you can shake my hand. Very nice, so come see us, everybody. You won't regret it. We're pretty sure that's correct. And hey, another thing. This is weirdly edited in real time. We're recording this in our time two days previous. My brain just melted out of my ear.

Well, we wanted to kind of front load this with a listener mail, because of what's going on in Australia, all this was sort of happening. It's been happening for a little while, but over the holiday break, when we weren't in here and had a chance to do something. This is from Sally M, guys who live in Sydney, New South Wales, you've probably been hearing

about the catastrophic wildfires that have been happening across the country since September. Having lived in California before, I thought I knew what to expect. However, this has been truly unprecedented. Minor inconveniences for us have been happening, but compared to what so many other Aussies in our wildlife is experiencing,

yet another example of the far-reaching effects of this emergency. There's so much need in Australia, and I thought the stuff you should know, Army might be primed to help out. This is great. This is from Sally M, and this is something that has been on our radar for a little while,

but obviously, being across the world, America's becoming more aware and engaged thanks to social media in recent days and weeks. It's just devastating to see what's happening there. We've always had such incredible support from Australia, and when we had a chance to visit there, just we're charmed by the people and by the beautiful country, and it's just heartbreaking.

So we want to direct people to quite a few places, because there are lots of ways that you can give money to help out. Do you have some? I've got some, too. Yeah, I've got a bunch. All right, go ahead. I mean, you can do the usual,

the Australian Red Cross, the Salvation Army Australia, St. Vincent de Paul Society. There's something called Food Bank in Australia. Those are some pretty good places to start. Yeah, and we're huge fans of animals and held koalas and petted kangaroos while we were there, and to see these images of these animals in need

has just been really tough. So the World Wildlife Fund is always a great place to start. There's an organization called Wires, capital W-I-R-E-S. The Port, Macquarie, Koala Hospital, the RSPCA of New South Wales is all gonna help out our animal friends. And if you want to help out the firefighters directly, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service

has set up funds for the families of volunteers fighting the fires who have died fighting the fires. Yeah, so do what you can. It is a dire situation right now. And I think people can come together and spare a few bucks. Every little bit helps. Yeah, and Australia, we are thinking of you.

The whole world is sending you good vibes. Big time. And hang in there. All right, so finally, let's get on with the show. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is part two of two about MH370, the most mysterious disappearance of any airliner in the history of modern aviation. That's right. We won't do a full recap, but where we're picking up now is... No, no, wait.

You wanna do a full recap? 20 minutes easy. We are at the point where the plane has crashed. And we're gonna pick up with post-crash investigations, which, like many airline crash investigations, were bungled in, was bungled in a lot of ways. Oh, yeah. So Ed points out that like, kind of oddly,

that there are a lot of crash investigations you can point to that, you know, kind of deferred toward the airline manufacturer when they were at fault, or tried to do some cover-up or was not great. None of them, from what I can tell, compared to this one. No, agreed.

This was very, very not good. And the seems to be the roundly accepted reason for the whole thing being bungled was that Malaysia at the time was a dictatorship, and you could disappear if you weren't doing your job very well, or if you offended the people in charge. And a crash of a Malaysian's airline flight, in particular, was kind of a dicey thing to talk about,

because Malaysian Airlines was the pride of Malaysia. And it was a, at the time, a government, largely government-owned and controlled airline, a state-owned airline. It was the, Malaysia was the majority owner of stock, and it was publicly traded Malaysia Airlines was, but they owned the majority of it. They called the shots.

And after 2014, which proved to be a terrible year by any airline standards, because not only was MH370 did it vanish, MH17 was shot down over Ukraine the same year, just less than six months later. The Malaysian government said about buying back all of the shares that were outstanding of Malaysian Airlines,

and took it off of public listing, made it a fully state-owned company. Yeah, so they certainly didn't want the bad press. No. It was sure to follow. No, so there's a lot of people who say the Malaysian government covered this up, not because they did anything nefarious, but because they were worried

that something embarrassing was gonna come out. And this is not a government that could handle embarrassment very well. And so they literally obfuscated the investigation into what happened to MH370. Yeah, so the first problem here is, we know now that this plane crashed in the South Indian Ocean,

and it took a week before they were looking in the South Indian Ocean. So the first 24 hours was in the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam. They ended up hooking up and creating a joint agency coordination center, or actually, Australia's who created that. And they led the search efforts

because it was close to them. And they found no trace, even after they did all this ocean floor mapping, searching, they had that seventh arch pegged, searched all along there. 120,000 square miles. Yeah, which is, even if you find that seventh arch and you know it's somewhere in here,

that's still a vast, vast area. And this thing is on the bottom of the ocean at this point. And we should say it, by this time, Australia has stepped up and been like, well, this happened not too far from us, I guess, where the closest major country, certainly Western democracy in this area, we'll head this up.

Malaysia will help you out. And they footed a lot of the bill, which was pretty cool for Australia. 160 million bucks, that's what Australia spent. Yeah, and I think it was the most, and still is the most expensive search in aviation history. Yeah.

Which is kind of surprising, you'd think that more would have been spent, but I think they usually find them sooner than this. This was not found. And they searched for two solid years for this thing. And just on that seventh arch, there's a lot of people who at the time were like, no, you know how it forms a circle?

Well, there's a northern arch and a southern arch. And some people said, no, northern arch, somewhere it's in Kazakhstan. The southern arch was in the Indian Ocean. Most people said it's probably the southern arch. Right. So that's where they searched, and they still didn't find it.

Yeah, and it took so long to even get there. By that point, there were a lot of things. If you had that first 24 hours, it's sort of like a murder investigation. That first day is so key. The first 48? Yeah, is it 48? I'll say I'm there and I'm down to 24, buddy.

Yeah, okay. So Malaysia then heads up what's called a joint investigation team. The US was involved, China, Britain, and France. This was the one that was meant to follow the protocols of just the internationally agreed upon accident investigation to make air travel safer for everybody, and Malaysia did not help out very well.

No, so they issued, the Malaysian Ministry of Transport issued a preliminary in a final report. The preliminary report, Ed describes as more or less a reprint of the Boeing 777 manual. Just like, well, here was the plane. Which I think is kind of standard to have technical information, but this was-

But not as the whole report. Right. And then the second one, the final report, basically pointed out where air traffic control failed along the way. Yeah, and I saw in that Langouge article that they were politically speaking the easiest targets. They were not going to,

there wasn't gonna be any backlash by kind of taking them to task, especially taking the Ho Chi Minh air traffic controllers to task too. They should have been taking the task. 18 minutes is a very long time to let an airliner in your jurisdiction just be disappeared. So that was a big problem, but the Malaysian Air Force

also should have been criticized for covering up the fact that they hadn't done anything for an hour that they were tracking this unidentified airplane in their airspace and let an entire search, multi-national search be mounted in the South China Sea. Yeah, in the wrong place. For like a couple of days before they were like,

actually, we think they went this way. Cause it takes a long time to even assemble that kind of search squad. So I think if they searched for two days and didn't get started until a week later, that's like four days just to like move. Right. And so in that time, an oil slick, a debris field,

all that stuff can just vanish. And an airliner really can in an area the size of the Indian Ocean, especially even when you know where to look can just disappear. And that is why a lot of people say, we will probably never find MH370. There's another couple of reasons why too.

Are we gonna get to those? Okay. The police in Malaysia, and this bore a little bit of fruit, they conducted some background checks on everyone on the plane. And they did find two passengers who were Iranians that had stolen passports. Apparently they were just seeking political asylum though, although that does factor in

to some of the conspiracy theories that pop up later on. Yeah, anytime you have two Iranian nationals traveling under fake passports on a plane that disappeared, some people are going to say, I don't know about that one. Yeah, exactly. And then here was the one thing about their final report from the police

is they described Captain Zahari basically saying like this guy was great, nothing wrong. He was a great pilot, nothing to alarm anybody here about Captain Zahari. Nothing to see here. And that's in the final report. And we'll get to him, but that does not appear to be true.

