In early 2009, Iran’s secret proram to build nuclear weapons suffered a series of mysterious failures. Centrifuge machines used to purify uranium suddenly spun out of control and tore themselves apart. More than a thousand machines were destroyed, and Iran’s pursuit of the bomb was seriously delayed. It turned out that the machines had been sabotaged by a computer virus called Stuxnet, a sophisticated malware developed by Israel and the United States. The attack demonstrated that hackers can...

In today’s episode we discuss a new approach to gathering the Lepas data that could help us finally understand how long MH370’s debris was in the water. By tapping into a worldwide community of oceangoing sailors who convence on the social media site No Foreign Land, it might be possible to retrieve data from barnacles that are just about anywhere in the ocean. I tried out this approach by reaching out to cruisers Leslie Graney and Peter Sheaff after I noticed that there boat “Itchy Feet” was...

The ocean is a big place. So maybe it isn’t that surprising that MH370 wasn’t found. At least, that’s what you hear a lot of people say. It’s pretty widely accepted among the general public that the seabed search failed because, well, the ocean is big, why wouldn’t it be hard to find a plane in it? But actually, the scientists who defined the search area had good reason to think that they knew where the plane had flown to, with a pretty good degree of accuracy. In today’s episode, we discuss...

Sergei Deineka and Oleg Chustrak were childhood friends who graduated from high school together in Odessa, Ukraine, then served as conscripts in the Soviet Army before reuniting to open a furniture manufacturing and retail business in their home town. They also imported furniture from Malaysia and China, which is why they came to be on MH370 the fateful night of March 8, 2014. They were travelling from a furniture trade show in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to another one in Guanzhou, China. At...

Today I’m very excited to introduce The Finding MH370 Project, an ocean experiment to gather the first new evidence about the missing Malaysian airliner in seven years. This data will resolve key paradoxes about MH370 and should clarify once and for all what happened to plane and the 239 people aboard. To this day, the only physical evidence we have are several dozen pieces of debris that washed ashore years later, starting with the flaperon, a piece of the wing found on Réunion...

Starting in 2014, Russia dramatically intensified its hybrid warfare attack against the democratic West, launching hacking operations, misinformation campaigns, assassinating critics, and tampering in elections. Was MH370 a part of this wide-front assault? I’ve argued that it likely was, but whether or not that is the case, what is inarguable is that the success of Russia’s efforts has been aided by the failure of officials and mainstream media outlets to fully understand the true scope and...

In order to understand where MH370’s debris came from, we need to know how marine organisms like the goose barnacle Lepas anatifera typically grow under similar conditions to those that the debris likely experienced. To do that, we’re going to need to collect specimens from buoys managed by an office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. The AOML maintains reams upon reams of data that it makes freely available...

The Lepas anatifera is basically the spirit animal of this podcast. As we’ve discussed before, these animals live all over the ocean, and they attach quickly to anything that’s floating there, and they grow quickly in a predictable way, so just from the size alone you can tell how long something’s been afloat. Also, as the shells grow they incorporate minerals into their shells at a different rate depending on the temperature of the water. That provides a clue as to where in the ocean...

If you spend any time engaged in the discussion about what happened to MH370, you’ll encounter the idea that the United States, and in particular the shadowy US intelligence community, certainly must know what happened to the plane since they have such a vast and all-encompassing network of assets for gathering information. In effect, the work of the French journalist Florence de Changy, whose work was featured in episode 3 of the Netflix documentary “MH370: The Plane that Disappeared,” is...

Understanding MH370 requires understanding how strategic planners think. One of the most important concepts in strategic thinking today is the decision loop, which is a way of describing how people gather information, use it to understand their situation, then decide what to do and act upon that decision. This process is sometime referred to as the OODA loop (for “observe, orient, decided, act”) after the formulation by the influential American strategist John Boyd. To discuss the decision...

In recent months one of the most viral pieces of MH370-related content has been a video that purports to show the airplane being surrounded by a trio of UFOs, which then escort it through some kind of wormhole or interdimensional portal. The video has been tirelessly promoted by a man named Ashton Forbes who has developed a whole elaborate patter to explain how the video came to be. On its face, the whole thing is ridiculous. For one thing, UFOs aren’t real — or, if they are, they’ve never so...

It’s been years since anyone’s reported finding a new piece of MH370 debris, and even longer since anyone has come up with any other evidence of what happened to the plane. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to collect new evidence. In today’s podcast, I’m joined by Andy Sybrandy, the founder and president of Pacific Gyre Inc., a company that makes sensors and telemetry for ocean data collection. He helped develop the SVP drifters that are the mainstay of NOAA’s Global Drifter...

Black box data is the ne plus ultra of aircraft accident investigation. But it is not the only kind of physical evidence. Pieces of debris—in particular, their dents and fractures — can tell a vivid story in themselves. When a plane crashes, it’s common for all different parts to exhibit different kinds of failure. Imagine a plane whose wingtip hits a tree. The impact would crush the leading edge of the wingtip—compression failure—and then wrench the wing backwards from the body of the plane,...

In episode 6 we discussed a recent paper by Usama Kadri that examined whether the crash of MH370 should have been detected by a network of underwater microphones. Kadri argued that it should have been easily detected. The paper received a lot of attention in the mainstream press. Among the community of marine hydroacoustic researchers, it stirred some consternation. In today’s episode Dr David Dall'Osto of the University of Washington explains his misgivings about Kadri's work. In the earlier...

MH370 is a mystery, but more specifically, it’s a murder mystery. It was an action carried out with a perpetrator with nefarious intent. That’s a lens that we can use to gain perspective on what happened. As you know this is a podcast all about trying to understand aviation’s most perplexing mystery. We not only talk about the evidence of the case in great detail with the help of leading experts, but we also try to find new ways to frame what we know, to see if by looking at the facts from a...

In Episode 5, we discussed how MH370's captain might have planned an elaborate murder/suicide in a way that would create the body of evidence we have today. In this episode, we re-run the exercise from a different perspective, guessing at the methods and motivations of a Advanced Persistant Threat actor. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

In 2011, the US was flying one of its most advanced drones over Iran when they lost control. To their shock and embarrassment, they came to realize that the Iranians had used Russian electronic warfare technology to take over control of its navigation system. They seized the drone, decrypted its secrets, and reverse-engineered its technology to build their own version. It was a painful lesson — but have we learned it well enough to avoid such catastrophes in the future? Get full access to...

A new paper published by a researcher at Cardiff University in the UK explores whether the hydrophone network maintained by a nuclear test-ban monitor should have detected the ocean crash of MH370, and analyses the signal that seems to be the most likely to have come from the missing plane. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

Whoever took MH370 did so in a lightning coup de main that showed decisiveness and a sophisticated knowledge of airspace, air traffic control procedure, and avionics. Formulating the plan would have required substantial planning. In today's episode, we explore how the plane's captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, might have laid the groundwork for such an operation. (In a future episode we'll look at how hijackers outside the cockpit might have laid their plans.) I'm extremely fortunate to be joined...

This is the audio version of the episode 4 of the Finding MH370 podcast . Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

An interview with foreign affairs journalist Melik Kaylan Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

Who was Nikolai Brodsky, and why was he on MH370? Get full access to Deep Dive: MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

Welcome to the new season of the world’s only in-depth podcast about the disappearance of MH370. For the full show notes, click here. Get full access to Deep Dive: MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe