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June 16, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:29:20
20230616_what-happened-to-missing-plane-mh370-a-megyn-kelly
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Primary Radar Mystery 00:15:01
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and the final day of our Hot Crime Summer Week.
Today, we investigate the mystery of MH370, the missing plane.
You may think you know this story, but you do not know it like this.
Oh my gosh.
We're going to take you from takeoff to the controversial search and investigation with famed writer, author, and journalist William Longovisha.
In addition to his journalism, he's also an aviation expert.
He was a professional pilot for many years before turning to journalism.
And he has researched and investigated the MH370 findings more than pretty much any other journalist, including those involved with that recent Netflix special.
And we're going to get to that too.
We will try to get to the bottom once and for all about what happened, where that plane is, and we will get into the head of that pilot.
Set the stage because I watched this whole special on Netflix about what happened to the plane.
I was excited.
I was like, okay, I want my answers.
I walked away frustrated and kind of angry that I had been led down a bunch of paths that seemed equally unreasonable and led to trust people who turned out to be, to me, kind of quacky and didn't get any answers.
There wasn't an answer.
So is there an answer?
I mean, is there a better place to go for what not definitively, but most likely happened to MH370?
Yes, there is completely an answer.
It's indisputable.
In fact, the answer is indisputable.
The motive is a different question.
The why is the question.
The what is indisputable.
So let's start there.
What happened to MH370?
Well, this airplane took off.
It was in 2014, March, at night, just after midnight, out of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, so Air Malaysia.
They were going to Beijing about a six-hour flight, straight on up the coast of Asia, basically, to Beijing.
And after about, you know, after leveling off, a few minutes after leveling off, it got over the South China Sea, disappeared from radar.
This does occasionally happen.
It usually means that there's a crash, which happens immediately.
In this case, there was no crash.
It disappeared from radar.
And for reasons we can discuss, we know that it kept flying not toward Beijing, but essentially 90 degrees to that path, and then in the roughly opposite direction toward the South Pole out over the Indian Ocean for about seven hours.
And that doesn't fit any profile that any of us have ever seen before with an airplane accident, whether it's a terrorist act or an explosion or a system failure.
It just disappeared after a very, very strange flight, an enigmatic flight that we were able to piece together, however, conclusively.
And at the end of that flight, it ran out of gas and went into the deep ocean in a remote part of the Indian Ocean and has not yet been found.
Period.
It basically was on its way northeast toward Beijing.
It turned around, it crossed back over, and then it went south over the Indian Ocean.
This is what you say happened.
And there are data points that support that theory.
The most important being the Imarsat data, right?
Can you explain what that is?
Yes, I would say that the most important initial data points was primary radar, right?
So that either military radar or just raw radar.
And that showed within a few days, it clearly showed that the airplane turned west across the Malay Peninsula and then went northwest up the Straits of Malacca around the top of Indonesia and then south from there into the depths of the Indian Ocean.
It was on radar for a long time after making the first turn.
So that was the first thing.
It was or was not.
It was or it was not.
It was.
Okay.
It was on primary radar.
It was not on normal air traffic control, computer-enhanced transponder-based secondary radar, which is the normal air traffic control radar, carries a lot of data with it.
It was on the kind of radar that the military uses for air defense reasons and also that lies underneath normal air traffic control radar.
So it was an unenhanced raw target.
And that was the first thing, no matter what, it stayed.
I think I'm going to say it was in the air being seen by some form of radar for about an hour after making the first crazy silent turn off course from Beijing.
As it proceeded then around the top of Indonesia, it then disappeared from radar range, normal radar range, both Thai and Indonesian, let alone Malaysian military.
And then the, but at about the same time that that occurred, that it was being lost from normal radar, it's complicated to explain this, but a series of electronic handshakes began.
And these handshakes are related to an obscure communication device in the ceiling of the cabin of the 777.
This was a 777 Boeing that is responsible for some forms of communication, largely entertainment stuff and other things, reports to maintenance.
