We're back with another plane crash! This one is a doozy and a mystery, did the captain plan this? Where was the plane for 6 hours, and where is it now? We'll talk about mental health, flying over the ocean, and how scary the ocean is in general!
We're back with another plane crash! This one is a doozy and a mystery, did the captain plan this? Where was the plane for 6 hours, and where is it now? We'll talk about mental health, flying over the ocean, and how scary the ocean is in general!
Taylor brings a craft to this event. How are you doing? Good. Hi, Taylor
>> Taylor: In the matter of the people of State of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA096.
>> Farz: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not boom. We are recording in progress. Hi, Taylor. How are you?
>> Taylor: I'm good. How are you? I brought a craft to this. To this event.
>> Farz: Good. That's a good move. I recently bought my first blue bowl.
>> Taylor: Wait, to crochet?
>> Farz: Well, technically, I got it for Rachel, but then she was like, you should crochet yourself. And I was like, okay, I'm excited for you.
>> Taylor: I've been taking a break because my arm hurts so freaking bad. I think I have tennis elbow from crocheting.
>> Farz: That's intense. That's intense. You're really committed to your craft.
>> Taylor: I am. I am.
Dooms to Fail is a podcast about historical disasters and failures
>> Farz: Do you want to introduce us?
>> Taylor: Yes. Let's get into it. I. Hello. Welcome to Dooms to Fail. We bring you historical disasters and failures. And I am Taylor, joined by Fars.
>> Farz: I am here, and I'm going to tell you a tale. Taylor.
>> Taylor: I'm excited.
>> Farz: Are you excited?
>> Taylor: I am. I'm nervous. That's part of the reason why I bought the craft. Brought this craft.
>> Farz: Today we are going to cover one of the most mysterious disasters in aviation history. We're covering Malaysian Airline Flight 370, which is MH370 for short. I am fully aware that this topic has been covered to death. But I also hear my AI buddies have been telling me that the SEO for an episode around MH370 is great. So that's what we're doing. We're going to go through it.
>> Taylor: We're trying to get people's attention. I really like the ones that we do that are very niche and never heard of. But once you've listened to one, then you can go back. You have a ton of episodes. This is 259.
>> Farz: Fun fact. I. When I'm trying to find topics to research, I deliberately search for topics that are not covered anywhere else because I want to learn something new. And I learned that that is actually the worst way to reach an audience. So we're pivoting bad.
>> Taylor: We're pivoting and just to grab your attention. But I do want you to go back and look at other cool stuff that we've done.
>> Farz: Please.
>> Taylor: I like the random, weird stuff that we've done.
>> Farz: That's what that's. We're great at. But we're also going to be good at this because this was a very interesting topic. It is very scary. This gave me the level of fear I have when I think of the deep Ocean in like, a totally different way, like above the ocean.
>> Taylor: That's exactly, exactly where my imagination went when you said that, because I was like, fear of the ocean. Plane crash. Oh, my God. You're above the ocean. There's nothing there. And it's so big, you can't find a plane in it. That's how big the ocean is. Which we have talked about in reference to submarines. Yeah, go.
>> Farz: We're going to. We're going to go through what we know happened, what we think happened, and then also talk through why things like this happen. Maybe not necessarily. We'll kind of know what the why is. We actually reference it in our German air episode. But the fact that this actually happens on a more frequent cadence than I ever would have assumed. So we're going to discuss that as well and discuss the why it would happen and why it's not talked about more so than anything else.
Some YouTube channels are replacing mainstream media in terms of recreating events
So we're going to go ahead and get into it. And I'm going to call out several YouTubers here because they do phenomenal work. YouTube is kind of. Some of these channels on YouTube are replacing, like, mainstream media in terms of how incredible they are of recreating things and detailing events. The first one I call out is a YouTube channel called Mentor Pilot. The tour of Mentor is Tour T O U R. And it's hosted by an active Boeing 737, a pilot who is also a flight instructor. His name is Peter Hornfeld. He's Norwegian or. Or some sort of Scandinavian. So there's a lot of dots over his name. There's another one that I've mentioned to you before, Taylor, called Green Dot Aviation. And they do it all the time. Their recreations were fantastic. So take a look. Also, both of these teams go into very in depth inside baseball elements of, like, how planes are operated, which fuses you can pull to do what. It gets super, super in the weeds. And it's. It's great for YouTube because you need to be able to visualize it and it's not so good for podcasting. So I'm gonna, like, not go super into the inside baseball pieces of like, he flipped this fuse and then pulled this breaker because it's just not going to be that compelling.
The aircraft was a triple 7,200er der. I looked up stands for extended range
So we'll start off with what we actually know happens. We're going to start off with a detail of what the aircraft was. It was a triple 7,200er der. I looked up stands for extended range. And at max takeoff fuel, it has about 8,100 miles worth of fuel. It can take onboard before having to, having to stop. The engines were rolls Royce Trent 892 engines, which are incredibly reliable. All jet engines are incredibly reliable, but this one particularly has a very high reliability rate. The reason I'm bringing that up is just to frame the fact this was not a technical failure that could have caused what we're discussing here.
>> Taylor: Like it couldn't have been, it could not have been.
>> Farz: I mean, I guess anything's possible, but the feasibility of it, I mean it's very low, the likelihood is very low.
MH370 was bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing carrying 239 people
>> Taylor: Got it.
>> Farz: So MH370 was bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and it carried on board a total of 239 people. 227 of those were passengers, 12 were crew. And if you're like me, you don't know what part of the country this is or the world this is. And so I'm going to actually spell out like the routes in a way that hopefully in a non visual format makes sense. On March 8, 2014 at 12:42am Malaysian time. So this is the red eye. The plane took off with Captain Zahari Shah and first officer Farouk Hamed at the helm. For context, the captain is the person in charge. The first officer is there to basically just help the captain manage communications, fly the plane, things like that. There's a vast experience discrepancy between the captain here and the first officer. The captain is 53 years old with 18,000 flight hours. The first officer is 27 years old and this flight was part of his training flight for the 777. So very different. 53, 27, 18,000 hours. Relatively new to the chat. So there's seven minutes from when they are at cruising altitude. That is really, really consequential. Cruising out takeoff and getting up to cruising altitude was totally routine and normal. You have seven minutes here that are incredibly, incredibly relevant. The first is the fact that there was a final a cars transmission that was made seven minutes into the flight. This is a text message that is sent from the plane to ground control to let them know what the status of the flight is. Says things like engine speed, status messages, things of that nature. And this is a pre programmed thing. So that's automatically.
>> Taylor: You're not like automatic on your phone with your thumbs.
>> Farz: Exactly.
>> Taylor: Got it.
>> Farz: Then about 12 minutes later you have the final voice transmission. So this was the handoff that was supposed to happen from Kuala Lumpur's area control to Ho Chi Minh area control. And that was a simple Good night. Malaysian370 it was calm, it was unremarkable Nobody clocked anything. Arrived. About two minutes later, what's called an S mode or sorry, a mode S transponder stops working. And that's important because it really should never stop working because the mode S transponder is what tells everything around you that you are there in, in their airspace. So other planes can note that you're there, ground control can note that you're there. All that, all that very important information is conveyed via the mode S transponder. I'm going to kind of articulate how this, this plays out. So north of Kuala Lumpur is Vietnam. So south of Vietnam is Kuala Lumpur. On the tip of Vietnam is Ho Chi Minh. There's a, there's airport. Yes, there's a sea between the two, or in between the two is the Gulf of Thailand. In the middle of that space is a thing called Igari. Igari is a waypoint. So for trans, I mean there's a waypoint in any situation where you're navigating a plane, but they're really critical in over water transportation. It's a single waypoint they can always count on to be there as a lat long beacon.
>> Taylor: Got. Is anybody in it? Is it just like a, what is it just like an antenna?
>> Farz: Yeah, I don't know if it's an antenna necessarily, but there's nobody in it. It's just a transponder.
>> Taylor: Got it.
>> Farz: So the whole point of it is you're supposed to catch Igari so you know you're going the right direction and then that routes you up to the next area control, which in this case is Ho Chi Minh. So when the plane vanished off civilian radar, both sides of air traffic control assumed. Okay, well that makes sense. If you're on the Ho Chi Minh side, you're like, oh, they're still on Qualum port control. They haven't handed off yet. If you're on Kuala Lumpur side, you're like, oh, they just hand it off to Ho Chi Minh. So.
>> Taylor: Right. So no one's like looking for them.
>> Farz: Right, right. Except it wasn't invisible to everyone. The military doesn't rely on transponders because that would be a terrible way to defend a country because you need to know, even if the other person's not in King, they're coming inbound, that they're there. What the Malaysian military saw was that the plane took a sharp left turn when it hit waypoint Igari. So it's supposed to continue further north after hitting that waypoint up to Ho Chi Minh. What they tracked is that it literally just did. It wasn't so much a U turn as it was a V back towards the Malaysian peninsula.
>> Taylor: And it did that really soon is what you're saying.
>> Farz: Very, very fast. Very fast. Yeah.
>> Taylor: We haven't even had a drink yet. Like, I mean like soon in the, in the flight.
>> Farz: It was about an hour into the flight.
>> Taylor: Okay, so we've had like one drink.
>> Farz: Well, probably not even that because at that point it would have been around 1:45am so again, it was a red eye. So most people were there sleeping.
>> Taylor: Okay, well I just don't feel like you're not really supporting my ability to drink on an airplane. But fine.
>> Farz: In this case, Taylor would be double fisting 100.
>> Taylor: If they don't give me two, you would order one and I'd like take it and like it'd be holding.
>> Farz: What's, what's really interesting about this and this, these details were kind of put together by investigators because the Malaysian military never released their actual data. What they concluded is that the flight, as it was going back the direction across the Malaysian peninsula was literally straddling the Malaysian and Thai airspace. Borders. Yeah, between both.
>> Taylor: And so like almost like it was on purpose.
>> Farz: Well, it was deliberately on purpose. And part of the logic behind that that meant, I think it was green pilot aviation called out is that when it's straddling both boundaries, then the Thai side can look at that, the military Thai can look at that and say it's probably just a Malaysian aircraft that veered a little bit more in our direction than not. But the same could be said on the other side with the Malaysian military.
>> Taylor: 100%. Yeah, I know what you're saying.
>> Farz: So the final point which the military tracked the plane to was roughly 219 miles north of Kuala Lumpur near a city called Penang. And so the only reason I'm calling that out is that is the furthest hit before you kind of enter into open water. And it was again more like a v. So 219 miles, not that much distance.
Every plane has a system called an Inmarsat satellite
Maybe a 30 minute flight for an airplane or an hour flight for an airplane, but that's where it ended up. After that, no radar anywhere ever saw the plane again.
>> Taylor: Wow.
>> Farz: Some of this stuff getting a little bit slightly into inside baseball, but I'm going to explain it quite a bit because it's really relevant to the rest of the story is that every plane is, is, has a system in it called an Inmarsat satellite. So typically what that does is this is a transmission line from the plane automatically to a satellite that will send you things like altitude, speed, all that good stuff, so that air traffic control or anybody who needs to later on can actually track this information later. And if you're wondering why they need this when they have that ACAR system I mentioned earlier that has text messaging, this was designed for ocean crossings where texting isn't going to work. That's the point of it.
>> Taylor: So just to say out loud, you are, you are telling the story in the frame that you know what happened and you're 100% sure of what the reason is.
>> Farz: This part is just factual of like, what was detected and also how the plane was configured.
>> Taylor: Okay.
>> Farz: And then we're going to get into what we actually, what experts think actually happened. Cool. So a key thing about the Inmarsat satellite is that Malaysia Airlines subscribe to the cheapest tier of Inmarsat. It's called Classic Aero. And that, interestingly enough, does not include position reporting. So you have air speed, engine speed, but not position like lat long in the gps. When the ground and the planes in MARSAT system exchanged those automatic handshakes, none of the coordinates of the plane were actually being exchanged. But in MARSAT logs, two things that are going to be kind of interesting when that handshake does happen in this context. So one is a thing called burst timing, offset pull dto, which is how long the round trip takes from the plane to the satellite and then back down to the ground. So that can give you like a very, very rough approximation of how far that transmission had to travel. So that's one important piece. The other was called a burst frequency offset, or bfo. And I had a hard time understanding this. I literally asked ChatGPT to explain it to me like I'm a child. And what it basically said was, imagine you're riding your bike and your friend is riding his bike, but they're going the other direction and you have a walkie talkie. We need to be on the same channel. But if you go really, really fast, then you might waver a little bit off that channel. And so when you think about a plane going really fast when it transmits that data back down, you need to account for the fact that it also probably moved further away from in space before that message was actually received. That's what those two mean. And even that, I don't actually still totally understand it.
Can we not do this via satellites? Well, that's what this
>> Taylor: So another question I have for you is, can we not do this via satellites?
>> Farz: Well, that's what this, the Inmarsat system was supposed to do was so let me actually answer that question. Actually, I'll answer this part of the question right now, which is I think what you're asking is, can't like, spy satellites or Google have picked up on this? Okay, I don't know if the answer to that question is yes or even if it is yes, whether that could ever be revealed given the means in data would be collected. What I will say is that this is such an absolute anomaly that these two things I mentioned, these two values, the burst frequency offset and the burst timing offset, they were never designed to track where an airplane is in space and time. They never had been before and they never will be again. Because the amount of things you would have to know to turn off within a plane to disappear is beyond the pale. They only realize that these two values could provide any sort of indication of where the plane went after the plane had already disappeared. So they were never designed for this use case because in any other situation a plane is tracked.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: The documented sequence here is that for on the inmarsat side of things was that the satellite terminal logs on having been off the network, and the satellite detects this log on request. And that was kind of how these little bursts ended up happening.
>> Taylor: Got it.
