Episode 337 - MH370: "Good Night, Malaysia Three Seven Zero”

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(upbeat music) - I'm Sruti, I'm Hannah, and welcome to a very exciting episode of Red Handed that I've been wanting to cover for years. Because in this digital day and age, the idea that a single person could disappear and go off the grid forever feels near impossible. We recently did the Moramari case. And I think, you know, there is that obsession with individual people going with them because we're like, how, how is that possible? How could this person just disappear off the face of the earth? And we have no idea. Hell even permanently deleting your internet search history isn't even possible. Your most personal and embarrassing Google searches will long outlive you, I'm sorry to tell you. Whether you think you've deleted them from your browser or whether you thought you're really smart and used incognito mode because there's a little man with a trench coat to them, microscope. And it was the non-microscope magnifying glass. A little trench coat and a magnifying glass convincing you that it's safe. We're constantly being tracked. And it's all up there in the cloud or whatever. So how could a whole entire 175 ton, 160 million pound airplane just go missing midair? And we're not talking about a million air holes in past showcase today. This month is the 10 year anniversary of the strangest mystery in aviation history. The disappearance of flight MH370 and all 239 people on board. So given that it is the anniversary this year, we thought it was time. Then we took a little look. It was almost midnight on the 7th of March 2014. When the red eye flight, MH370 to Beijing began boarding. Tired of business people, tourists, exhausted parents and their board children marched forward step by step in the queue at Gate C1 to C3 at Quala Lumpur International Airport. By the time all 227 passengers and 12 crew members were on board, and MH370 was set to take off, it was 20 to one in the morning. The journey from Malaysia to Beijing was a short one expected to take no more than six hours. Hence the term red eye, it's a late night flight, but not long enough for passengers to get any meaningful sleep. I did not know that. I just thought red eye night time plane. I just thought, yeah, it's just a red eye 'cause your eyes will be red, because you're really, and then you wake up and drink some horrible coffee that they give you. Honestly, I have less than number one that I have learned. When I'm getting off a plane, do not take the coffee that they give you. Because all that has happened to me in the past is I've taken the coffee that they've given me about, oh thank you, yum, yum, yum. And then I get off and then I'm standing in security and I look incredibly shifty, but it's because I'm tired, and the coffee has made me agitated. (laughing) And then security, I like, what's wrong with this girl? And your passport doesn't work. And my passport doesn't fucking work. I have looked into it though. I will have it replaced before our secret thing at the end of the year. Okay, okay, well good, because it's stressful. Anyway, within 20 minutes of take off the Boeing 777, reached its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Everything was going smoothly. The passengers were settled in, seatbell signs were turned off, and cabin crew were serving the inflight meals. 20 minutes after this, MH370 left Malaysian airspace. And as is routine, the pilot told Air Traffic Control, good night, Malaysia 370. His voice sounded calm, but everything that happened in the following 15 minutes after this message was broadcast was anything but. The Boeing 777, an all-239 people on board, vanished from the radar screens of both Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic controllers who were meant to register MH370's entry into their jurisdiction. At 6.30am, the scheduled landing time, flight MH370 delayed appeared on the message boards in Beijing Airport. The families and friends of the 227 passengers stood waiting for their loved ones at arrivals with no idea that flight MH370 wasn't delayed. It was missing, and what a way to them was an ordeal that hasn't ended to this day 10 years on. And possibly, never will. It was only an hour after the plane should have landed at 7.30am that Malaysia Airlines issued a statement that they had no idea where flight MH370 was. And at this statement, the world's collective is pricked. And the questions began to swell. Had the flight been hijacked? Did the pilot crash it in some sort of murder suicide? Did the aircraft suddenly explode and sink into the deepest darkest depths of the South China Sea? Did aliens abduct it? Did it fly into a wormhole and end up in another dimension? And waste years of everybody's life watching Lost? (laughing) All the classic. Did the Russians do it? Come on, how much of your life was wasted by watching Lost? Significant. If I backed back to all the time, I'd spent watching Lost. Yeah. But probably my high school career. If the number of hours we spent watching Lost were in tins of beans, it could reach from here to the moon and past. (laughing) Fuck you, Lost. Though, I will say, I've taken a chance, and the producers of Lost bring us a new sci-fi horror show that this weekend I did watch. Okay. It's called From, right, like FROM, and it is on now TV in the UK. And I have been watched two seasons by the final episode of season two. Oh, okay. Season three is currently filming, and I have already enjoyed it. But what I enjoy the most is that it's a similar premise. The premise is that it's a small town somewhere in Bumfuck, Norway, US, that maybe exists, maybe doesn't, but it's basically the idea that people that drive through it get stuck there and they can't leave. And monsters come out of the woods at night. Sound shit, it's actually pretty good. Give it a chance. Okay. I can't be held responsible for what happens in the ending, because I don't make it, but producers of Lost made it. But I do enjoy that pretty much in episode one, they're like, could we all be dead? (laughing) Could we just be trapped in purgatory? And they're like, no, all of these reasons viewers, please trust us again with your viewing time. (laughing) So spoilers on Lost, but I don't care. If anything, you should listen to my spoilers and don't watch it. (blows raspberry) I'm rewatching American Gods. Oh, yes, you do speak very highly of it. I think it is so underrated. Yeah. Christian channelist, isn't it? Who's that? (laughing) No, if you could above that, don't. But yes, when you finish that, check out from. Okay, I think you will enjoy it. Anyway, where were we? So basically, did the aliens do it? Did they end up in Lost, did the Russians do