So satellite-based, and those handshakes were either the airplane or the ground-based satellite, the ground base of the satellite system was trying to establish communications, always unsuccessfully.
But the attempt to establish communications carried with it whispers of content, hints of location and of direction.
And in the end, of a final violent dive.
The use of that information, which was basically interpreted in London in Marsat as the company, was revolutionary.
That information never been used before.
There were two forms of it, these handshakes.
And they were able to, in Marsat, in London, they specifically were able to derive distance from the satellite.
And there were, I think, seven handshakes.
It may be a little wrong on that, but roughly seven handshakes, each of which gave a distance from the satellite and an arc, and then also through a Doppler effect, if you know what I mean, distortion of frequencies.
And I'm simplifying it a little bit, related to the speed of the airplane and problems with the wobbling satellite.
They were able to, in Marsat, was able in London to derive directional information or at least turn information.
So the turns were seen because it warped sort of like a train going by, you know, a Doppler effect.
It warped the signals and a train going by, I'm talking audio, a train whistle, anything like that.
That's, of course, the famous Doppler effect.
We all learned about it in high school.
But it was happening electronically out over the Indian Ocean.
This was never, this is revolutionary stuff.
And it was out of desperation that these brilliant people in London realized they had real information.
They could go back into the records during those hours and derive from that satellite a lot of information of where the airplane was at any given time or at each given handshake and where it was turning.
So that's what I'm talking about.
That's fascinating.
So let's start back at the first kind of radar that you said picked up the plane.
You said it wasn't the normal air traffic control radar.
Now, why do we know why that was that it wasn't being picked up on the normal air traffic control radar?
Well, because the airplane's transponder was turned off.
Whether if we're talking about a simple single failure, this is not uncommon.
It's why airplanes typically have two transponders.
I mean, transponder failures are not uncommon.
And, you know, it's not very exotic technology, that kind of transponder.
It's similar to the traffic, the toll transponders you have in your car, easy pass or something like that.
So the transponder transmits all kinds of information about the airplane, the flight number, where it's going, et cetera, et cetera, altitude.
It piggybacks on the data coming in with raw primary radar.
So we know that the transponder turned off.
Did it turn itself off or did someone turn it off?
Well, given that it's totally unrelated to communications, it happened seconds after communications stopped.
And given that it is totally unrelated to which way the airplane's flying, it happened at the same time that the airplane made its first radical, crazy turn.
We know it was turned off.
It didn't turn itself off.
These are independent.
These would be independent issues.
So, yeah, that's what happened.
And I think what about the second transponder?
Were they both?
Were they both turned off?
Because you say there's a backup, but they both would have been turned off.
Yeah, well, that's no, they weren't.
You can't turn off the primary.
I mean, the primary is what the military uses to see pieces of metal in the sky, right?
They don't rely on transponders to say when the enemy is invading their airspace.
So primary transponder, you can't turn it off.
It's just going to pick you up.
And in fact, the Malaysian Air Traffic Control has a baseline primary radar, but they didn't look at it.
We're talking levels of incompetence here, right?
Which is part of the story of what happened here in terms of the disappearance.
The military very quickly said, admitted, basically out of Penang on the peninsula there, where they have A fighter base that they were watching it, or at least they said they were watching it.
They should have been watching it.
And they said, Well, we knew it was a friend, we knew what the airplane was, so we didn't bother to make anything out of it.
We didn't send any interceptors up to find out what's going on because we knew it was MH370.
So who cares?
Well, that falls apart in a hurry because the search, the initial search, took place in the South China Sea, totally the wrong place.
As if the airplane had gone down on course for Beijing, and the military, so that just completely not believable.
It very quickly was obviously a cover-up, which is completely believable in Malaysia.
Political embarrassment, corruption, brutality, whatever, dysfunctional government, dysfunctional military.
They were either asleep, and there's some indication they may actually have been asleep, or they were just incompetent.
The military was, in one way or another, was tracking this thing right along and didn't do anything about it.
Why ask them?
I've tried.