No. So after the search, after two years and $160 million and 120,000, sorry, 120,000 square kilometers, I think it said square miles, still a lot of square miles searched. The Australians, the Malaysians and the Chinese that made up the tripartite commission

that were kind of running the show in this search said officially, we don't know what happened. All we can say is that we believe MH370 ended somewhere in the Southern Indian Ocean. That's the official stance on what happened to a vanished airliner that they said we don't know and that's as far as we're gonna go.

Yeah, and I do wanna point out quickly, there was one private agency called in or I think volunteered called Ocean Infinity. From Texas. Yeah, they performed a search basically pro bono if they find a plane to get paid, but just as a sort of a nerd in this way, I looked into that company and they are awesome.

Yeah, they are. It's really cool, man. They call it Seabed Intelligence and it's like James Cameron style stuff, the resources and the toys that these dudes play with. It's pretty cool. Yeah, they'll have a mothership, well at least this is what they did for the MH370 search.

They have a mothership and I think the mothership goes through and maps the underwater terrain in 3D first and then that forms their search area. They release some autonomous drones. Yeah, they look like torpedoes. Yeah, but they're drones that can be controlled from this mothership and they go through and scan using Sonar like in detail, the Seabed.

It's so cool. And high-risk photography, it's like really cool stuff. It works really well. Ocean Infinity has a great track record of finding stuff. They're who I would call. They found like a missing submarine from Argentina. They found a bunch of other things I would call them too by the way.

We should get them on the, we should hire them out for the Tybee Island nuke. We totally should. I'm surprised they haven't just done that for fun. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I think they should. Solve a mystery. Yeah, of the broken arrow or the empty quiver.

And they're like, we spent how many multi-millions of dollars just to say we solved that mystery? Right. Wait, is someone gonna pay us for this? No, no, they're from Texas. So anytime they find something, they don't think about that.

Instead, they just shoot their six shooters into the air. That's right. I forgot about that. Right. So that's fine. That's a good enough for them. Let's pay enough. But Ocean Infinity, yeah, they know what they're doing.

And they still couldn't find the A370. And they couldn't find it either. There were some things that were found in the search. Number one, this was uncharted territory. And now huge swaths of it are now mapped. They found an underwater volcano, an enormous one that they had no idea existed before. They found a couple of shipwrecks from the 19th century

that had just been totally lost. But they still found no trace whatsoever of MH370, despite two major searches in an official final report from Australia saying, we don't know, we will probably never know. All we can say is that the flight ended almost certainly in the Southern Indian Ocean. That's right.

And we should shout out the Independent Group. This is an online group of enthusiasts. Internet sleuths. Yeah, who got together to try and figure this out. And Ed even pointed out, you hear internet sleuths and you're like, come on, get off the tinfoil hat. But it turns out that these people, a lot of them were engineers.

They worked in aviation formally or currently. And they were really interested in trying to help. And I think ended up helping in a lot of ways. Yeah, and even beyond tinfoil hats, the internet sleuths can, they've done things like identified John Doze and Jane Doze. Yeah, for sure. They've done a lot of cool stuff,

but typically they're not qualified in what they're doing. They're just very interested and very dogged in their pursuits, right? With the Independent Group, these are actual, like people with PhDs in electrical engineering and secondary radar and satellites and the stuff that they're doing. They just all happened to come together,

bound by their common interest in search for this plane. And if you go and read, I will give you $1,000 if you can make it through one of their blog posts. It's so dense and so scientific, but they're so legitimate with the Australian government when they wrapped up their search, maybe at some point during it, they actually acknowledged and thanked

the Independent Group for their work because they were relying on it to some extent. Yeah, and I'm sure like no one ever in this kind of thing or search and rescue, no one ever wants this to happen, but this is their chance to really get involved in trying to do some good. Woohoo, the Independent Group?

Yeah. Sure. They also agitated for more transparency in this stuff. And I think they got their hands, well, they went around about way. They made friends with some of the family of MH370 just by the families hearing about what they were doing. And from one of the families, they got the raw MRSAT data

at a time when MRSAT was saying this actually belongs to Malaysia or Malaysian Airlines. We can't release it. Malaysia was saying, well, no, MRSAT has to release it. They just went around both and got the raw data and were able to really do some much better calculations than they had before with the raw MRSAT data. All right, so let's take a break

and we'll go start up our own internet sleuthing concern. Get that ramped up. What are we going to get to the bottom of? Puppies? Sure. Okay. Why are they so darn cute? That sounds like us. All right, we'll be right back. ["Hey Dude the 90s"]

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 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 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 will 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. Okay, Chuck, so. Are we at wreckage? Not quite yet. I want to talk about the, yeah, we are at wreckage. I think they'll tie in nicely to what I was going to say.

Yeah, I mean, because this thing disappeared, that is not to say there were no traces because we have pieces of this plane now. Right. There are people sort of like these internet sleuths that are captured by a story such that they will spend a large portion of their life trying to solve it and looking for stuff.

And savings. Yeah, sure, a lot of money. I think by people, you really mean person. No, there are a lot of other people. There was one man called Zahid Raza who searched for years and he was murdered in Madagascar. So he was, his job was as the Malaysian Council

to Madagascar, he's like the ambassador to Madagascar. Yeah, and the conspiracy minded will say, now this guy's finding stuff and they took him out. So there was a dude who did leave his life in I think Seattle and moved, well actually just started moving around the world, which he did normally anyway, but his name was Blaine Gibson. Yeah, he's an attorney.

Yeah, he factors big into that William Langwish article. He talks about him a lot, but he just became moved by this and decided that he was gonna go start finding wreckage and he has. I think a third of the debris found from MH370 has been personally found by Blaine Gibson, just globetrotting basically.

Amazing. But he figured out if it was the Southern Indian Ocean, then this wreckage is probably gonna start to show up somewhere around the Southern, the Southwest coast of Africa, South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar. And he was right. And the first piece turned up in 2015, it was a six foot piece of an airplane.

And it washed up. Can you imagine what he felt like? No, I can't, as a matter of fact. I mean, looking for this and then finding it. It's like a search for a needle in a haystack. But it was found on Reunion Island off of Madagascar. I think it's under the control of Mauritius. And this was a really big deal for a couple of reasons.

One, it showed incontrovertibly that the Southern arc was correct. That it hadn't flown north into Kazakhstan. That the flight had ended in the Indian Ocean. Yeah, I mean, it showed that it crashed. That's a big one. It showed that it had broken up. Like it wasn't like a fire, anything like that had come apart.

Well, and it wasn't secretly landed somewhere, because some of those conspiracies get pretty out there. Right. But the other effect that this had was that it devastated the MH370 families who had been holding out hope. Because it was disappeared. This airline had vanished.

And people were saying, no, it actually is in the air-based Diego Garcia under US control. No, it's under Russian control in Kazakhstan. It's somewhere, our people are somewhere. Maybe, maybe there's this hope, this dashed those hopes. And it came a full, more than a year after the plane disappeared. So they had been like really holding onto this hope

to a desperate degree for more than a year. And then it was dashed. So it was a big deal when it was found. And that was the first of several pieces that washed up in that area. Yeah, this was a part of the airplane called a flapperon. It's on the back edge of the wing,

and it's a control surface. You know the kind that just kind of flaps up and down on it? It's a great name for it. It is. Now I'll know. And the serial numbers confirmed it. So it was definitely from MH370. And then many other pieces have, I think, what, dozens?

At this point, the pieces of plane have been found. What's creepy is other pieces have been found, but they're not from MH370. It's like, well, what planes are these coming from? Oh, well, yeah. That's creepy. Yeah. I think maybe every, is there any way

to completely tag every square inch of an airplane? I don't know. I don't know. And not necessarily with a stamp, but I don't know. No, I know what you mean. Some kind of technology. You could probably attach some sort of marker to atoms eventually, and you would be able to tag

any part of any plane down to the atom. You find a little four-inch piece of metal, and you know what it is. You just analyze the atomic makeup, and be like, oh, look, MH370. But that's the future, everyone. That's not too far. Once we get into nanotechnology, that will be commonplace.

Although, we'll also probably be able to make planes that don't come apart. So the other thing to suggest, too, is that the plane hit, and we talked earlier about, when a plane is descending into an ocean like that, it's going super fast. And this really kind of confirms that, because they didn't find much wreckage.

