The Taking of MH370

by Jeff Wise

  To have any hope of success, the search would have to focus on the area where the plane most likely went down. But where was that? As time went by, and the experts honed their understanding of the BFO signals, they kept running up against an intractable problem. It kept proving impossible to get the two Inmarsat data sets to line up.

  The BTO data strongly implied that the plane had flown fast and straight. This made sense, as straight and fast are how planes are designed to fly. The BFO data, on the other hand, suggested that the plane either flew in circles for a while or took a curving path, in either case winding up further to the northeast. Despite investigators’ best efforts, it proved hard to come up with a search area that matched both sets of data.

  In an attempt to bring clarity to the issue, the ATSB called together an assembly of experts from a variety of disciplines. The aircraft’s manufacturer, Boeing, and the maker of the SDU, Thales, brought proprietary knowledge of the 777 and its key systems. Inmarsat contributed its expertise in deciphering satellite dynamics and communications protocols. Aviation safety boards from the US, China, Malaysia, and Australia brought air-crash investigation know-how. And government bodies like Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) contributed scientific expertise in specific domains.

  While this was going on, PBS science journalist Miles O’Brien reached out to me and asked for help putting together a documentary for the PBS series “Nova.” His production team had access to Inmarsat’s scientists and engineers, including Mark Dickinson, vice president of satellite operations. We all got on a conference call and I asked the question I’d been dying to ask for months: how had they been able to determine that the data could not have been tampered with? Rather than offer technical reasons why a spoof would be impossible, Dickinson dismissed the idea as simply seeming too unlikely. For someone to have pulled off a spoof, he said, “whoever did that would have to have six month’s worth of knowledge of what would happen, in essence have to know how the data would be used… there’s nothing to show that evidence at all as far as I’m aware.”

  I took this to mean that a spoof would have been impossible because to pull it off the perpetrators would have to have been significantly smarter than the investigators. An inconceivable notion.

  On October 8 the ATSB published their experts’ latest findings. The paper defined a new search area hundreds of miles to the south of where they’d previously planned to look. This new search zone actually encompassed two separate but adjoining areas: one that made sense from the perspective of the BTO and how airliners actually fly, and another that better fit the BFO data. Together they delineated a curving strip of ocean 600 nautical miles long.

  The logistical and technical challenges of searching this 23,000-square-mile area were enormous. Because it lay so far from land, crews would have to stay out for a month at a time, in a clime that mariners considered to be among the most inhospitable in the world. Here in the fabled “roaring forties” the waves at times reach 50 feet high.

  When the weather was amenable, the ships would reel out torpedo-shaped devices called towfish on six-mile-long tethers. Scooting along 500 feet above the seabed, these emitted beams of high-frequency sound. The echoes they received were descrambled by computer to produce photograph-like images of what lay below. When the undersea terrain was too rugged, searchers deployed autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs, that darted more nimbly around obstructions.

  In late October, the search vessel Fugro Discovery made its first pass towing side-scan sonar gear. It saw nothing, reached the end of its search zone, did a U-turn, and scanned a parallel swath. Over the next few months it steamed up and down parallel to the 7th arc, imaging the seabed in lawnmower strips, gradually working outward from the center of the search zone.

  By now officials were confident that they’d got the numbers right, and believed that success would follow in short order. As lead Australian crash investigator Peter Foley told one reporter, “the 1988 Moet is chilling nicely.”

  Chapter 12

  November 2014

  Meanwhile, my investigative efforts in Ukraine and Russia were beginning to bear fruit.

  A freelance researcher I hired in Irkutsk was able to interview one of Nikolai Brodsky’s friends and three of his relatives. From their accounts she was able to assemble a rough outline of his life.

  Born in 1971 in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Brodsky moved with his family to the eastern province of Yakutia when he was eight. He then returned to Irkutsk when he was 16. He attended a local polytechnic but was a poor student. When he was 18, his girlfriend Nadia became pregnant, so they married and moved to Yakutia along with Brodsky’s parents. The marriage was unhappy, and Nadia returned to Irkutsk alone. Brodsky followed, but the marriage ended soon after.

  Brodsky subsequently moved to a small town further north where he worked for a timber-products company. For a time he attempted to continue his education via correspondence course, but the school eventually expelled him for poor performance. Then he hooked up with a future oligarch, Vitaly Mashchitsky, and his fortunes improved dramatically. While still in his 20s, Brodsky founded a wood-products company whose operations ultimately extended to three cities in Siberia and the Far East.

  Brodsky’s passion was technical scuba diving. He was proficient in the use of trimix gas breathing equipment, which allows dives to depths of 1,000 feet and is primarily used for commercial and military diving. Brodsky was active in a local scuba club and regularly made dives under the ice in nearby Lake Baikal. (A yearly club tradition is to brave subzero temperatures to hold an underwater party below the ice, complete with Christmas tree and a Santa who hands out gifts.) He was an instructor in the club, and at the time of his disappearance was on his way back from an 11-day club trip to Bali.

  Brodsky’s eldest son, 25-year-old Lyev, described his father as “a very strong and prepared person, both morally and physically… I’ve never known him to be afraid of anything.” He said that Nikolai had never been in the military, having received an exemption from the draft due to flat feet. Lyev had no firsthand knowledge of his father’s whereabouts between the age of 19 and 29, however, as Nikolai had left his mother soon after Lyev’s birth and only reconnected with him later.

  One of Brodsky’s fellow dive club members also described Brodsky as fearless and exceptionally competent. When Brodsky first joined the club, the friend said, most of the members were ex-military who had learned to dive in the service. The first day Brodsky showed up, he went in the water with two instructors and another first-time diver. Conditions were tricky, and the other beginner nearly panicked. Brodsky kept his cool. “Nick felt very comfortable and did not look like a novice diver,” the friend said. Later, he got to know Brodsky as a man who “has a very good mentality, resistance to stress. In any situation it is collected, a sober assessment of what is happening can never be in vain to take risks.” Brodsky was adept at rigging up whatever gear or amenity might be needed, out of whatever materials might be at hand. “We often joked about him that he is a hamster—in his car always find all the necessary and useful.”

  Brodsky most definitely enjoyed the challenge of diving under the ice, in poor visibility, at great depths, with special gases. But he did not enjoy diving in warm seas and tended to skip club trips to the tropics. “He took part almost in all dive-club activities except for long trips,” his friend said. “His decision to go to Bali with club was pretty unexpected. He didn’t love the warm water and this kind of activity.”

  Brodsky was on MH370 because he had decided to cut his vacation short by three days. According to early press accounts, this was because he had promised his wife that he would have dinner with her on International Women’s Day, a kind of Soviet-era counterpart to Valentine’s Day. His family, however, said that wasn’t the reason, but rather that he had to make a business trip to Mongolia.

  I had a much harder time finding out anything about the Ukrainians, Oleg Chustrak and Sergei Deineka. The me
n had no presence on the web except for cursory, recently created profiles on Google Plus which contained little information beyond photographs.

  Deineka’s page listed his employer as an Odessa furniture company, Nika Mebel. The company sold upholstered furniture online but listed no physical address and only accepted cash payments. The website, which was registered in 2011 but only seemed to have been active since mid-2013, listed three phone numbers, all of which belonged to cell phones.

  Nika Mebel’s Google Plus page listed only two members: Oleg Chustrak and Sergei Deineka. But when a translator called Nika Mebel on my behalf, the man who answered said that neither man worked for the company, and that he knew nothing about them.

  A second translator visited Chustrak’s apartment for me and briefly spoke to his father, but the man didn’t want to talk. He did say, however, that Oleg worked for Nika Mebel. A third translator then called the company and was told that not only did Oleg Chustrak once work there, his son still did. The translator then called Chustrak’s son, who said he didn’t know if he wanted to speak with us, and referred us to the family’s lawyer. The lawyer refused to provide me with any information.

  Chapter 13

  December 2014

  Search officials were absolutely confident that they understood roughly where the plane had gone. But the ATSB had avoided laying out any theory about why it had gone there, insisting that its job was to find the plane, not to determine the cause.

  The community of independent researchers, however, had long since arrived at a consensus. They identified MH370’s captain, 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, as the most likely culprit. A highly experienced pilot with 18,000 hours of flight time, Shah was the only person aboard the plane known to have sophisticated knowledge of the 777. What’s more, only a minute had elapsed between Shah’s calmly spoken final words to flight controllers—“Good Night, Malaysia 370”—and the switching off of the communications equipment. It was hard to imagine that passengers could have broken through a locked door and taken control of the airplane in such a short amount of time, all without the flight crew sending a mayday.

  On the other hand, from a psychological perspective Shah seemed an unlikely candidate for mass-murder suicide. His family said he was a loving husband and father. His friends said he was a cheerful soul who loved to cook, fly model airplanes, and make balloon animals. His professional record was spotless. His YouTube channel consisted of home-improvement videos in which he demonstrated how to fix leaky windows and tweak an air conditioning system to save electricity. Though Muslim, he was no fundamentalist. He criticized terrorists, subscribed to Richard Dawkins’ YouTube channel, and supported democratic reform in Malaysia. At the time of his disappearance he was looking forward to retiring to Australia.

  With no slam-dunk evidence of Shah’s guilt, all sorts of theories multiplied across the internet. The media, lacking the technical savvy to separate the wheat from the chaff and keen to serve up new angles on an immensely popular story, amplified each new idea no matter how outlandish. The result was a chronic fog of misinformation.

  Some of the erroneous ideas were spread by apparently well-intentioned people who just didn’t know what they didn’t know. A Canadian pilot named Chris Goodfellow went viral with his theory that MH370 had suffered a fire that knocked out its communications gear and had diverted from its planned route in order to attempt an emergency landing. Keith Ledgerwood, another recreational pilot, made waves with his theory that hijackers had taken MH370 and ducked into the radar shadow of another airliner heading for the Middle East. Others felt certain that MH370 had been taken over by hackers and shot down by the United States to prevent the plane from being used in a 9/11-style attack on Diego Garcia, a military base on an atoll in the center of the Indian Ocean. Each of these theories received a flurry of attention in the media, but none fit the evidence.