You don't get very far with that kind of question in Malaysia.
So the primary radar was showing it.
And it was, let's say, it was both the military radar and the civilian primary radar.
The military fessed up a lot sooner than the civilian did to having had primary radar on this machine on this airplane.
But they came up with all kinds of crazy excuses why they didn't do anything about it.
So we don't know.
I mean, truly, they could have been asleep.
Is there a record of it?
So we know it did, in fact, appear on the radar.
And the real question is just why didn't they do anything about it?
They were asleep.
They didn't care.
They were incompetent.
But do we know it did in fact appear on their radar?
Yeah, we do.
I mean, the images exist and not the full radar record, but they certainly exist.
And they were pretty widely disseminated.
Yes, we do.
There it is.
They provided images that showed it, but then provided false explanations for their inaction.
Got it.
And this is all relevant to what I think is your belief as to why this plane did what it did.
And that relates to the pilot.
And that explains, if it relates to an intentional decision by the pilot, why there might have been a cover-up, why the Malaysian government might have misled us.
I mean, it really does explain a lot if this was an intentional downing of an aircraft by the pilot.
But to this day, the Malaysians are saying that's not what this was.
That wasn't it.
So let's talk about, before we get into the pilot, let's just talk about the end of the flight so we can take the viewers and the listeners there.
Then it turns south over the Indian Ocean, which is a bear of an ocean.
My God, the videotapes I've seen of the retrieval efforts they did make.
The Australians did, the Chinese did.
There were a few efforts to actually see if they could find debris someplace in the Indian Ocean.
More than three years of efforts by the Australian, primarily by the Australians.
Yeah.
And $120 million on that.
And we've got some videotape of those boats out there trying to do it.
Radio Silence After Sign Off 00:15:46
And it was just, it was chilling to me because the waves they dealt with, like, that is a scary ocean.
And they were on it for a long time.
And that's where we believe this aircraft wound up.
But one of the mysteries is in this post-9-11 world in which this plane may have been taken down, why wouldn't the passengers have fought?
Why would they have allowed somebody might have realized at some point was making weird turns?
They were well past the number of hours it would have taken them to get to Beijing by the time we believe the plane went down.
So what happened to the passengers?
What do you think?
It's no one really knows, but it's because of the amount of time that transpired, it's likely that they were incapacitated in one way or another very early in the event, right?
So after right after the first left turn, turning away from Beijing, we know the airplane climbed to 40,000 feet.
It had been at 35,000 feet.
40,000 feet was pretty much the ceiling of the airplane, performance ceiling at that time, that weight that night.
So they climbed as high as they could go.
And I think there would be general agreement.
Well, there's a lot of disagreement here because people have all kinds of crazy theories, but reasonable people think that the passengers were incapacitated and actually probably killed by depressurizing the airplane.
Very easy to do.
You throw a switch, you depressurize the cabin.
The people basically go to sleep.
And, you know, masks fall, but they put them on, but they're no good at that altitude.
Those are masks are good only for riding a short descent down to higher pressures in the lower altitudes.
At 40,000 feet, the mask is really not going to do you a normal mask.
But in the cockpit, there are four pressure masks, which are different, right?
They pressurize the oxygen flow to the lungs.
So you have a sort of a mini pressurized airplane if you put that mask on there, quick donning masks.
So slap those on, depressurize the airplane.
Everybody in the back dies within minutes.
A peaceful death, not screaming.
How?
How would it be a peaceful death?
Because people go to extreme hypoxia.
People go to sleep.
They're not gasping for breath.
They don't feel that they're suffocating.
Yeah, hypoxia.
So it seems, I think many people would agree that the airplane was depressurized at roughly the same time that the entire electrical system was shut down, which is another matter.
And this is all very closely associated with the first left turn away from Beijing and a short, a tight turn, high G-load turn and a climb to 40,000 feet.
If you were going to depressurize the aircraft with a switch, why would you need to go up to 40,000 feet?
You don't.
So, you know, that's like overkill, but it makes it happen faster.
So, yeah, and you also don't need to make a tight turn.
We know that that initial turn away from Beijing was not flown on autopilot.
It was too tight for an autopilot.
It was flown by hand.
And somebody was flying that airplane and made that turn.
It was a tight turn, steep, steep bank angle, high bank angle, high G-load.
Why would that be the choice?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, whoever was doing that was not entirely rational, obviously.
So then we go out over the Indian Ocean and we go south.
For how many hours was it over the Indian Ocean?
Well, the whole flight lasted, what, seven hours, six hours.
I think probably five hours over the Indian Ocean, something like that.
Yeah, I'm going to guess.
Have to go back and look at my notes and all that.
That's been a long time for me, but several hours actually over the Indian Ocean.
That's a long time, by the way.
Right.
So, is there anything to be gleaned from that?
No, I mean, why would if a guy is suicidal and intent on killing himself and all his passengers, why would he wait so long to do it?
That's totally unknown.
I have a theory, which is nothing at all solid, is that if indeed the captain did this, and I think he did, okay, why he waltzed around this.
His name is Zahari.
He may have he committed to this flight path that he presumably actually had thought through in advance and practiced on a flight simulator, that he that he found himself in a quandary, that he actually knew he couldn't turn back.
For one thing, he probably killed an entire plane load of passengers.
And also, he just deviated from the course to Beijing, that he couldn't go back home ever again.
That he knew that he had to die, but he didn't want to die, maybe, or he was savoring the last moments of his life.
I don't know.
It's always struck me as that long flight, the length of that flight, after he made that last turn over the Indian Ocean and then flew pretty much straight for five hours, let's say, that he was in some kind of an emotional or philosophical quandary.
I want to, I don't want to, I want to, I don't want to.
And it just went on until he ran out to gas.
He couldn't quite bring himself to do it.
And finally, he let it do it to him.
But I don't know that.
And I know that nobody knows that.
That's why would he take five hours?
Why not just do what every other suicidal pilot does?
And there are quite a few have been around.
You know, this is a fairly stand, not standard, but an occasional occurrence.
You push the airplane into the ground right away within minutes.
You don't wait around.
So he waited around for five hours.
So I cannot explain that.
It's incredibly eerie to think about that man up there potentially flying that aircraft with dead bodies filling up the cabin, dead at his hand.
Just shut the door.
The door's shut.
He doesn't need to worry about that.
But he knew, is my point.
He knew it was on his soul.
It was on his moral conscience.
But what about the co-pilot under this theory?
Well, now you're bringing that up.
So, yes, it's inconceivable that the co-pilot was involved in this.
He was a young man.
He was getting married.
He was 24 years old, 27 years old, Fariq Hamid.
He was riding high because to be a co-pilot, a first officer on a Boeing 777 in Malaysia, in Malaysia, is a really big deal in society.
So he was just riding as high as you can ride almost in Malaysia.
And he was about to get married and all this.
He was not political.
He was not religious.
There was no motive conceivable for this guy.
We know he was not involved in this.
So we know that he had to be eliminated one way or another.
Now, the obvious one is to lock that the captain locked him out.
We've seen this before in the German wings accident in Europe.
The co-pilot locked the captain out when he went to the toilet.
And we've seen variations of the lockout theme where you get yourself alone in the cabin and then you crash the airplane, if that's your desire.
I don't know how long we can go on this, but after I wrote this piece, a man approached me, a man I've known for a long time.
I guess I should not name him, but he's one of the preeminent human factors accident investigators in the world, and very well known and very respected and had a private conversation with me.
And he said that he was doing studies on studies on voice analysis of the radio transmissions.
Now, remember, the cockpit voice recorder was never found.
So all they had to go on for human factors with voice were the radio transmissions.
I had noticed, and I wrote about the fact that the captain was handling the radios and the co-pilot was handling the flying of the airplane or managing the co-pilot, the autopilot, totally normal on departure from Kuala Lumpur.
That the captain's Zahari, his radio transmissions were weird.
He was making unnecessary, unusual radio transmissions.
I noticed it.
From the transcripts, I never heard them, but from the transcripts, you could tell.
Why do you do that?
This is reporting level when he shouldn't have reported level, reporting level again when there was no reason.
He hadn't changed his altitude.
He was just blowing some final response where he should have read back a frequency and didn't do it.
Why?
I made a note of that and didn't have an answer when I wrote the piece.
This highly respected man approached me a little bit later, and he had been on the associated with the investigation in Kuala Lumpur.
And he said that he and a partner had been doing studies for years about measuring stress in people's voices and largely with either cockpit voice recorders or with radio transmissions.
And I'm going to get this wrong.
So don't quote me on this.
But what he said to me, and I have every reason to believe him, a very, very sober guy, is that they know they have found that as people's stress goes up in airplane accidents and also in shipping, certain shipping accidents, that you can measure changes in the timber, I think is the word, the tone of the voice, it gets higher, okay, as the stress goes up.
And also that the language becomes more and more confused.
So the first level is normal, say baseline, normal radio transmission.
The second level, it's getting a little bit higher.
The level, let's call that level two.
The third level is it's getting higher and also confused, grammatically confused, like they're not really talking in normal sentences.
And the fourth level is, and the fifth level is just howling screams as people are dying.
This guy's listened to more people dying on tape than probably anybody in the world.
And he also told me that it was, that it's 90% of pilots who die in a cockpit are screaming when they die.
10% aren't.
So, and he doesn't know why, but 10% stay cool.
And I know certain situations, a certain Brazilian flight, for instance, where the Brazilian pilots just stayed cool, cool, cool.
But most of them scream.
And in the very end.
In this flight, he measured and he had a graphed and showed me the graphs the changes in Sahari's voice and radio transmissions from the ground where he was talking to ground control at the airport through the takeoff to the point of leveling off to the first unnecessary transmissions that I had noticed were strange, but okay, I don't know why he, maybe he was getting sloppy.
And he went up the scale.
It got to level, you know, three or something.
He was mixing his language.
His voice was really high.
Zahari.
And it peaked right after, soon after the initial level off at 37,000 feet.
And then as the minutes went by, there were another, say, seven or 10 minutes before the airplane turned and disappeared.
His subsequent radio transmissions began to descend, that began to normalize.
Never got normal.
On the basis of that, though, you can't prove it at all.
He believes that what happened to the co-pilot was that the captain attacked the co-pilot right after leveling off.
Now, there are various ways that you can kill a guy sitting in the cockpit with you, including, you know, crash axes and whatever it is.
So he believes that he has audible evidence of an attack that occurred in the cockpit.
I don't know if that's true.
He doesn't know if that's true.
He's a sober guy.
I'm a sober guy.
So it's interesting.
It does make sense.
We don't know exactly what happened to the first officer, the co-pilot, but we do know he wasn't up there sucking his thumb when the other guy was flying for seven hours like that.
I mean, he was incapacitated too.
Did the captain send him back to the bathroom?
Did he go back by himself?
That would be unusual because they had just taken off from Kuala Mpur and they hadn't been in the air very long and get locked out by the captain.
Was it a lockout?
We don't know.
But if he was away from the cockpit, he wouldn't have had pressure oxygen.
He would have been just like the passengers and the flight attendants susceptible to depressurization.
We don't know.
All he needed to do was come up with some excuse to get him out of the cockpit and then he would have been just like the other passengers.
Can I just clarify something, William?
Did you say that this gentleman picked up on radio transmissions that happened after they signed off?
You know, Malaysia Flight 370, Goodnight.
They happened after that?
No, before, before.
Before.
Good night.
That was the last radio transmission.
These are radio transmissions that started on the ground, call that baseline, normal, and ended with the final sign off.
And they peaked in their strangeness and the stress level that could be measured in the voice and the changes in the voice right after the airplane leveled off at 37,000.
Simulator Route Debate 00:05:37
Wow.