it? Now, these are all theories and questions that have been discussed over the past 10 years since MH370 were missing. Some more seriously than others. But still today, the world is at a loss for what actually happened. Speculation is all we have. The first theory to go out of the window was that an explosion had caused MH370's comm system to turn off, which immediately ruled out a bomb or an accidental catastrophic failure because within a week of the aircraft vanishing, the first solid lead emerged. Up until this point, the last known communication with the plane took place at 120 AM over the South China Sea, as it left Malaysia's airspace and entered Vietnam's. Good night, Malaysia 370, with the last words heard from the pilot. Based on this, search efforts were primarily focused in that area of the South China Sea. But then came the revelation that military radar had picked up on an unknown aircraft, which may have been MH370. And if it was MH370, then the radar was indicating that the aircraft had flown thousands of miles off course and had made a U-turn back over the Malaysian peninsula. And then, on the 15th of March, the Prime Minister of Malaysia held a press conference and confirmed that this was, indeed, the case. Thus immediately ruling out the theory that the aircraft had exploded at 120 AM and giving rise to a host of more sinister theories like hijacking. Yeah, 'cause if it's not been blown to smithereens, something else is going on. But two, and why? Well the media went wild with speculation immediately after Malaysia Airlines released some very troubling discoveries about the passenger manifest. There were a total of 14 different nationalities on board, mainly Chinese, but on closer inspection it was found that two of the passengers were not who they claimed to be. Italian national Luigi Moraldi was watching the news on TV when he saw his name listed among the passengers on MH370, as was Austrian-born Christian Cossal. Now Luigi's passport had been stolen while he was on holiday in Asia six months earlier, and Christian had had his passport stolen two years before in Thailand. And now, two Iranian nationals, 19-year-old Porian nor Muhammad and 29-year-old Muhammad Resardelba, had bought these passports in Thailand and somehow managed to get on board MH370 using those passports. The media went wild. Iranians fake passports? They surely had to be terrorism. And I do think that was a very plausible line of investigation, but it did turn out that the pair had no obvious history or links with terror organizations, and it was concluded by Interpol after a lengthy investigation into this, that while they were definitely illegally traveling under fake passports to reach Europe, they probably hadn't been connected to a plot to blow up the plane. Also, the plane hadn't blown up. And if you hijack it, you're going to tell people, because if it's a terror attack committed by two Iranians using fake passports, a secret one isn't very useful for making your political point. We'd have known if it was a terror attack, surely. Name one terror attack in the history of the world where they haven't been like that was us by the way. Yeah. Please can we have what we want? It's incredibly pointless. So I think basically the investigators all they can do is methodically go through every possibility. It didn't explode, even though it looked like it could have been terrorism, because these Iranians on board probably wasn't because nobody claimed it. Fall just got a whole lot more flavorful. Spice up the season with big savings on old whiskey, rich wines, crisp canned cocktails, and all your entertaining essentials during specs fall sale. With Texas largest selection at the lowest prices, toasting to fall has never tasted better. Celebrate everything fall at specs, wines, spirits, and finer foods. Cheers to savings. Grab a sweater and a cocktail shaker, cozy season starts at specs. Discover big savings on robust reds, bold whiskeys, seasonal sips, and more, all month long during specs fall sale. Shut up specs! With the lowest prices on Texas largest selection, specs mix it easy to celebrate. From pumpkin patch to pregame tailgate, don't miss the fall sale at specs, wines, spirits, and finer foods. Cheers to savings. That then placed all eyes on the two pilots of MH370, and the media started a smear campaign against both of them long before the investigation had even begun. The co-pilot was Farik Abdul Hamid, an outstanding pilot by all accounts, who'd logged over 2,763 hours of flight time, and that flight was a significant one for Farik, because it was going to be his final supervised flight on a Boeing 777. Nothing about Farik or his life suggested that he was suicidal or had any terrorist motivations. He was happily engaged to another pilot, and his colleagues described him as conscientious and respectable. Farik even coached a five aside youth football team. Not to mention the fact that Farik lacked the experience and knowledge required to pull off such a sophisticated hijacking, which then put the spotlight on the captain of the MH370 a 53-year-old, Zahari Amid Shah. Tabloids made all sorts of claims about him. His wife and kids had left him, his diary was blank after February 8, 2014, and he had distant relatives in Pakistan, implying therefore that he must have had links to terrorism. The media also hoatened in on a theory that Zahari was upset about the fact that the leader of Malaysia's People's Justice Party had been sent to jail the day before the plane vanished. Both of the pilots' homes were raided and searched. Nothing suspicious was found in Farik's home. But in Zahari's house, police found a high-tech flight simulator and discovered that he'd also recently deleted some files. The FBI managed to recover these and found that he'd been practicing landing a Boeing 777 in Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives and a US military base in Diego, Garcia. But just two weeks later, Malaysian authorities announced that there was nothing incriminating about any of it. And similar to his co-pilot, on the surface, Zahari's life really didn't point to anything that suggested that he had suicidal or any sort of fanatical ideas. He was a loving grandfather, a keen cook, a hobbyist model builder, and a DIY enthusiast who was well liked by all of his flying students. Yes, he had some strong political views, and was happy to debate with anybody who wanted to. And yes, he had a flight simulator at home, but all of his colleagues insisted that Zahari lived for quote, "Food, family, and flying." What do you live for, Hannah? Oh God. What are the three Fs? Monday morning is not the time to ask me that question. I'll get back to you when I've got that Friday feeling fair