  In the fringes of social media the fog lay even thicker. Everywhere the case was being discussed online, the conversation was dominated by cranks peddling fever-dream theories. As the proprietor of the most active web site, I found myself constantly beset. No matter how much time others spent pointing out the logical flaws, these people would keep at it, needling and prodding the discussion back around to their pet theories. One was convinced that the plane had been hit by lightning and then floated in the South China Sea for seven hours, transmitting to the satellite on battery power. When I kicked him off the site he came back under aliases. I wound up banning anyone who used the word “lightning.” At first I assumed that people like this were all garden-variety cranks, obsessives who’d gotten sucked into a mental feedback loop. In time, though, I began to wonder if their motivation was more malicious.

  Eventually, confusion became the case’s defining characteristic. The words “MH370” and “conspiracy theory” became so closely linked that whenever I told anyone that I was working on the story, they’d winkingly ask, “So do you think a UFO took it?”

  I understood the ribbing. I’d gone deep down the rabbit hole, and I knew it. The CNN checks by now were a distant memory, and I was spending vast amounts of time on an obsession that earned me not a cent. Worse than that, I was forking out my own money for translators and researchers. I knew I needed to move on and find work that would pay. But all I could think about was that damned plane.

  On December 1, 2014, I published the first installment of a six-part blog post laying out my hypothesis that MH370’s satellite communication system had been hacked and the plane flown north to Russia. I explained my suspicions concerning Brodsky, Chustrak, and Deineka, and argued that since the missile that took down MH17 could only have been fired by the order senior echelons, the Kremlin must have been responsible for the destruction of both Malaysia Airlines 777s. In the new year, I collected the posts into an e-book called The Plane that Wasn’t There, which Amazon picked up as a Kindle Single. I then wrote a feature article for New York magazine that ran under headline: “How Crazy Am I to Think I Actually Know Where That Malaysia Airlines Plane Is?”

  The e-book and the magazine article caused a stir. As the anniversary of the disappearance approached, I was invited onto Fox News, MSNBC and CNN to talk about my research. Not everyone bought my theory. CNN host Richard Quest pronounced it preposterous. Russian network RT declared that I suffered from “Putin Derangement Syndrome.”

  I’d made an extremely public gamble, and it caused me no end of anxiety. Any day now, the ATSB’s search team could find the plane and prove me wrong. But I felt an obligation to call the case the way I saw it. It would be embarrassing to be mistaken, but how much worse if it turned out I’d been right and hadn’t said anything?

  Whenever the self-doubt grew too strong, I’d think of the timing of the disappearance five seconds after IGARI, the aggressiveness of the U-turn, the high speed flight to the west, and the SDU re-boot. Whoever did this was aggressive and sophisticated. Their aim clearly seemed to be to outfox any pursuers. If evasion was their goal at the beginning of the flight, it seemed reasonable to presume that it was their goal throughout.

  Part 2: The Search

  Chapter 14

  April 2015

  By April 2015 the search ships had scoured 60 percent of the planned search area, a swathe more than 500 nautical miles long and 25 miles wide. The laws of probability dictated that the further they moved away from the 7th arc, the less likely they’d find something in any given sweep. While the ATSB maintained an external veneer of confidence, internally doubts were starting to grow that the search might not be successful after all.

  If that turned out to be the case, the question would be: Where else could the plane have gone?

  As officials saw it, there were two possibilities. The first was that the investigators had misidentified the range of possible endpoints along the 7th arc where the plane could have gone. Perhaps it had flown further to the southwest or northeast. But ATSB investigators felt that either scenario was unlikely. To reach a point further to the southwest, the
plane would have had to have flown very fast, and in so doing would have burned more fuel than it carried. To have flown further to the northeast, on the other hand, the plane would have to have flown slower than normal. To do that in a way that matched the ping rings would require a curving path. Planes don’t fly that way on any standard autopilot settings.

  There is another way that MH370 might have ended up outside the search area. It could have flown on further after the final transmission than investigators originally considered likely.

  As you’ll recall, we found out back in June of 2014 that the SDU had turned off when the plane first vanished, then came back online at 18:25. As a result, the data that Inmarsat recorded during that first ping was long and complex, involving a back-and-forth exchange of data required to establish a logon. The five pings that followed were shorter and simpler, part of a regular check-in routine that Inmarsat’s network carries out whenever a user is inactive for an hour.

  The sixth and penultimate automatic exchanges took place at 0:11. Then something happened. When MH370’s SDU contacted Inmarsat eight minutes later, at 0:19, it was requesting a log-on just it had at 18:25. Once again, evidently, the SDU had lost power and then been turned back on.