So he could have, it's possible under this theory that he could have killed the co-pilot before he even signed off with air traffic control.
Well, yeah, I'm not tabloid.
I don't think you are either.
And so, you know, we veer too easily into the tabloid territory here, but it is a possible explanation.
And I mentioned it because I have such deep respect for the guy who brought it up to me, who made a special trip to see me to explain this to me with evidence.
And I've long, long known and respected him.
And you can't get more sober than this guy is.
He's not a crazy in any way.
He's very serious.
Let's talk about possible motives and what they found at Zahari's home because the flight simulator made a lot of news.
The picture of him sitting in front of his home flight simulator.
And they did find a route on there that looks like this one, I'm told, but they also found routes, you know, hundreds of routes on there.
And, you know, there's been a debate about how much we can really tell from the fact that that one route may have been on his flight simulator.
And also what was going on in his life.
You know, the Malaysians would tell us this is a happy man, a well-adjusted man.
This is not a depressed guy.
There's no reason to think he had it in him to kill 239 passengers just on a whim.
So can you speak a little bit about what we know of him outside of the aircraft?
Well, let's take the simulator first.
We know that he had the simulator.
He was a simulator buff.
He was an airplane buff.
He was also an internet buff and he was in chat groups and social media and blah, blah, blah.
But he was running hundreds of flights.
It was a Microsoft simulator, but a fancy setup.
It wasn't a full motion simulator, but it was a pretty fancy setup.
Invested thousands of dollars into this thing.
He played with it a lot.
So there were hundreds of flights, as you say, that were recorded by that simulator and then rather clumsily erased.
But they were kind of all over the map.
And then there was this one flight, which was also erased with the other flights.
And this flight eerily duplicated the turns, the irrational turns, the flight path with no reason and no destination, no landing airport that actually did occur.
That's number one.
Number two, and I eventually, I mean, initially, it put no weight in this.
I thought this is, but there are other aspects of it which amount to that of all those flights, this was the, I think I'm right about this.
I could be wrong, but of all those flights, this was the only one that was flown in a very particular way.
Whereas the other flights, he would essentially turn on the autopilot and let the simulator fly for hours and run the entire flight smoothly, start to finish.
Or maybe he'd stop it and didn't go get a cup of coffee and forget it.
But this is a flight in which he advanced the aircraft along that path manually.
So, and it's the only one.
So there was a different approach to this flight.
So he was as if he was impatient.
So he's pushing it forward, pushing it forward, pushing it forward by hand, basically, manually.
And then also, I think subtracting the fuel.
My impression is that the fuel subtraction was not happening automatically.
So he had to punch a few keys and take out some fuel to establish the actual fuel exhaustion point.
So there is that, which is odd.
And the other thing about the simulator is that he there was really no reason to do this.
In other words, why would you need a simulator?
And that's the other side.
Like maybe this hit, maybe that's totally by chance.
Because if I wanted to figure out how I want to crash an airplane, I know how much fuel I've got on board.
I know where I want to go down if I want to run it out of gas.
And I'd just go to Google Earth.
I mean, you can do the same thing on Google Earth.
So, you know, you don't need a simulator for this.
And Google Earth is a simulator.
What's the answer to that, do you think?
I don't know.
I mean, is it possible it was a message?
People say that, and that he was leaving a message, a goodbye.
If so, it's a really bizarre goodbye because he erased it along with the other stuff.
And he would then assume that the FBI and others would come in and find it and pull it out of the memory.
And I mean, that's a really, really obscure way to say goodbye.
Was he trying to sow confusion?
Well, it didn't sow much confusion.
I have no idea.
And see, unlike many observers of this accident, amateur observers, and I'm an amateur observer, I don't claim to know everything.
There are things about this accident that are unknown and will probably always be unknown.
What about his mental state?
Was there evidence that this was a depressed guy or his life wasn't going well?
Pilot Mental State Questions 00:04:37
Yes.
When I was in Kuala Lumpur on this assignment for the Atlantic Monthly, I spent a lot of time on that because it was so obvious to me.