>> Farz: What's really important is that you can't track these things with any degree of precision because again, you're doing a lot of weird, rough math because you don't know, you literally don't know what the speed of the airplane is because it's been disabled. You don't know the direction it's going, it's been disabled. You don't have any of this. All you know is that this handshake occurred and the handshake took this much time to get from the plane to the satellite and from the satellite back down to the ground. So what ends up happening is that investigators use this ARC methodology where they're like, okay, a handshake happened here. So this strip is like one of the arcs where the handshake happened, then it happens again later on, so on and so forth down the globe. Right. And in total, there are seven arcs, which means that there were seven handshakes that they know of for sure before it stopped doing any handshakes.
>> Taylor: Right. It stopped doing handshakes because that the handshake was turned off.
>> Farz: It stopped doing the handshake as the plane disappeared.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: Because the plane would have crashed at that point. There would have been no ability for it to do a handshake.
>> Taylor: Got it. So they couldn't. No one could turn off the Handshake ability. That's just if it just doesn't exist anymore.
>> Farz: So we don't know for sure what happened. Got it. One part of it is that as part of the mechanism of shutting off parts of the plane, auxiliary power had to get deployed. Auxiliary power is tied to Inmarsat. And so what that means is like a ram air fan is dropped underneath the plane and that could power it on enough for a handshake, but not enough to transmit information.
There's a lot of wiggle room here in terms of where MH370 could have landed
What I mentioned earlier, there's seven arcs. That's a critical piece because that's the last place in time you can possibly track the airplane too. So we're going to talk about that quite a bit here. I did some questioning online of what is an arc in this context. What could it possibly represent in terms of space and what it can represent? Each of these arcs can represent roughly a 12 mile wide patch that is 16, 800 miles long.
>> Taylor: Oh my God.
>> Farz: Right. So it doesn't really pinpoint much. There's a lot of wiggle room here in terms of like where this plane could have landed.
>> Taylor: And there's also like, you know, this is obviously obvious, but like another dimension to this because it goes under the water.
>> Farz: There's that too.
>> Taylor: You know, it's like it's not just, oh, it's this, it's landed in this piece of land, it could go,
>> Farz: when it breaks down, trade, whatever they're called, currents can grab the piece of the plane, move it. So yeah, that's also a huge factor.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: So 16 months after the plane disappears in July of 2015, a flaperon, which is like the back or part of the wing, it washes ashore on Reunion island in the Indian Ocean. And the serial numbers track back to this plane over the following years. About 40 pieces of debris, well, possible debris, we don't know for sure, not all of them anyways. They were cataloged from Union island to Mozambique to Madagascar to Mauritius to Tanzania and South Africa. And I went and looked at those places on a map and yes, they are squarely like all regions that border the Indian Ocean. So that narrowed it down to the plane. Absolutely. Went down in the Indian Ocean. Also, it's worth noting that like, not, we don't know for sure all these pieces, all these 40 pieces are from MH370. But hopefully it is because otherwise a bunch of planes are crashing the ocean.
>> Taylor: Right. I mean, also like surprised that just like things just float.
>> Farz: Yeah, they, they actually found. One of the more eerie parts of it is they found this, you know, that plastic piece that goes around the TV casing on the back seat. They found one of those.
>> Taylor: I hate that.
>> Farz: I know, I know. I kept looking at that. I was like, somebody was looking at that. Probably.
We still don't know exactly what happened with the search phase for MH370
So anyways, we're now at the search phase. We still don't know exactly what happened with the search phase. We're looking at from 2014 to 2017 where an Austral Australian led search crew searched roughly 46,000 square miles of the seabed, found nothing. Then you go to 2018, a company called Ocean Infinity searches around 15,500 square miles of a different part of the seabed. Again finds nothing. All within the 7 arc. March 25 or sorry, March 20, March of 2025 through January of 2026. Ocean Infinity returns under a no fee, no fine, no fee contract with the Malaysian government for $70 million. If they can actually find the wreckage. They can't. They actually in that case only did about half their search. They covered about 9,300 square miles before the ocean got too bad, too rough and they had to call it off and nothing was found. The blazing government has tried doing this again many, many times. They actually tried to get Ocean Affinity out there again and they said their vessels were dispersed elsewhere and they couldn't do it. But I assume it's also because it's a little more fusal.
>> Taylor: Yeah, it's hopeless. Yeah.
>> Farz: The Malaysian investigation into MH370 was released on July of 2018 and that's kind of the closest thing we have to authoritative document on this. Their conclusions were simply the aircraft diverted from its flight path. The transponder signals ceased for reasons that could not be established. The subsequent turns were consistent with manual control inputs. That is, this was not a system failure and this was not autopilot. There was no evidence of mechanical fire failure or structural problems in the maintenance records of the plane. The team could not determine the cause of disappearance and could not exclude law unlawful interference by a third party, which is the last part we're going to hone in on.
There are some arguments against the theory that this was a murder suicide
So one side quest here that the media harped on for the, for a long time in the first few weeks of this is that they did discover in the manifest there were two Iranian men on the plane who were on there with stolen passports. It was Italian and Australian passports and there was a lot made out of that. Ultimately the investigators determined that these guys were just seeking asylum. They were trying to flee Iran. That was basically what was going on there. So here's what we think happened. This is the stuff that most people tend to agree on. And it's kind of four specific details. One, the transponder stopped because of human action. It would not have stopped on its own because it's also strange that it happened to stop at the most advantageous time for disappearance of the plane to have happened, meaning when they would have made that transition from Kuala Lumpur to Ho Chi Minh. That's one. Two, the aircraft turned back and flew a deliberate track for at least an hour under control because like I said, it straddled the line between Thailand and Malaysia very deliberately.
>> Taylor: It couldn't have just like floated on that line.
>> Farz: To, to the point I mentioned earlier too, at Igari, it wasn't a U turn, it was a V turn. It was a sharp, sharp turn that they did. The third point is that it flew south for roughly six hours and it had to have come down in the Indian Ocean somewhere around that seventh arc. Again, 12 miles wide, 16,008, 800ft across. And the last point being that it had to have come down because it ran out of fuel, because knowing the capacity of that, er, that's what the likely outcome was.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: So there's some things that support the theory around, around the fact that there is this was most likely a murder suicide by the captain. And what do we. Why we conclude that several points, the timing of the ATC handoff is the single best moment for the plane to disappear. We mentioned that earlier. And you have a captain who is incredibly experienced in how the systems work. Between this handoff from Ho Chi Minh or Kuala Lumpur to Ho Chi Minh, the transponder and the A car is a texting thing. We know that that was deliberately silenced. The turns were manual inputs. And you have the simulator which feels like a smoking gun.
>> Taylor: Yes. So heard this.
>> Farz: In 2016, roughly two years after the flight goes down, New York Magazine, they worked off of a confidential Malaysian police document that reported that the FBI had recovered six deleted data points from a Microsoft flight simulator that was on the captain's hard drive. They recovered those deleted sessions and they found that it contained a route northwest up what's called the Malacca Strait and then south into the Southern Indian Ocean. Later, forensics on the deleted data found that it had happened about five weeks before that flight. So five weeks before this flight, the captain had kind of like done this route that we think he did. But there's some arguments against it. So one of those arguments is there's no evidence this guy was suicidal. His family doesn't say he was suicidal. They have no indications of that. His family tends to think that he's being scapegoated. The, the ATSB own careful phrasing about the flight simulator data was quote, the possibility of planning but not a plan. So this could have been a thing, but it could not have been.
>> Taylor: Right, because you're allowed to like around in your flight simulator.
>> Farz: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. One thing that they also noted is that on the flight simulation session that they actually recovered, they found that the fuel loading and departure procedures that we think he undertook here were also consistent with someone who's going from Kuala Lumpur to Jeddah. And the captain was on a route to go to Jeddah before the accident actually happened. And I looked this up. You would actually fly across the Indian Ocean to get to Jeddah. So like there's some things going against him, against this theory as well.
>> Taylor: Right. Because he would have like he was already doing it. He's maybe he was just actually practicing.
>> Farz: Right.
>> Taylor: Have he ever done, had he done that before? Like that route before? Because he'd done the route before a fight is.
>> Farz: Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. The other thing that also seems kind of compelling against the captain having done this is that in every other situation where a pilot has killed his.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: Thank you passengers. That was deliberate action that took like a second to execute. It was not like a six hour long thing. Right.
>> Taylor: Because that is a weird.
>> Farz: That's really creepy six hours.
>> Taylor: Yes, it is very weird and very creepy. And I want to find out. I remember this thing from the 90s where there was this TV show where the aliens knew the world was going to end, so they interfered on a bunch of planes, intercepted them and took people out of the planets by hooking up the plane to a, a UFO and then saving them. And then every. And then they put like fake people in the planes. They're all these planes crashing, but really they're being rescued by UFOs. I'm gonna put that into the Internet and see what that is. But in that, that gave me that weird feeling where you're just like hovering over the ocean. Or that one plane where that one guy was walking around in it by himself. Do you remember that plane crash?
>> Farz: I'm going to talk about that.
>> Taylor: Okay, cool. Because like that's, that's such a weird six hours. Such a long time to be alone on an airplane.
>> Farz: So.
>> Taylor: Yeah, because we're assuming everybody is dead or can't be.
>> Farz: I'm going to get into that.
>> Taylor: Okay, keep going.