enough. That Friday feeling. However, if anybody on that flight was capable of pulling off what happened to MH370 Zahari was the best bet. He'd been a pilot since 1981, had over 18,000 hours of flying experience, and was one of the best pilots in the country, which is why, when authorities concluded their investigation after three months, they ruled out everybody on board MH370 as a suspect, except for Zahari, and we will come back to that. Now, we need to point out that there is nothing clear cut about this case. So much misinformation was coming from the press, the airline, and even the Malaysian authorities. Malaysian airlines were keen to do as much damage control as possible to keep their stock prices from tanking. So they did their best to brush off any suggestion that one of their pilots could have been responsible. Now a lot of people do say that this is because Malaysian airlines is now a state-owned airline. So Malaysia seems to have been very keen to do as much damage control as possible because it's intimately linked to the state itself, though that doesn't get them off the hook entirely. Because it was revealed later that Malaysia had been notified about MH370 having gone off course in a westward direction on the day the plane went missing. But for whatever reason, they kept this information to themselves for almost a week and focused the search efforts in the South China Sea knowing full well that the plane wasn't there and there was no way the plane could be there. Then came some new profound revelations about the actual route that MH370 had taken. Once the aircraft had left the area monitored by the military radar, it continued to passively communicate with a satellite above the Indian Ocean. This satellite was run by a British company called Inmasat. Inmasat are in the business of providing satellite communication for planes when they're beyond the range of ground radar systems. What this satellite does is send what's known as a "ping" to the aircraft once every hour to see if it automatically responds, which is called a "hanshi". And after combing through the enormous amounts of data, Inmasat learned that MH370 had actually responded for up to 6 hours after it was believed to have vanished. However, this data received from MH370 by Inmasat was never intended to be used to track the location of a plane and it had never been done before. All that data can show you is the distance the plane was from the satellite at the time of a handshake occurring. But it was possible to use this information to roughly calculate the flight's path. In the simplest of terms, this was done by utilizing the Doppler effect. Is the Doppler effect why motorbikes sound quieter when they're going away from you? Yeah, okay. I learned that, watching Malcolm in the middle. Anyway, based on the difference in speed, the signal came from the aircraft to the satellite at each point. Similar to how the whistle from a train gets louder as it approaches you or a motorbike as I just said, and it gets fainter as it gets farther away. So if you're the satellite, and the train is MH370 and the whistle sound of the train is the ping, with data from each of the seven pings received and some very complex mathematical equations, it was possible to determine where MH370 was at the time of each ping. On the 24th of March, so 16 days after the flight vanished, the Prime Minister of Malaysia held a press conference. They announced that in Massa had concluded that MH370 flew south after passing over the Malaysian peninsula. This was not what anybody wanted to hear. If MH370 had gone north, then it would have been overland. and there would have been a higher likelihood of survivors. But having gone south, it only left the possibility that MH370 had crashed into the Southern Indian Ocean, which would make the survival rate likely zero. The plane probably flew until all the fuel had been exhausted, and since there was only enough to keep it flying for seven and a half hours following takeoff, after its change in course, it couldn't have gone much further than the Indian Ocean. So, it's a good bet that that's where it ended up. And this theory added up with the last time that the aircraft pinged in Marsat satellite, which was around 8.28m, because the next attempt, the following hour at 9.15am, the handshake failed. Following this announcement by the Prime Minister, the family and friends of the passengers and the crew of MH370, lost all hope that they'd ever see their loved ones again. Some expressed their grief in very understandable, emotional breakdowns. Others did so in equally understandable displays of anger and suspicion. Many believed that the Malaysian authorities were not telling them everything that they knew. 239 people had just suddenly been declared dead based on one mathematical calculation with absolutely no physical evidence. After all, there were no bodies, and there was no sign of any wreckage. It was a very hard and bizarre pill to swallow, and the world wanted answers. Now, like we said earlier, the majority of the passengers on board had been Chinese. And within a day of this news that everybody was gonna be declared dead, the Malaysian embassy in Beijing was surrounded by angry protesters. The pressure to get to the bottom of things was on. And it really didn't help. The millions of dollars had been wasted, scouring around 1.8 million square miles in the wrong location, because Malaysia hadn't admitted to knowing that MH370 had gone off course. But within Marseille's new information, the new search area was now the Southern Indian Ocean, about 1,800 kilometers off the Western Australian coast. The search effort was comprised of 43 ships and 58 aircraft and 14 different countries, covering an area larger than the continental United States. And as one Australian pilot who was involved in the search put it, we're not looking for a needle in a haystack. We're still looking for the haystack. The odds were definitely against them. Months passed as Australian led search teams narrowed down the search area to 120,000 square kilometers of sea floor. That's 46,000 square miles. But still, they didn't find a single clue as to where the aircraft or its passengers were. Then just when it seemed like things couldn't get any worse for Malaysian Airlines, they did. On the 17th of July 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was making its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The aircraft vanished from all radar systems as it was flying over Eastern Ukraine, about 31 miles from the Russian border. However, unlike MH370, it wasn't a mystery as to what happened to that plane. That Boeing 777 had been blown to pieces midair. And the wreckage had fallen over the Doniesk oblast region of Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 members of crew on board. Intelligent services quickly figured out that the aircraft had been hit by a surface-to-air missile, fired by a pro-Russia separatist group. The Russian government of course denied any responsibility, but in November 2022, a Dutch call ruled otherwise. They announced that Russia had had full control over the separatist forces fighting in Ukraine at the time. And after a trial in absentia, two Russians, Igor Gorkin and Sergei Dublensky, and a Ukrainian separatist, Leonard Karchenko, were all found guilty of murdering the 298 passengers. As far as we know, all three men are still at large in Russia, and will likely never serve their sentences. Which makes the case of MH370, our story today, the second deadliest incident involving a Boeing 777. But the search for MH370 held its place as the most expensive search in aviation history, estimated at a total cost of 155 million. Yet, to this very day, the majority of the aircraft has never been found. And we say majority because in July 2015, a small section of the wing called a flapperon, which is made up, that sounds incredibly fake. It sounds like when you watch those anti-aging cream animals, and they use fake science to confuse you, anti-crisium, now filled with anti-crisium to put on your face to anti-yourcrisis. So the made up flapperon left for Lange was discovered by members of the public on Reunion Island, 170 kilometers from Mauritius or thereabouts. I actually met a lovely couple from Reunion Island when I was travelling. They were like, "Oh, you should come stay with us, "you should come stay with us." And obviously, we never did. But very nice couple. And the guy swam every single day. And he was like, "I did every single day." Back home, it's great. It's the only way to start your day. I googled Reunion Island. The most dangerous place for Shark Attack formed the planet. And I was like, "François, what the fuck?" And he's like, "Yes, fine. They're not gonna bite you." And I'm like, "They definitely will. They definitely do." But yeah, scary times. Probably why it didn't go, even though I'm fascinated. So, since that flapperon was found in the Shark Capital of the World, about 40 small pieces of MH370 have been located by locals on the coast of South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, and several small islands. But nothing else. The official government led search for the aircraft was abandoned in 2017. The following year, a private US marine company, Ocean Infinity, resumed the search, based on drift data from the debris found. But they too gave up just after a year of no results. However, just last year, the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that the location of the crash site could be determined. Scientists believe that they can do this by studying the barnacles found on the debris of MH370. Apparently, by looking at how the shells have formed on the barnacles, scientists can figure out the temperatures of the sea where they've come from. That's so fucking cool. I was gonna say how incredibly boring they must be to have at parties. (laughing) Tell me more about the barnacle shell, Dave. Yeah, you don't wanna hang out with them like your barbecue. But if your plane goes down or your boat goes missing, tell me all about the barnacles. So, these very ocean detectives not boring scientists. These scintillating party guests were able to plot a drift route, hopefully, leading back to the original crash site. And it does sound like a long shot. But they really don't seem to be many other options at this stage. Ocean Infinity has said that they want to resume their search efforts in 2024, pending authorization from the Malaysian government. Until then, we likely won't get any more answers. So in the years, since MH370's tragic disappearance, like in the aftermath of any major catastrophe with no clear explanations, conspiracy theorists have, of course, run a muck. Basically, everything. From the moment MH370 vanished from air traffic control radars is up for debate. And theories have ranged from, like we said, you are foe abductions. The idea that the plane flew through a wormhole or Russian hijacking and even claims that the US shot it down, have circulated. Now, if we were to run through all of these theories, this episode would be as long as the entire lost saga, and you would hate us just as much. So we've decided to run through what we believe is the most likely scenario. It is also the theory believed by the majority of investigators and experts in the field of aviation today. But we should preface this by reminding you all that this is just, of course, a theory. And therefore, very speculative with no solid evidence whatsoever. It's simply the theory that we believe follows Occam's razor. And it is the one that is most supported by the existing evidence and requires the least number of assumptions to be made. The pilot did it. - First of all, Sahari Amichar was going through a very rough time in his personal life, and many who knew him believed that he was clinically depressed. His wife had left him. And although he still spoke to his kids, they were adults living lives of their own. Sahari had even told some of his friends that he spent much of his free time just pacing around his house, waiting for his next flight. And when he wasn't pacing, Sahari was using his home flight simulator. - That's how you know he got a divorce, because he was just like, I'm gonna buy a massive flight simulator and put it in our house. She wouldn't have allowed that. He's like, now I can do it. Live the bachelor and part of my dreams. When the Malaysian government finally released their lengthy report on the investigation into MH370's disappearance, it seems that they left out one critical detail. In 2016, some confidential documents were leaked from the Malaysian authorities investigation, revealing the following. - One month before the aircraft vanished, Sahari had carried out a simulated flight way out into the Southern Indian Ocean. I used a fairly similar route to the one that MH370 is believed to have taken. Although his simulated flight ended about 900 miles away from the actual search area, but the very fact that we now know that the Malaysian government deliberately withheld this information from their report should make us all very suspicious. Yes, Zahari was, by many accounts, a very friendly and very helpful family man, who made YouTube videos about home DIY and loved to cook, but that doesn't mean much. Pilots carrying out murder suicides is not unheard of. Just a year after MH370, the co-pilot of German wings flight 9525 deliberately crashed the plane into a mountain in France, killing all 150 people on board. That is absolutely terrifying. Yeah. I saw her tweet the other day, like, "I'm not a nervous flyer". It's not this tweet that was like, "Oh, it's absolutely fine, just a million things I have to go right at once for this to stay in the air". We shouldn't be allowed to do it, I don't think we should be allowed. I mean, again, I'm also not a nervous flyer, and there is all the stats about like, "Oh, you know, we're just walking down the street or driving your car is a lot more dangerous than crashing out of a plane", but I'm like, "When it happens, you're dead. There's no chance". So now, let's be party poopers and get it into the scenario that we think is the most likely. This version of events is incredibly told in an amazing YouTube documentary by green.aviation, we really do suggest that you guys go and have a look at it, because it blows Netflix's shambolic documentary, "The plane that disappeared out of the water". But we will come back to that later on. So for now, here we go. And remember that this is just a theory, but it is the best one that we have we think. And you will see why, but it is a theory all the same. We're going to explain it as if it actually happened to connect the evidence. Yeah. Like, any other way to explain this makes no sense. We have to talk you through it as if this is exactly what happened, just so we can point to the evidence that matches. At Verbo, we understand that even the best of plans sometimes need a little support, so we plan for the plot twists. Every booking is automatically backed by our Verbo care guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready, before you stay through the moments in between and after your trip. As a great trip, starts with peace of mind. And maybe a good playlist, but we've got the peace of mind part covered. Once upon a feeding time not so long ago, bulbs Australia found a chintel away to grow. Creamy whole goat milk farm fresh at its best, with a two protein, and easier to digest. Nothing bellies stay calm day by day, because bulbs brought us the clean and simple way, nurturing little ones from head to toe. Bob's goat, chintel from the get-go. So on the 8th of March 2014, 53-year-old Captain Zahari Shah and his 27-year-old copilot for recapital hermit were in the cockpit of MH370, ready to make the routine flight to Beijing. Malaysian Airlines runs this flight twice a day every day, so routine is definitely the world. Freak was excited, as like we said earlier, this was his final supervised flight of a Boeing 777, after which he'd be clear to become a main pilot. Zahari however had no intention of going to Beijing. A 40 minutes past midnight, Zahari taxied down the runway and took off, and the fates of the 238 people on board were sealed. As usual, MH370 flew northeast over the Malaysian peninsula and over the South China Sea. 20 minutes later, Zahari reached a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, and notified air traffic control that all was well. Zahari was then given permission to take a shortcut to a waypoint called Ikari. Waypoints are specific geographical locations used as points of reference in aviation navigation, and Ikari is one of the few waypoints in the world that lies on the borders of five different air spaces, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Singapore. At 1.19am, as Zahari approached Ikari, leaving Malaysian airspace behind, he uttered the now infamous words "Goodnight" Malaysian 370. This was the last verbal communication made between MH370 and the ground, and this is where the speculative scenario begins. Zahari gets his copiler out of the way by asking him to go and make a cup of coffee, and when he obediently does so, Zahari locks the cockpit door and gets ready to do something David Blaine could only dream of. He was about to make 175 ton airplane disappear. Soon after MH370 reached Ikari, the pilots should have sent Vietnamese air traffic control, a message like this, Ho Chi Minh control, Malaysia 370, flight level 350, good morning. That would have been standard protocol, but they didn't do this. And Vietnamese air traffic controllers didn't notice either. They were busy dealing with the planes already in their airspace. They weren't expecting MH370 for another few minutes, and this moment of limbo was the perfect moment for Zahari to do what he was about to do next. 90 seconds after MH370 reached Ikari, Zahari turned off the plane's transponder. That's the communication system between MH370 and air traffic control. The switch for the transponder is as simple as a knob on a car radio. It's located between the pilot seats. Pilots, however, are not even taught how to turn this off in training, because there isn't a single good reason that they would ever need to. Why is it there? There are a lot of things about planes I don't understand. Do you remember being able to go into the cockpit when you were a kid? Oh my god. We lived in such a simple attack. Pre-9/11. Thanks for ruining it for all the kids of today. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I remember we used to fly every single summer to India every single year for six weeks, and every single time we fly bridge shareways, and they would come and get you. They'd be like, "Do you want to come sit in the cockpit?" And you'd go and you'd like, "Where are little captains here?" And you'd look at everything and the captain would be like, "Oh, where are they?" "Do you want to be a pilot when you grow up?" Blah blah blah. And then you'd go back to your desk and listen to Andy Peters, talk on B.A. radio, and colour in your little thing with your crayons. Can you imagine? A kid approaches cockpit to shop back, air marshals. I'm almost certain that I was on a plane on Christmas Eve, and the pilot dipped the plane and said that Santa was on the roof. Oh my god. I'm marking out. Yeah, it's like, "Oh, we've got a visitor." Jesus Christ. A simpler tone. So, if he turned the transponder off, it was in that second that MH370 vanished from the radar screens of air traffic controllers in Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. But also in that second. So Harry dropped a breadcrumb that wouldn't be found for years. As the host of green.aviation explains, the dial for the transponder on a Boeing 777 has three settings, one, fully on, which transmits all the plane's information regarding its altitude and position, etc., two, altitude off, which transmits everything but the plane's altitude, and then three, fully off. And as the Harry turned the dial to fully off, it passed the altitude off selection, and in that micro second, the plane's position, but not its altitude, were transmitted to the ground. If the transponder was turned off due to an electronic catastrophe, this