It became obvious really quickly that the airplane didn't fail, that the pilot failed, that this was an intentional act, and it fit a pattern of other intentional acts, suicide murders that I've written about in the Atlantic over the years.
So it wasn't extremely surprising to me that a guy, a pilot, would do this.
It does very rarely, but it does occur.
The list is, yeah, I can name them on, you know, it takes probably two hands to name them.
But so I was immediately, well, not immediately, but the farther I got into this in Kuala Lumpur, wondering about what was the deal with this guy.
Well, the Malaysians were putting out a story that everything was hunky-dory.
He was sort of in a way like the co-pilot who was indeed hunky-dory, right?
He was this young guy getting married.
But the more I talked to people, the more I looked around, the more obvious it became to me that he was, despite what the Malaysians were saying, despite what their god-awful police report, this completely corrupted police report said, and they painted him as a model citizen, he was deeply, deeply disturbed.
He was going through, you could say, an intense midlife crisis.
You know, I think that's a polite way of putting it.
He was 53.
His wife had left him.
His children were grown and had left also out of the house, normally, normally.
But he was alone in this house, big house.
He had two houses.
His wife had moved into another house.
And the first sign of trouble I noticed was that his wife was saying, I think it was one of his daughters was saying that everything was normal.
Daddy, he's such a nice guy.
Everything was fine.
He was happy.
He wasn't fine.
His wife had just left him.
And I don't know how soon before the accident, that's some time before.
And then other things began to appear about his mental condition.
He was obsessing about some cute little internet models.
They were twins, you know, far beneath his age, you know, like professional virgins, right?
He was just writing the messages and they were, you know, whatever the word is for that, but they were making a splash in Malaysian society. by being cute little clean cut girls.
And it was like really inappropriate for this guy.
What is he doing?
He's 53 and they were, I think, in the 20s.
That's weird, a sign of mental distress.
And there were other things that began to add up to point to a very unhappy man.
And I really don't even talk about them.
I don't think it's appropriate to talk about them.
But it became apparent to me that the wife and daughter were covering up for him and the reputation of their husband, father, and also that the Malaysian government was covering up for him because they didn't want to be embarrassed.
And that's really typical for a country like Malaysia, or let's say for Malaysia.
It's very typical.
It's all about face-saving, covering up dishonesty, corruption.
It's a very dishonest place on some level.
When you say there's something more that you don't want to talk about, can you give us like a category, like sexual or sexual.
Okay.
Yeah, sexual.
But again, I know quite a bit about that now, and I never wrote about it.
But it does explain.
To me, when I was in Malaysia, I really wasn't so interested in his motivations, his motives, because it became apparent to me that he had done this.
And if he had done this, well, what gain would there be in finding out exactly why he done it?
Next Level Hijacking Sophistication 00:12:10
Well, you got to get into the airline population globally and try to weed out people who might do this for those psychological reasons.
He can't do it.
We like to tell ourselves that.
You know, we like to tell ourselves that because we like to think we have some control over stopping the next guy, you know, that one you mentioned, the German pilot who flew that plane into the side of the mountain was just unforgettable and such a mystery to the rest of us civilians.
Like, how, what, how, you know, why didn't they see the signs?
And you think if you can figure out what are the signs, then you can prevent the next one.
Well, in that case, there was a fairly long track record of psychological problems, the German guy.
And they, you know, Lufthansa should have known he had a real psychological problem going on with depression.
But in Zahari's case, no.
And it's a famous problem in aviation is you, as globally, as an airline or as an aviation regulatory agency or as passengers.
You really cannot predict who is going to crash your airplane.
It's been a problem since the beginning of aviation.
It remains a problem today.
It's very, very difficult to do.
I would say it's impossible.
You really can't do it on the basis of flight hours, of licenses, of exams.
It's a very stubborn problem.
Now, it's very rare that airplane, the airline pilots crash airplanes.
Very, very rare.
But when they do, it's almost always a big surprise.
