Deep Dive: MH370, Remastered

Today we’re going to go deeper than we’ve ever gone before on a question that I’ve called the crux of the whole MH370 mystery, and which is newly important because a bunch of viral MH370 videos have come out that spend a lot of time discussing it and, I’ll argue, they’re getting it wrong. And it matters a great deal because these videos are shaping what the public thinks is a reasonable explanation of the mystery.To help us with this important task we have with us a very special guest today, Juan Browne, an experienced airline pilot and the host of the popular aviation channel Blancolirio on YouTube.Juan has been flying airplanes for a very long time, and most recently he’s been working as a first officer on 777 flights over the Atlantic, so he really knows aviation and he knows this plane in particular. I reached out to Juan because I knew he could help us understand a crucial but widely misundersood aspect of the MH370 mystery. Namely: how did MH370’s satcom get turned off, and get turned back on again?This is the central crux of the mystery because, first of all, no one’s been able to come up with a really good explanation for how and why it happened, and second, without it we don’t get the 7 ping arcs, we don’t get the BFO analysis, we don’t wind up having anywhere to look in the southern Indian Ocean. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

It doesn’t seem to make much sense.Unless you understand the man who makes the decisions in Russia, and how he sees the world.Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer stationed in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Like many patriotic Russians, Putin experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union not as the blossoming of freedom, but as the humiliation of a once-great power. Territory that had once been considered the heartland of the empire split off into independent states. Putin later called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” After he came to power, he was determined to return his country to its rightful place of greatness in the world. To do that, he would need to adopt a mode of warfare suited to Russia’s diminished resources — an approach called hybrid warfare. And that involves hurting your adversary in all sorts of ways, some blunt and obvious, others quite sophisticated and unexpected. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

Today’s topic is one that I’ve been fascinated by for a long time: the art of stage magic and what it can tell us about MH370. I’m joined by Ed Dentzel, the host of an excellent podcast Unfound, in which he’s examined hundreds of missing persons cases. In a previous life Ed was the stage manager for “The World’s Greatest Magic Show” at the Greek Isles in Las Vegas from 2005 to 2008. While there he worked with more than 50 magicians, helping them create and hone new tricks. Ed wrote a guest post for my blog back in 2019 and I found what he said really fascinating and I’ve been wanting to have him on the show for a long time. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

If the satcom was hacked and MH370 was taken north, the perpetrators presumably had a plan that ended with them alive, and this would have to involve landing the plane at an airport.But is there an airport they could have landed at?If there are no airports near the part of the 7th arc where MH370’s flight would have terminated, then that would be a major blow to the cyber-hijack theory. As it turns out, though, there are a number of airports where the plane could plausibly have landed, and in today’s eposide we look at some of the more intriguing ones. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe