The Quest to Find a Missing Airliner Continues

A month and a half after MH370 disappeared, the Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, stood before a room of reporters and said this: “We will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery. We owe it to the families of the 239 people on board, we owe it to the hundreds of millions — indeed billions — of people who travel by air to try to get to the bottom of this.”

Abbott was right — solving the mystery of MH370 would be crucial to ensuring the safety of the worldwide air transport system. He was right that the Australian government should be committed to doing whatever it would take to make sure that the answer would be found.

Unfortunately, he didn’t live up to that promise. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and scanning thousands of square miles of ocean three miles deep, search officials threw up their hands and gave up. In the final report issued the following year, they said that there was one more area that they would have searched if they hadn’t run out of time and money and that the plane was most likely there. If it wasn’t, they didn’t have any good ideas of where to look.

Soon after, a private company called Ocean Infinity announced that they would pick up the search on their own dime. They searched the area the Australians had pinpointed (and far beyond). There was no sign of the plane.

When Abbott made his promise in the early months after the search, neither he nor the rest of the officials running the search could have guessed that their efforts would be so fruitless. But here’s the question they never asked: Did the fact that their search failed mean that maybe their theory of the case was wrong?

That’s one of the many questions we’re going to be addressing in the new season of the “Deep Dive: MH370” podcast. This time around, things are a little different. The name of the news season is “Finding MH370,” and you can find show notes and a link to the videos at FindingMH370.com. Also, I’m flying solo this time, without a regular co-host, and instead I’ll be joined by a steady stream of experts who can bring their world-class knowledge to bear on the topic at hand.

You’ll find lots of claims on social media, and plenty of videos on YouTube purporting to offer the low-down on aviation’s greatest mystery. The fact is, almost all of them are made my people who either don’t know what they’re talking about or are just plain old grifters.

MH370 is a deeply technical and complex case. It’s not easy to get to the bottom of it. But I feel that it’s also important enough of a mystery, with far-reaching historical implications, that it deserves to be handled carefully and in depth. I hope you’ll come along with me.

In today’s episode, we launch the new season by asking why the Australian authorities were so confident that they would find the airplane even though they thought that it had flown into the far reaches of the remote southern Indian Ocean. We hear from veteran 777 pilot Otjan de Brujin of KLM about how to turn the satellite communication system off and on again, as happened early in the disappearance. And we’ll talk with a friend of the podcast who gained access to a Category D flight simulator, the most accurate kind of simulator available, to find out what really happens if you turn off a large chunk of a 777’s electrical system, or all of it, as many have speculated the perpetrators of the abduction might have done.