A possibility here is that a fire or some rapid decompression occurred
>> Farz: So there's a second hypothesis which is there's a catastrophic event that happened on board that turned this into a ghost Flight because again, we still have the seven arcs, we still have the handshake, so we know the thing was flying for that period of time. A possibility here is that a fire or some rapid decompression occurred that incapacitated everyone and the thing just flew on autopilot until its fuel was depleted and then it just crashed. And to your point, this actually has happened before. So in 2005, Helios Flight 522 had had the cabin oxygen set to manual rather than automatic. And because of just the Swiss cheese effect, multiple Czechs missed this. And eventually the plane flew to cruising altitude with no radio communication. The cockpit Greek fighter jets were dispatched and they went up to the side of this plane and they saw the captain and first officer had been slumped over the controls. But there was a woman, a flight attendant, who had gotten the bottled oxygen, realizing what was happening. It was waving at them like trying to get their attention. This all witnessed, the fighter jet pilots witnessed all this and then they couldn't do anything. I mean, there's nothing to instruct her on. She's not going to land a plane on her own at that point. And so the plane just crashed. But like that situation where one person was alive and walking around these bodies wearing an oxygen. Terrifying, terrifying stuff.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: The theories that support support this are that it accounts for the long straight southern flight, the total absence of communication for six hours, and the presumed rapid descent. The last presumption, the rapid descent part, comes from the fact that all the debris that was recovered indicated that the plane did not glide to the ground. Like this was not a ditching attempt where he was safely trying to place the plane on the ground. This was a catastrophic crash. Because all the broken up pieces indicate that the things that work against that theory, it does not account for the deliberate turn back across peninsula, because we do know that he did that. And the navigation up the Malacca Strait or the satcom power interruption and the reboot that happened, causing the first arc in the handshake to occur within Marsat.
>> Taylor: Okay,
>> Farz: so in this hypothetical, if a hypoxia situation had occurred, it could have only happened after all that happened, which then you say, why would that happen?
>> Taylor: Why would you turn, why would that ever happen in the first place?
>> Farz: Right, exactly. Again, callback going Back to episode 190 entitled Suicidal Pilots, German Wings Flight 9525, we've seen something like this before. That was, that was not done intentionally to hide the disappearance of the plane like we have in this situation. But in that situation, again, a pilot Decided that he was going to die by suicide, take the plane with him, ended up killing 150 people when he flew into the Swiss Alps, or, sorry, the French Alps. And here's the part that's gross, too. This happens. This has happened quite a bit. It happened in 1982, 94, 97, 99, 2013, 2014, 15, 2022 and 2025. But here's why I'm bringing this up now is because we don't know a lot of this stuff. The reason we don't know a lot of this stuff is because a lot of times in countries where this happens, they don't want to say that's what happened. Investigators.
>> Taylor: That's what I was going to ask. I was like, where is this happening?
>> Farz: But I say, yeah, investigators assume this is what's happening, but they can't prove it in the country that's responsible for the investigation, won't confirm it. And so I have a whole listing of all these where it's all just disputed claims. And because they're disputed, nobody's going to go out there and say this is actually happening with a some degree of frequency. The most recent was June of 2025 with Air India 171. You might remember this one. This one, the one guy survived.
>> Taylor: Yes. And he was walking down the street.
>> Farz: Right. So that was why in that situation, what ended up happening? That was a Boeing 787, that crash 32 seconds after takeoff, and it flew into a hostel again. 241 out of 242 people aboard died and then 19 others on the ground. The report for that said that seconds after liftoff, both engine fuel control switches moved from run to cutoff. So somebody reached over and flipped the switch from and was like fuel and put their hand off the cvr. The cockpit voice reporter recorded a pilot asking the other why he moved the switch. And he replied that he had it.
>> Taylor: So he did, obviously.
>> Farz: And he did. And he did. There was a Wall Street Journal report from investigators who, like, looked at the report. It was like, this could only happen if it was done intentionally. Like, it's almost inconceivable for not to be done intentionally.
So here are the likely theories of what happened to MH370
So here are the likely theories of what happened to MH370. And I'm piecing this together from experts from various different parts, because nobody's saying this conclusively, right? So some of it is coming from other Triple Seven pilots or friends of the captain. There's investigators, all that kind of coming together. So the theory is the captain sends the first officer out of the cockpit to run an errand. There was a quote from the Atlantic from a friend of the captain who said, yeah, this guy was, who's also a 777 pilot. He says this guy was super seasoned and the first officer was super junior. He could have told him to go get a coffee and he would have ran out the door immediately and done that for him. The captain then presumably locked the door to the cockpit. Green Dot Aviation is the one that called this out. The captain then deliberately depressurized the plane to incapacitate everyone. This was something said by a guy named Larry Vance, who's an air crash investigator as part of a panel he did for 60 Minutes. The God.
>> Taylor: I just want to say that I really hope that people were just passed out. That's the way to go.
>> Farz: That's presumably actually what happened.
>> Taylor: That I hope, that's the part that I definitely hope is true, that you just like oh, I'm falling asleep on this red eye. And then you just never wake up. And like you're fine. You're not fine because you're dead. But like you don't know what's happening.
>> Farz: You don't know. The captain could manipulate the pressurization valves manually, meaning the passengers mask, they, they would only get 20 minutes of air supply.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: The, the tanks for the captain are different, the cockpit is different. And so he could have oxygen for hours without running out. So he could turn it off for, for the whole plane, put his mask on, everybody behind him is dead within 10 minutes at most.
>> Taylor: Right.
>> Farz: And then he didn't refreshurize the plane and he's fine. What's interesting is we know for a fact that the crew only oxygen tank was topped off that morning which was called out by another Triple 7 captain saying that's really weird because from what we found in the logs, the tank wasn't low enough to require a top off. It wasn't at that stage where it needed a top off. So this would be something that you would never call for on your own. Like this would just, like this would not be a normal part of service doing.
>> Taylor: So who asked for that? The captain or the captain?
>> Farz: The cabin was repressurized after he was certain the crew was dead and out of oxygen and the flight just carried on with 200 plus dead bodies behind him in the plane. That's a really, really creepy part that also comes from Larry Vance, the air crash investigator. Then the active pilot at the control in this case, presumably the captain is there just flying the plane without his mask on for six hours until the fuel is exhausted and it crashes. Shortly after that seventh handshake, or the seventh arc handshake occurs. That's the presumed theory of how all this kind of came together. Again, no idea where this thing actually hit the water. It's never been found. And I would. Would presume that at this point it would never would get found. But.
>> Taylor: And then again, can you remind me, during those six hours, no one was looking for them or had they already been like, alerted?
>> Farz: I don't know that they had to have been alerted. Right. I actually don't know. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't. I didn't figure that part out. I should have. That would have been good detail because at some. Some point Ho Chi Minh must have been like, we don't know where this plane is. Right.
>> Taylor: Like, we should expect them to check in or we should be able to
>> Farz: see it somehow from a. From a. One thing to note is from a geography perspective, that part of the peninsula from Igari Waypoint that he crossed over to get to Penang was pretty narrow. Like, it wasn't that much distance. And it's also worth noting that not a lot of countries, like, we're kind of useless in the US like if someone enters US airspace, like fighter jets are on them immediately.
>> Taylor: Right? That's what I assume.
>> Farz: But that's not the case in a lot of other parts of the country, especially parts that are not like, wealthy, I guess. And in. When Malaysia saw it like this was not like a scramble, the jets. Let's go figure out what's going on with this plane. And again, this guy, being very experienced as a Malaysian pilot, would have known these details. They were like, there's budgets to consider. And they're like, we're not going to scramble the planes for no reason. And so they let it kind of go along its way. I would assume by the time Ho Chi Minh was like, there's something bad happening, he was probably already off the peninsula and on his, like on the. Over the Indian Ocean.
>> Taylor: Yeah.
>> Farz: So that's the theory. That's what the working theory is. I was, as I was researching this, I was like, look, if this guy was that smart that he knew all the ways that you could make a plane disappear with all those satellites tracking it and all that stuff going on, and we're looking at the 7th arc, and we search the, the 7 7th arc for somewhere around 75,000 square miles of seabed. What's it. What's to say that maybe like, he didn't turn around and go backwards towards the sixth arc. You know,
>> Taylor: why would he, why would he do that?
>> Farz: I mean, if his. If the whole point was to hide the plane and to hide what he did, then maybe he knew that the seventh arc would. Would hit and he would. He'd say, okay, let's turn this around. Because they're going to assume I'm somewhere at the seventh arc or past the seventh arc, but not behind the seventh arc, so why don't I go back to the sixth one?
>> Taylor: Right. So he knew where to hide at the sky, if possible.
>> Farz: Well, hide where. Where would have made impact.
>> Taylor: What do you mean? I mean, he can crash anywhere.
>> Farz: Because if they're tracking it from. So if the plane only had. If the plane only was able to track. If we're only able to track the plane's handshake from the first arc, then you would know that it crashed somewhere around the first arc. But then in the second arc, so there's another handshake, then there's a third, then a fourth, then a sixth and a seventh.
The presumption is that the plane is somewhere under the ocean
That's why the presumption is that the plane is somewhere under the ocean around the seventh arc or shortly past the seventh arc. But if you're trying to actually do this deliberately in a way that hides what you were doing. I don't know, maybe you do a. You know, your fuel is exhausted. You know that this is the last handshake you're ever going to have with Inmarsat. Maybe you just turn the plane around and go towards the sixth arc because you're really trying to hide what you did and make sure that you throw them off the scent. Yeah, because the presumption wouldn't be that somebody would do that. Right. The presumption would be you just keep going until fuel exhausts, then you crash where you crash.