wouldn't have happened. It would only have happened if the transponder had been turned off manually. This is why people who understand aviation and who are creating videos and content like green.aviation are so helpful because we don't understand it. We have to take the experts' guidance on this, but that is fascinating. The idea that only by turning it manually through those selections, it would have created that breadcrumb. That's so interesting. And also like, I know we've said that they're not trained on how to turn it off. It seems pretty easy. Yeah. It's just a knob. They're like, it's just a first day of flight school, first day of pilot school. That's the transponder, but do not touch that. In fact, I'm just going to put a little sticker, do not touch, not for you. But yeah, it's really interesting, and the only way it could have disappeared from the radars of air traffic control on the ground is if you turn it off. And by turning it off manually, he goes past that selection, which gives that breadcrumb. Really, really interesting. So at this point, let's assume Farik is still busy fixing the cups of coffee for himself and Zahari. And again, we are speculating here, would a copilot go and make coffee, or do they have an estuary that does that for them? Is he in the loop? We don't know, but we have to assume that for some reason he is not in the cockpit. The copilot isn't in the cockpit. So also at this point, although air traffic controllers now couldn't see MH370 on their screens, the airline still knew whether plane was. And this is because of something called a CARS. Now a CARS is an acronym that stands for Aircraft Communication, Addressing and Reporting System. It automatically sends technical information. information about the aircraft every 30 minutes via satellite to Boeing, Rolls-Royce, and the airline, which in this case was Malaysian Airlines. This technical information includes the amount of fuel left and the plane's position on its flight route, and there are two ways to turn a car's off. The first is the simplest, which is to flick the switch, but doing so would definitely notify the ground that a car's was being turned off, which would, no doubt, send up some sort of red flag. The second way is to literally pull the plug on the engine's electrical generator so that a car's would go dead immediately. The latter is what Zahari would have had to do, and so just like that the plane would have vanished, and Zahari could have done this in a matter of minutes. As a pilot over 30 years, with again 18,000 hours of flying experience, he was certainly capable of it. Zahari's next problem came in the form of the 238 people behind him on the plane. At 35,000 feet, the air pressure is 1/4 of that at sea level, which means there's also only 1/4 of the oxygen in the air as there would be at sea level. The reason we can breathe on-board airplanes at 35,000 feet is because the plane has machinery which compresses the outside air, warms it up, and pumps it in. If that didn't happen, exposure to the outside thin air would result in a deadly condition known as hypoxia. All Zahari needed to do was let out the compressed, safe to breathe air out of the plane and pump the thin air in. To do that, he needed to open two outflow valves underneath the Boeing 7777, which is possible from the cockpit. So Zahari fitted himself with an oxygen mask next to his seat and flicked the switches, stopping the engines, pumping compressed air into the plane. In addition, he changed the setting on the cabin's air pressure control to manual, allowing him to control the airflow inside the plane. Zahari then opened the two outflow valves, and that was the point of no return. A gust of cold thin air would have swept through the passenger's cabins, oxygen masks would have dropped from the ceilings, and hypoxia would have started to set in. At this moment, Zahari would have made his extreme U-turn by banking the plane left as much as possible. Anybody not in their seats would have been sent flying to the left side of the aircraft as they slowly fell unconscious from the lack of oxygen. What Zahari was trying to do by turning so hard was to avoid the airspace of Thailand. He knew they wouldn't see him on the air traffic control radar, but there was a chance that he'd be spotted by primary radar. Now, primary radar is the most fundamental kind of radar, which involves a radar dish that emits signals into the sky and picks up what's bounced back. It wouldn't tell you anything more than the size and distance of what the signals were bouncing off though, but if the Thai military realized that there was an aircraft in their airspace without permission, they would have reacted, and Zahari would have known this. After just managing to make a tight enough U-turn to avoid Thai airspace, Zahari flew to MH370 back over the Malaysian peninsula. He now needed to avoid alerting the Malaysian Air Force and also being thwarted by his own co-pilot. The passengers of the plane would have at this point had their oxygen masks on, but were likely reassured that the worst was over. The cabin crew may have explained that the flight had experienced decompression and that they'd reduced altitude to get to a breathable level. The co-pilot, Fereek, however, would have been more suspicious. The pilot's guidelines, in case of depressurization, do not mention turning the plane around in some sort of sharp, crazy U-turn. You're just meant to reduce altitude. Fereek would have needed to attach his oxygen mask to a portable oxygen tank, of which there were 15 on board to make his way back to a cockpit. Little did Fereek know that the cockpit door was locked, and Zahari had no intention of letting him back in, and Little did the rest of the plane know that their oxygen masks would only supply them with oxygen for 20 minutes, and Zahari had absolutely no intention of descending before those 20 minutes were up. The 15 portable oxygen tanks on board for the cabin crew, however, held about 45 minutes worth of oxygen. So at this point, Fereek would have been the only member of the crew using a tank. The rest of the cabin crew would have been sat using the 20 minutes supply waiting for the plane to descend. This descent to safe breathing levels is meant to take just about 10 minutes. Fereek would have then pressed what is essentially the doorbell for the cockpit, and Zahari would have seen this on his central screen. To open it, he would have simply needed to turn a dial, but he didn't. Zahari was focused on carefully balancing the flight's path along the borders of Thailand and Malaysia. That way, if either country's military noticed the MH370, they would assume it was being handled by the airspace controllers of the other country. It