The plane, these parts probably ripped off on the way down, and most of the plane fairly intact, hit the ocean, and went south very, very fast. Yeah, right to the bottom. Right to the bottom. So this also dashed the hopes of the families even further in that, those four electronic location transmitters, the life beacons that were supposed to go off,

and all four failed. Some family members and a lot of conspiracy theorists are saying, all four of those failing, no way. It means that the plane didn't descend quickly, didn't catch fire, didn't hit water, because some of those transmitters are supposed to go off when they hit water. But if they broke up on the way down,

because here's the thing, if the planes entered a steep decline at 600 miles an hour, which is about what they think it was cruising at, if it drops from 35,000 feet at 600 miles an hour within two minutes, it's going to just break up, either on the way down or the moment it hits water. So much so that some of these beacons that are designed for the scenario

are not going to function. And there's another, there is one beacon that is designed to go off on impact. It's designed for that kind of thing, but it needs 50 seconds above water to transmit to the satellite. So they think this thing hits so fast that that beacon might have just gone right down under water

and not been able to transmit in that 50 seconds. So it's an explanation that the plane came apart in the Southern Indian Ocean, didn't just crash in the Southern Indian Ocean, it came into a million pieces in the Southern Indian Ocean. Yeah, and we mentioned the black boxes in the previous episode. Obviously we don't have these black boxes,

they're down there with everything else, haven't recovered anything like that. But they think that they probably wouldn't tell much of a story anyway. No, and not unless there was some sort of final communications or something. That's what it would take. It would take whoever was in charge of the plane

at that time still talking and explaining. And if you were the only person alive on this plane, who would you be talking to? Well, let's go ahead and talk about who this might be because all indications point that it was the captain of the airplane himself, Captain Shaw. Yep, Captain Zahari Ahmad Shaw. That's right.

So the wreckage basically, I mean, there's a lot of clues. Again, we can't say anything for sure. But no one ever, it's unlikely that it was terrorist because one thing terrorists do, which is what makes them terrorists is claim responsibility. They like to brag. Well, so everyone knows who it was.

No one did this. No one even falsely did this, which happens sometimes. The same can be said for a kidnapping because there are some theories about that, that there were some important people aboard that they wanted to disappear or something. Right, like if you were kidnapping somebody, you want them alive and they can't be alive

if the plane's in a million pieces in the Southern Indian Ocean. That's right. And there were only two people on that plane who knew and had the knowledge and access to do this stuff. And that was Captain Shaw and first officer, Hamid. Also, yeah, there's something really important to point out here too, Chuck.

There was no distress call. Right. And if it was a hijacking, between the time that Zahari said good night, Malaysian 370 and the transponder went off at exactly the right time, right when it hit a Ho Chi Minh air traffic controls jurisdiction,

it would have taken a minute for terrorists to make their way into the cockpit, which was sealed with an electronic lock, lots super bolted. It would have taken less than a minute at a precise moment in time for terrorists to take control of the plane that just would not have happened. No.

The idea that these two were working together is not very plausible. The idea that it was first officer Hamid himself is not plausible because like we said, this is a greenhorn. He was just getting started in his career. He was super happy to have this job, this great job, flying the pride of Malaysia,

nothing at all points that he had anything to do with this. No, it doesn't. And also it would have been much harder for him to get Captain Shaw out of the cockpit. Yeah, like why don't you go take a bathroom break? Yeah, Captain Shaw would have been like, I don't need to. I'm the boss of you.

He's like, no, but seriously, go do it. I'm wondering how Captain Shaw might have gotten him out. So one thing language, this is a well I will keep going back to all day long. The language well? Yeah. He said that Captain Shaw was known as a somebody who wanted to know all the details of what was going on.

So it would have been very normal. Just go back and check on something. Exactly. It would have been very normal. It would have been very easy. And first officer Hamid would have hopped right up and gone right out of the cockpit, leaving Shaw alone to lock the door, lock him out.

Yep, and that's all it took. That's all it took. So when you start, we said that the report from the Malaysian police came back as a glowing report for Shaw. When you start doing a little digging around, that's not exactly the case. Before this plane disappeared in the months before

he had separated from his wife, he was living by himself. Apparently he was having an affair with a married woman. I think a platonic affair, but a weird emotional affair. Yeah. He also involved her children that he was really into. Right. He apparently was very big on social media,

but he did not leave like a Facebook post. No suicide note. No suicide note, no video. And he was on YouTube. He did DIY repair things on YouTube videos, which is pretty remarkable. But here's the big clue to me and everyone else is that Microsoft has this flight simulator

that's a lot of fun. And have you ever played around with one of those? Not for many, many years. It's a ton of fun. I've crashed tons of planes because it's really hard as it turns out to fly one of these. But he loved doing this. He loved flying these.

It was one of his hobby, was flying this flight sim. So they were able to get into the flights that he flew, preceding this disappearance. And one of them really closely matches the flight path of MH370 right into the Indian Ocean. Some people might say like, hey, listen, that doesn't prove anything. But all the other flights that he had played around with,

he took from takeoff to landing. This is the only one where he jumped forward like a podcast commercial. Don't say that. He's skipping forward in time on that flight alone to see how these fuel calculations were gonna play out and where this plane would be when it ran out of fuel over the Indian Ocean, flight sim over.

Right. And that is so suspicious. Like, I mean, I know you can speculate, but it's almost an open and shut case when you hear that. It's so suspicious. I saw one member of the independent group said that he left it as a bread crumb. Oh, interesting.

You know, that like he wouldn't have learned anything from Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is to a guy in the 777, basically a game, you know? That he was just basically leaving something behind. That was one guy's interpretation in the independent group. Well, the very least he could say, if I'm here and I'm on this header and I put it on autopilot,

who knows, he may have killed himself. Yeah. He may have wanted that thing to fly into the ocean for sure. So the idea is that Captain Zahari took control of the plane by locking first officer Hamid out of the cockpit, turned off the electrical system, took the 777 in a hard turn backtracking

and probably going up to about 40,000 feet at the same time, accelerating the effects of depressurization in the cabin. Yeah, killing everyone on board. Killing everyone on board, putting it on autopilot and setting a course for the Southern Indian Ocean with a plane full of dead people for a good six-something hours.

He may have killed himself at some point. He may not. There's some data that suggests that the plane running out of fuel and dropping from the sky would not have hit the ocean as hard as the wreckage suggests that it hit and that it might have taken somebody driving the plane into the ocean.

So he may have been alive to the very bitter end. And if he was a 777 pilot dying by crashing a plane in the ocean, I'm betting that he wouldn't have killed himself before the crash. It just doesn't seem right. But the idea is that he killed his passengers and then killed himself by crashing this plane

into the Southern Indian Ocean. And this, like the mind recoils from that idea. But the problem is, it's happened before. Pilots have killed their passengers and themselves. At least four times. Yes, multiple times in the history of air travel. Yeah, and here's the other final clue, which to me is kind of the cherry on top,

is that... Really, I found this one tough to start. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, I didn't think so. Because we mentioned earlier, he took a very deliberate path to do a little fly by of Penang Island that was out of the way

and he grew up on Penang Island. And I don't know, man. I don't think that was... So that's it? I don't think that was an accident. Okay. I think a final little fly by makes sense. I mean, I could see it, sure.

To me, it's the simulator. Well, I think... It's like a smoking gun. Both those things to me. So we were saying that people have done this before, right? Yeah. German Wings Flight 95-25. I remember that one.

L.A.M. Mozambique 470, Egypt Air 990, and... That's another language article you should read. I'm not reading any of these. You got it, man. He's so good, Chuck. Then Silk Air Flight 185. They murdered everyone on board.

Yep. I feel like there's no other way to take your own life. Yeah. There's so many other ways to take your own life that don't involve the innocent lives of your passengers that this is one of the most despicable things you can possibly do. Absolutely.

And so, in response, a lot of people... It's like a suicide bomber. Sure. A lot of people say there's no way he did this, including his family. They are like, no, this guy did not do that. He was a nice guy. He wouldn't kill a bunch of people.

But if you follow the evidence, and again, nobody can say for certain, and probably no one will ever be able to say that it was Captain Shaw that did this. But if you follow the evidence and you form your own opinion, there's a pretty convincing that he did. Yeah.

But a lot of people say no, no way. And because they've not been able to explain what happened, it's formed this vacuum that's being filled by conspiracy theories. Right. And there's a lot of them. Yeah, so we'll take our last break here and we will...

We're not gonna go too deep into those, but we will kind of rattle off some of the leading ones right after this. ["Paydude the 90s"] On the podcast, Paydude 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. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

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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.

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on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And Chuck, before we, you know, rattle off some of these conspiracy theories, I want to say, because we can't explain this, nobody can say that it was Captain Shaw. Sure. There are some things you say it's not,

like it wasn't an accident, it wasn't, it wasn't, you know, terrorists or anything like that, but you can't say definitively that yes, it was Captain Shaw. And if this floats your boat, this is a, there's a whole rabbit hole for you to dive down with MH370. There's a lot of other interpretations,

but this seems to be among air disaster experts, the likeliest explanation. Yeah, we are not saying to be clear that it was Captain Shaw. Nobody can say that it was. Yeah, we're just sort of following Occam's razor here and the findings of experts, like you said, that it just,

it's the cleanest explanation there is. Yeah. All right, well, some things that aren't so clean. Should we go over some of these? This was compiled by theweek.co.uk. The week. I didn't see, yeah. I didn't see any authorship though on this one.

Yeah, maybe they're like the economists and they don't, it's all the economists speaking, it's all the week speaking, you know what I mean? Exactly, they're a collective. So let me see here. One of these is that Captain Shaw parachuted out of the plane to meet that woman on a boat. Totally unnecessary because he and his wife

had already separated. Yeah. He was living alone. That's right, but that was actually written by a journalist in a book called The Hunt for MH370 by E. Ann Higgins. Okay. What else?

This one is interesting. That it was cyber hijacked. This is in another book called Beneath Another Sky, colon, a global journey into history. And this is the suggestion that Boeing's Honeywell, uninterruptible autopilot onboard computer was hacked and reprogrammed. Yeah, that ties into another one

that the CIA got their hands on the plane remotely. But I don't know that it's true, but there's a definite thread through conspiracy-minded groups that after 9-11 they have engineered some sort of mechanism on the airliners so that they can be remotely controlled in case they are hijacked

so nobody can fly something into the World Trade Center or anything like that again. Makes sense. It does make sense. It makes so much sense that I'm like, wait, did they actually do that? But that's like step one to that conspiracy theory. Step one is that that exists and then step two

is that somebody used it to vanish MH370. Yeah, what else? Asian Bermuda Triangle? No. Yeah, should we just... That's all you need to say. Well, this one, I thought it was funny because it said that when you look at where it crashed,

it's the exact opposite of the Bermuda Triangle on the other side of the globe. And then I guess someone just looked, and they were like, no, it's actually not. So go ahead and throw that down the tubes. Maybe in the general neighborhood, but definitely not on the... And also there's no Bermuda Triangle

causing plane crashes. Yeah, that's a big issue with that. Well, what do you got? Another one is that it was used as MH17. Remember I said that 2014 was a terrible year for Malaysian Airlines. And the idea is that they hijacked, they meaning probably the CIA or the US government

or some shadowy cabal, hijacked MH370, safely landed it in some Diego Garcia air base or somewhere under US control, killed everybody, or maybe they were dead from hypoxia to begin with anyway. Put them in freezers and then stage this, change the call sign from a zero or from an O to a D on the plane. Easy enough.

And then used it to be shot down over Ukraine. And supposedly there's reports from Ukrainian journalists and humanitarian workers and even Ukrainian rebels saying that the corpses that fell from this shot down plane MH17 over Ukraine were already decomposing and rotting as if they died weeks before. I've not found anybody who actually said that

or anything like that, but that's the whole thing is that it was a big false flag operation. Okay. But isn't it nuts that if you can explain something like a disappeared airliner, people go onto the internet and write books and say, here's what really happened.

And then it's this. Think about the level of distrust we have for the people running the show that this has an audience. Like I do not blame anybody who believes stuff like this because we've been lied to for so long that you can buy this. Some government agency would hijack a plane,

kill everybody and then use it to pin it on Putin-controlled Ukrainian forces. Right. Come on. Yeah, it was Hunter Biden. So here's another one that I thought was interesting and not I'm saying it's interesting as like, could it be? But if you go to look at passengers on an airplane

and try and find a thread, you might wanna look at the fact that there are 20 people that worked for a company all on board called Free Scale Semiconductor. So I hear that and I think, well, we should at least look into this. Is there any reason someone would want to tank this company or tank 20 people that worked,

important people that worked for this company? And the theory is that they might have been killed by plane crash either for secret technology or to manipulate stock prices. Right. And apparently that company helped the NSA or the CIA or the US government in general create some of its prism program surveillance technology.

So they were supposedly already in cahoots with shadowy agencies within the US government to begin with. And since this plane was headed to Beijing, China, perhaps this company was going over to work with China now and the CIA didn't like that. So they did this. Pretty interesting.

As you said, interesting. Yeah, that's all it is. And then there are other various ones from life insurance scams to false flag hijackings to alien abductions. Apparently 5% of Americans surveyed, believed that it was abducted by aliens. Believe MH370 was abducted by aliens?

I saw that and my brain wouldn't accept that. I think I just saw it as 5% of Americans believe in alien abductions. No, I think. I know, I can't hear what you're about to say. It's just some dumb survey. Okay, you got anything else? Well, if you want to know more about MH370,

friend, meet your new hobby because it is all over the internet and you can follow whatever thread you like. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. This one's a bit long, but boy, is it a good one. And super important one for this gentleman and his family. Hey guys, my name's Tyler. I live in Michigan.

Got a story for you. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, my family and I woke up and went around business as usual. I was playing a video game with my two boys and my wife said she was going out to the garage to get something and walked out the door. After about 10 minutes, my neighbor banged on the door.

I opened it to see my next door neighbor pointing at my wife, laying motionless on the ground in front of my car. Full on panic mode set in. I ran the 10 feet or so to find her not breathing. Fingers in face already blue and my neighbor started calling 911. Luckily, I remembered some advice from your CPR episode.

Not only how much pressure to apply to the sternum, which is a lot, but the rhythm. No. And I began to sing, staying alive. That is so great. By the Bee Gees in my head as I did the chest compressions. Trying to sing along while my adrenaline was pumping

was not easy, but I did my best to stay calm and keep singing that part of the song in my head. The colors started coming back to her face a little bit after I started. The EMTs and police were at my house within five minutes and used the defibrillator, I always mess that word up, defibrillator on her three times, gave her three shots

of epinephrine. Oh my gosh. Before they finally got her heart beating again. Her brain went without blood for 20 minutes though. And as a result, she's been diagnosed with brain damage. She's got a long road to recovery ahead of her, but the doctors think she has a good chance because of her age.

Her heart had a severe arrhythmia that ultimately caused cardiac arrest. I'm doing the best I can for her and my kids while she heals. I'm the primary provider for my family while my wife was a primary caregiver. Having to take off work and take care of my kids has been really scary, but I've gotten tremendous support

from friends and family here in my time of need. So I just want to thank you guys for the work you do. Without your podcast, I likely would have been burying my wife instead of visiting her in the hospital. Right? This is like Christmas time too. Chuck, I wasn't prepared for this

when you could have given me like, Sorry. Stuck me in the hand with a needle or something first. Sincerely, thank you both so much. That is from Tyler Elliott. He said, if you guys read this on the show, could you shout out my best friend, Justin? Sure.

He got me into the show back in the day and has been there for me and my family every step of the way. So Justin is the one who should be thanked really. It all, in a weird way, comes back to Justin. Man, what is his name again? Tyler Elliott, and I hope your wife is recovering. Yeah, same here, Tyler. Best of luck to you, man.

That's quite a hearing experience. Not only are we thinking of you, but everybody listening to this podcast right now is thinking about you too. That's right. Sending out the best vibes into the universe. Agreed. Wow.

Well, if you want to try to top Tyler's email, best of luck. Good luck. You can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links there, and you can also send us an email yourself to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio 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 slip dresses

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, 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.