>> Taylor: Right. That, like, something would happen. What do you think? What do you think happened?
>> Farz: I think he did it. I think the captain did it. I think. I think it's really creepy. I think you'd have to have, like, some really, really dark desires to want to do that. Because the whole ghost flight thing of, like, all these dead people behind you, it's like, man, that's. That's really eerie.
>> Taylor: And that happens so fast, you know? So like, all of a sudden, everyone's dead and you can't turn. You can't take it back.
>> Farz: Yeah, you can't take it back. And I mean, that was one thing I also researched as part of this is like, they only put about 20 minutes of oxygen in those tanks for the pastures. Because if depressurization happens, that's like an immediate drop level. Like, that's like you don't think, you don't do anything before you drop as far down as oxygen happens because otherwise you're all dead. Anyways. Anyways, that's. Those are the theories. Those are the counter theories. And we are now at year 12, still don't have anything more than theories. Still do not have more than those 40 pieces of the plane. And we'll see.
>> Taylor: I'm really impressed that like any pieces of any plane got anywhere.
>> Farz: I would assume that upon impact, a lot of it just broke up.
>> Taylor: Yeah. And it's like. And I mean, also, it like moves so quickly, you know, so it's not like. Again, unless, like I'm thinking, like if part of it is like on the floor of the ocean, like the Titanic, you know, or I'm thinking of it like is it exploded into a million pieces, which is probably the case. And then as soon as those pieces hit the ocean, they're going to go miles apart. Like, it's going to be crazy. Did anyone ever hear anything? It is. That's interesting because I feel like you would hear that boom
>> Farz: in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
>> Taylor: I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I feel like there's tons of trackers and stuff, you know, I don't know. That's what I feel like a satellite would have picked up on or something.
>> Farz: Again, I. I assume there's things that the governments around there or the US government know, but you can't, just can't reveal it. It's like the time they let the world think that the Titan was still on the bottom of the ocean when it actually imploded.
>> Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's terrible. Those poor people.
>> Farz: But to your point, the one saving grace is a lot of those people, I mean, would have been asleep when their oxygen was cut off. And by the time your oxygen is cut off, you're passed out and you just die. And then. Yeah, you don't know what's happening. So that's the one saving grace, I would say. Mm.
>> Taylor: I remember my cousin Lindsay was. Said was in Japan when that happened and she came to LA and she flew Malaysian Airlines a couple weeks after. And she was like, it was great. I had like three rows to myself because no one else wanted to fly Malaysian Airlines. She was. My ticket was $4 and I had a million rows to myself and it was great.
>> Farz: So there's a Silver lining in every disaster, right?
>> Taylor: Oh, that's terrible. I also, like, I mean, obviously I watched the documentary and like there was like the, like maybe they were accidentally bombed. Did you think about that at all?
>> Farz: No, none of those. Like, again, so many of these are competing theories and the governments at stake don't want to say too much because they don't want the blame to land on them. And so anybody saying the plane got bombed, it's so completely not provable because no country would ever say they did that.
>> Taylor: We didn't have bombs pointing at you when like we did, you know, you mean?
>> Farz: Yeah, yeah. But anywho, that is what I got. I would love to hear from folks who. This is one of those things that I think it's so intriguing that a lot of folks are tracking for. They've seen a lot of documentaries about it. If you have ideas or thoughts, would love to hear from you again at Doom to fell pod@gmail.com. tell us what you think and we'd love to read it out on the air.
>> Taylor: Yeah, documentaries are so sad too because you meet the families and they're like,
>> Farz: yeah, this is terrible. I fast forward those parts.
>> Taylor: Honestly, it's so sad. Like there's like a dad who lost his, like, wife and a couple sons. Yeah, terrible, terrible. And then we also talked about. I'm sorry, I know you finished, but I have another thought. We also talked about in the German Wings thing that like, if a pilot needs to see a psychiatrist, they usually don't because they can get put on like, medical leave and they're probably not going to come back. So they just don't.
>> Farz: So I, I included a piece on that in this that I deleted later because we covered it so extensively in the German Air. Yeah, German Wings episode. But yeah, that's a huge, huge piece of it as well.
>> Taylor: Yeah, that is.
Gary, do you have any list for mail force? Nope, nothing new
Gary,
>> Farz: do you have any list for mail force?
>> Taylor: Nope, nothing new. But please send us an email like far said doom to fail podmail.com. let us know what you want to hear.
>> Farz: Find us on the socials.
>> Taylor: We have lots of plane crash episodes, so this is just one of many.
>> Farz: Tell your friends. Maybe they like plane crashes.
>> Taylor: Who doesn't? Greatbye.
>> Farz: Thanks, Taylor.
>> Taylor: Thank you.
>> Farz: Bye. All.