was genius. Meanwhile, Fereek would now have been aware that something was horribly wrong. The cabin was depressurised. They weren't descending, and he was locked out of the cockpit. He would then have used the emergency code which unlocks the cockpit door. This code allows cabin crew to enter the cockpit in case the pilot falls unconscious, so it's a manual override for the pilots inside not letting them in. However, Zahari would have turned the dial for the door to the deny setting, which renders this code useless. Of course, you can see here that it's like the people that build the plane the engineers are trying to think of every possibility because the purpose of this dial is obviously to allow the crew to stop would be hijackers who have somehow found out the emergency code from entering the cockpit. Only now, he was being used by a hijacker pilot to keep his co-pilot out. And so, when he was denied access even with the emergency code, it would have dawned on Fereek, that his colleague co-pilot inside the cockpit was not unconscious, and that what was happening now was deliberate. It's now 1.30am. The 227 passengers and 10 members of cabin crew only had five minutes of oxygen left before hypoxia was set in, and MH370 became their coffin in the sky. Zahari, however, had 26 hours worth of oxygen left in his tank. It was only at that point that Vietnamese air traffic control, noticed Malaysian flight 370, had never checked into their airspace. And what's more, they couldn't even see it. But, despite guidelines stating that air traffic control is a meant to make a report when an aircraft takes more than five minutes to respond, Vietnamese air traffic control did nothing. Zahari was heading south west over the Malaysian peninsula. The cabin crew and passengers would now have been unconscious. Fereek, however, would have been an panic, and Zahari would have been watching him on his security camera monitor. Once Zahari reached the end of the peninsula, he was approaching the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and the last thing he wanted to do was enter that airspace. So, he turned right and made his way along the Malakas straight, a narrow stretch of water between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, allowing him to remain in Malaysian airspace. And as Zahari made this turn, Fereek's mobile phone connected briefly with a phone tower on the ground as he attempted to make a call. The call didn't go through, but it did get a signal for a second, and this was recorded. At 2am, Malaysian airlines were notified that Vietnam was unable to contact MH370, and that they couldn't see it on their radar screens. The system told Malaysian airlines that the plane was currently in Cambodia in airspace. But this, of course, was a red herring. The Malaysian Airlines dispatcher was unaware that the tracking system they were looking at was not a real-time update of MH370's location. It was simply telling them where the plane should have been if everything was going as planned, so they didn't worry about it too much just yet. Little did they know, MH370 was nowhere near Cambodia, and its passengers and crew were, by this point, either unconscious or dead. This included, co-pilot Fereek. And it wouldn't be until much later that morning that they'd know just how bad the situation truly was. Zahari knew, although he'd taken every precaution to not be detected so far, that records of primary radar could be used to plot his flight path during an investigation. But once he passed the island of Samatra, if he made a left turn out towards the open southern Indian Ocean, there wouldn't be any chance that MH370 could ever be found. The Indian Ocean is huge, and Zahari still had almost six hours worth of fuel on board, and hours and hours of oxygen left for him. However, what Zahari didn't know was this. When he turned off the engine's electrical generators to, in turn, turn off the plane's ACARS system, this also turned off the cooling systems for the cockpit's CPU, and this would have caused them to begin overheating, and Zahari would have needed to switch them back on if he didn't want to lose control of the plane. Zahari would have turned the electricals back on to prevent this once he was certain he was out of range of the military radar. But in doing so, unbeknownst to him, the plane began sending and receiving pings with the in-mass satellite above the Indian Ocean, which is how, if you remember, investigators were able to eventually calculate MH370's real flight path. But, whether Zahari knew that or not, isn't really important, by this stage his plan was almost complete. He then made a southward turn. towards the open expanse of the southern Indian Ocean, just as he had on his flight simulator a month before. This was the swan song of a suicidal murderer. Terrifyingly, when authorities recovered the deleted files from Zahari's flight simulator, they found a simulation flight Zahari had made on the 3rd of February to the southern Indian Ocean. He had set the date on the software to the 21st of February, which also happened to be the same night, Zahari had flown flight MH370 to Beijing from Koala Lumpur, but he deleted the file the night before and flew the plane to Beijing as scheduled. It would seem that the 21st of February had actually been his first choice, but something had made him hold off until the 8th of March. Now flying into the abyss, Zahari would have increased his altitude to make his fuel and final hours last as long as possible. This would have allowed him to fly out into the southern Indian Ocean as far as possible, making it even less likely that the wreckage would ever be discovered. But why did Zahari go to such lengths to make it as hard as possible to find the wreckage? If he did it, he planned to die as well, so what did it matter? Maybe Zahari wanted to spare his family the shame of everybody knowing for certain that he had killed all those people and himself. It's really the only explanation that makes any sense. In his final few hours, Zahari may also have placed the plane on autopilot, taken off his oxygen mask, and allowed hypoxia to take him away. And so MH370 would have become a ghost plane, flying further and further out over the Indian Ocean until it exhausted all of its fuel and crashed into the water, disintegrating on impact. And this is believed to have been at some point between 8.20am when the last handshake was recorded with the Inmasat satellite and 9.15am when the plane didn't respond. It does seem like, as you said, that's the only theory that makes any sense, because he goes through a lot of effort when he could have just bashed it into the ocean. So much effort, so much planning. And I don't know, I guess there's two theories