Lepas Don't Lie

March 8, 2024 5:31 AM

The Sea Creatures That Opened a New Mystery About MH370. Could freaky barnacles do what advanced technology couldn’t — find the missing plane?
posted by goatdog (22 comments total)

MH370 was hijacked by its own pilots and eventually smashed into the sea somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

That's the best framework we have. Every single step is supported by some evidence, and contradicted by some other evidence.

What surprises me most is our modern conspiracy-seeking media have just let this drop. An entire airliner with 220 people on board simply DISAPPEARED. It was YEARS later before any parts of the aircraft turned up.

Every part of the aircraft that has washed ashore has been examined and analysed by credible scientists.

Our best guess is that one pilot murdered the other, then died from their own injuries with the aircraft continuing across the Indian Ocean until it crashed from running out of fuel. The cockpit door was locked.

Then the plane sank in very deep water.

This is a comforting answer that fails to explain about 70% of the recorded facts.
posted by Combat Wombat at 6:20 AM on March 8 [3 favorites]

I found the ungated version
posted by chavenet at 7:58 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]

well that is weird.

I am really not at all inclined to give a moment of my time to weird woo conspiracy theories, but there seems to be something deeply incomprehensible about that plane crash. I hope it gets figured out in my lifetime!! I want to know what happened.

also flaperon is an awesome word and I hope its always pronounced with a strong Fronch accent.
posted by supermedusa at 8:03 AM on March 8 [9 favorites]

Time gate, obviously.

Truly fascinating article.
posted by Artw at 9:01 AM on March 8

Every single step is supported by some evidence, and contradicted by some other evidence.

That was the weird thing! I don't remember the details now, but there were things that didn't fit despite it being the simplest explanation, but there were also things that didn't fit it being an accidental ghost plane a la the Helios flight, which was the other simple explanation.
posted by tavella at 9:07 AM on March 8 [1 favorite]

The article is really worth reading. The researchers invented a whole new way of tracking where something in the ocean came from by looking at the barnacle growth pattern. It's like dendrochronology or something. Fascinating and detailed work! The other new information the article brought me is how the models of the debris drift don't match the expectation.

The conclusion:

Taken together, this swarm of paradoxes surrounding both the satellite data and the debris suggests that the authorities’ understanding of the case is badly flawed and that, if they have a sincere interest in solving it, they need to revisit their assumptions about what could have happened on that night ten years ago.

It's still entirely plausible that a pilot chose to kill everyone on the plane. But where the plane went and where it entered the water is still a very open question.
posted by Nelson at 9:25 AM on March 8 [4 favorites]

agreed the science of this is very cool and I look forward to hearing about what other gains of knowledge will be made possible as this system of tracking and analyzing becomes more robust.

but, I'm also curious, just for funsies, if anyone here has a good source for the not-so-completely-nutso end of the rabbit hole about this event? if one were bored and wanted to dip a toe into that cloudy water...?
posted by supermedusa at 10:34 AM on March 8 [1 favorite]

As someone who has been publicly obsessed with MH370 for a decade

A decade?! Surely this only happened a couple of… (checks dates) never mind. But this is a tragic and fascinating story that has fascinated me too for a, um, decade. But since the 10th anniversary is today that would explain why I have been seeing various references to it on the internet. Including the Atlantic article by William Langewiesche featured in this FPP that does a good job of summarizing the publicly available knowledge in 2019.
posted by TedW at 10:37 AM on March 8 [5 favorites]

If it turns out that Amelia Earhart’s plane has been found, then it seems like the same strategy could find this plane, which was a lot bigger and lost much more recently, among other reasons it should be easier to find.
posted by TedW at 10:41 AM on March 8

The William Langewiesche article is to date the best round-up I've read. IANAAA (aviation authority)
posted by j_curiouser at 1:27 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]

The theory I read, based on an Atlantic article, was that the head pilot committed suicide and took down the other passengers with him. In short, the head pilot was divorced and depressed, as evidenced by his social media posts. One likely scenario: he waited for the copilot to leave, then locked the door, vented the oxygen out of the main cabin, making everyone pass out. Then he turned off the transponders and set a course for the middle of nowhere in the Indian Ocean. Maybe he dumped the fuel and it crashed when it ran out, or maybe he deliberately ditched the plane.

That whole time that the media was going crazy with theories about what could be the reason, the Malaysian government, being secretive and paranoid, refused to let outsiders investigate the pilots. They knew what had happened but sat on it for years. Eventually it got out about the head pilot. So the cause not really a mystery anymore but all anyone remembers is the media circus at the time.
posted by zardoz at 2:22 PM on March 8 [2 favorites]

Wow, the basic science in the article is really interesting and then... given all that, the debris we've found doesn't fit into a coherent story? Thanks for posting this, I'm glad to know more about it although I sure would like to know the explanation.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:53 PM on March 8

the Malaysian government, being secretive and paranoid, refused to let outsiders investigate the pilots.

And the Thais as well, the moment it hit their airspace. One of the politically worst regions to have something like this happen, as the various governments are rich enough to get their pigheaded ways that it becomes opaque enough for parachuting foreign journalists to smash into, and even if they could, the authoritarian feature means those who were smart enough to have or know something worth leaking are either deeply embedded in the state or not even working in their own countries in the first place.
posted by cendawanita at 10:42 PM on March 8

(unless you're talking about banking and finance stuff.)
posted by cendawanita at 10:43 PM on March 8

But the entirety of the MH370 debris recovered so far displays this anomaly. Of the three dozen or so pieces of the plane that have been collected, not a single one has marine life on it that matches what you would expect to see if, as with the pumice Bryan studies, the debris had spent 16 months steadily gathering marine life from the waters it had traveled through.

It's The Anomaly, isn't it? Or just the crash that killed Payne Stewart? It is, if nothing else, perplexing.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:41 AM on March 9

Somehow I know it's just my pattern-seeking brain which makes this important but I just find it incredibly odd that this mystery was paired just months later with the shoot-down of the second Malaysian 777 over Ukraine. I mean, how many triple seven hull losses can you recall? And yet over nearly 30 years in service one carrier loses two in weird, suspicious ways within months of each other?
posted by St. Oops at 7:56 AM on March 9

That one wasn’t exactly mysterious.
posted by Artw at 9:17 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]

I said it (the second loss, along with MH370) was weird and suspicious. I mean, we know who caused it but the motive I've never seen spelled out.
posted by St. Oops at 9:33 AM on March 9

Malaysia just has the oddest luck with aircraft accidents but hopefully that means we're good for another twenty years.
posted by cendawanita at 10:20 AM on March 9

What surprises me most is our modern conspiracy-seeking media have just let this drop. An entire airliner with 220 people on board simply DISAPPEARED. It was YEARS later before any parts of the aircraft turned up.
It's not much of a story when every day is the same 'missing plane still missing for unknown reasons' story. It flares up now and again when a piece of wreckage is found or someone with A Theory manages to put together a statement that seems credible enough for the evening news (ie - it wasn't written in crayon).
posted by dg at 9:20 PM on March 10

I (and a Malaysian journalist) spent so much of 2014 maintaining a fact-checking and media analysis blog about MH370. There were way too many crackpot theories and such terrible terrible reporting out there, it infuriated the both of us. Amirul (my collaborator) was at the press conferences in KL and he was able to report on what exactly was said at those press conferences and how every other media outlet just failed at their job. Best reporting I ever saw about MH370 was by an 11 year old - stuck to the facts, no baseless speculation.

I find the monetization of conspiracy theories and the way that people are treating this as some kind of Spooky Mystery Book really disrespectful tbh. People are coming up with ideas that are rooted in bad misunderstandings about basic science and/or Islamophobia and/or anti-Asian sentiment and they get book deals. Besides Amirul's day job, neither him nor I made any money off our blog despite it being enough of a respected source that established news organizations were tagging us in their coverage - not that we expected to, but we weren't interested in theorycrafting, so no quick buck for us.

I did not spend months fighting off misinformation for people to treat MH370 as another History Channel "The Aliens Did It" scenario.
posted by creatrixtiara at 10:38 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

Partly because I just finished a book on deep sea ocean mapping (and how much we don't know about most of the planet), I feel like this is more likely to end up being "huh, there are things we don't understand about barnacle life cycles and how they grow on man made materials floating around in varying areas of the ocean" than "ooooh, maybe there's something UNEXPECTEDLY WEIRD about this conspiracy-bedecked event."
posted by rmd1023 at 11:55 AM on March 18