here. I do believe that the reason that he goes to so much effort to cover his tracks and to get the plane as far out into the Southern Indian Ocean as possible, so that it's not recovered is probably to protect his legacy. Let there always be some question mark over what really happened. Protect his family to some extent. Blah blah blah. But I think very similarly to how we would see like fantasy driven serial killers, which is all of them. The idea that the planning is as important as the execution of the plan. I think you see that here with Zahari. The idea that he's at home with his flight simulator, he's planning these routes. He thinks he's so smart. He's thought of every little possibility. He's like, I take a hard turn here so the tyres don't see me. I go here. I go here. Like I think that is as part what got him off as what he ends up maybe doing. And I think the route that he takes and the new turns he takes and the precautions he takes that is also so no one can stop him from completing the task at hand. But yeah, I think taking it out as far as possible was maybe also likely said because he wanted to take his mask off and not actually be the one that drove it into the water so that he could just go out passively. But yeah, multi reasons, I think. Multi-faceted reasons for why he did what he did. So there you have it. After researching various theories as to what happened to MH370 and the 239 people on board, this is what we found to be the most plausible because of the evidence we have like the pinks and the co-pilot's phone getting momentary signal. But again, this is just speculation. As avionics expert Richard Godfrey has said, there unfortunately is no smoking gun proving Sahari's guilt. This is what he had to say. Most of the evidence points to a murder suicide by Captain Sahari's sharp. Although the evidence is insufficient to stand up in a court of law, which is possibly what Sahari's plan was all along. We know the likely truth, but nobody will ever be able to prove it. Now, as for the shambolic three-part Netflix documentary MH370, the plane that disappeared, the first part of the documentary does outline the theory that Sahari may have been responsible. But barely. It goes on to say that he was such a nice guy. It wasn't too likely that he was the killer. OK, Netflix. They've got to have a hook. They do. They do have to have a hook. I think it's boring for them to say the same thing that everybody else is saying. So they're like, I don't know. He just seemed like such a nice guy. Could he have done it? OK. So the second part of the dog entertains the theory that two Russians hijacked the plane by climbing into the main equipment centre, accessible by a hatch on the floor of the first class cabin. The documentary goes on to say that these Russians then took complete control of the aircraft, faked satellite location data and landed the plane in Kazakhstan. Aviation experts, however, have pointed out that it's not possible to control a plane from the MEC, and satellite location data is transmitted live and cannot be manipulated. And also, the plane would have been picked up by the radar systems of nine countries on its way to Kazakhstan. Also, why would they have done this anyway and then kept completely silent about it? It makes no sense. I think this is what Netflix does. You're absolutely stupid. They always want to have an angle, and it's like that sons of Sam documentary that they put out. I forgot about that. Well, they're like, maybe there wasn't just one son of Sam. Maybe it was sons of Sam. And everyone was like, no, no. Because David Berkowitz told you. He's also the man that told him the fucking dog next door told him to kill all those people and then later said, I'm out. I was just kidding. I was just pretending to be crazy. So yeah, that's their second theory. Their third theory is I have to say even more ludicrous. French journalist Flores de Changey proposes that MH370 was shot down by the US government. Why? Changey believes that the plane was carrying some special motor roller equipment to Beijing, and that the CIA didn't want the Chinese to get their hands on this. So they murdered 239 innocent people to prevent this from happening, apparently. Not to mention that this would also have required a lot of people to have known about this and kept their mouths shut about such an atrocity for almost a decade, which hardly seems likely. Also, none of the evidence whatsoever backs up this theory. The other Les Bazaar yet flawed theories involve a catastrophe on board such as a complete electrical failure or a fire in the cockpit, but the evidence we do have is more than enough to make us question those ideas. For one, the perfectly time maneuvers of the plane which stopped it from being detected by military and civilian radars seems too far fetched to have been a coincidence. And also, the fact that the electricals turned back on at the perfect time. And as for the theories involving a terrorist hijacking, well, these would have had to be the most sophisticated and meticulous hijackers of all time. And also, the most pointless hijackers of all time as well, because no demands were made, no messages were sent. And in almost a decade, no group has ever claimed responsibility. So our old friend Ockham's razor would suggest that a highly skilled pilot in the grips of clinical depression pulled off this audacious yet very much achievable atrocity. And this is what the evidence seems to point to, but as we have said until we are blue in the face and suffering of hypoxia, we'll never know for sure. So yeah, is that what pilots are thinking about while we're all asleep? How to murder us all? Yeah, and get away with it. I mean, maybe it's like the call of the void. Yeah. Hard to avoid thinking about it, because there is a lot of power. I mean, you could with this level of careful planning murder everybody on your entire Boeing 777. And I don't know, do psychopaths that pilots go through adequately tell anybody who needs to know whether they're okay to be flying that plane? I don't know. But it is terrifying, but remember, this is a very rare case. This is one story. Actually, I don't know. Then there was the German wings thing. I don't know guys. It's scary, but you know, so is everything. I don't know how to round this off in a positive way. Be the right level of afraid. There you go. Cool. Cool. And don't listen to this on a plane. No, don't. If you're listening to this on a plane, it's too late. You finished. Unless you're like one of those weird people that reads the last page of a book first or whatever. What? No, what does that do? Where are these people that do that? I don't get why. Are you one of those people? If so, have a safe flight. Ciao.