And that's not because people are asleep at the wheel.
It's the reason that it's just about impossible to predict.
So to go into the Kualimpur and really go to ground on what his motivations were, I thought at the time was not worth my time.
I mean, I was more interested in what was the evidence that existed and still exists to what went wrong.
And was there any possibility of a technical failure?
And there is no possibility of a techno failure.
No conceivable possibility of combinations of technical failures could have caused the airplane to do what it did before it crashed.
There's nothing on earth that could explain that.
It has to be human intervention.
And it's pretty inconceivable that it would be anybody other than Zahari.
Let's talk about some of the other theories that are out there.
One that was explored by the Netflix documentary was they had a woman.
I mean, we'll go through a few of them.
So they get more, they get progressively outlandish.
We'll start with the one that's perhaps the least outlandish.
They had a woman who said she was an expert, not really.
She was like a home amateur who had become what she felt was somewhat of an expert in detecting debris in the ocean via satellite images.
And she felt very strongly that she did find said debris over in, what was the other ocean?
On the South China Sea, which would have been, no, not in the Indian Ocean.
She said she found debris floating.
She's French.
No, the French lady blames us, the Americans.
No, there was a civilian woman in this documentary who said, I can see via satellite images debris in the South China Sea that is very consistent with airplane debris.
And the plane went down on its way to Malaysia, I mean, to China, to Beijing, just as it was supposed to.
It didn't make a turn.
And why don't they just go and search?
Just go and search because you'll find the debris there.
So what do we, is there any chance this thing actually did go down on course?
Well, if it did go down, on course, you'd have to explain the fact that a significant amount of debris washed up in Madagascar, right?
On the other side.
How do you get there from the South China Sea?
You don't get there.
So it's, you'd have to go below Singapore and come up to the Malaysia.
Well, no, their theory would be that wasn't MH370 over on the other side, on the west side.
We know it was MH370.
We know it was MH370.
Some of those things are unmistakably MH370 because of serial numbers.
Some don't have serial numbers, but we're off of triple sevens unmistakably.
Well, take an inventory of the number of triple sevens that have crashed in the Indian Ocean.
So, you know, this debris that was found was either ambiguous, okay, some of it you really couldn't tell, or it had serial numbers.
That's totally unambiguous.
That was MH370, or it was unambiguously as triple seven without a serial number, but it was found in the Indian Ocean.
So forget about it.
Okay, but could it have been messed with?
There's a suggestion in the movie that debris found that would be consistent with all this happening over in the West, in the South Indian Sea, in the Indian Sea, the way you're explaining.
That might have been dropped there.
There could have been the Malaysians interfering, right?
That they intentionally dropped something there or some other actors, maybe the Russians, to make it look like MH370 went down in that ocean, but really it didn't.
It wound up in Kazakhstan or it went down on its way to Beijing over on the east in a different ocean altogether.
What do you make of that theory?
Conspiratorial fantasy.
I mean, you know, What I make of it is total and utter nonsense.
And it's overly embroidered, unnecessarily complicated, requiring a level of conspiracy that doesn't exist, can exist in a country like Malaysia or any other country for that matter.
What can come out will come out.
And that's not where it's at.
It's just this amateur, amateur stuff.
I mentioned Kazakhstan because there is a man named Jeff Wise who features prominently in this document.
I don't know.
I don't know if we should call it a documentary, but this film.
And he's featured prominently quite a bit.
He's been all over the news since this plane went down, offering different theories.
And one of his theories is that the plane may have been hijacked potentially by the Russians.
Somebody may have gone down into the belly of the aircraft via a hatch that would have been right in front of the first class department and messed with the signaling such that it would have thrown off the Amarsat data that says pretty definitively it went south over the Indian Ocean, not north toward Russia, towards Kazakhstan.
Here's a little bit of Jeff Wise offering some of his theories from the film.
A modern commercial jetliner is in communication multiple ways with the outside world.
All of them went dark at the same time.
Why?
The most obvious answer would be catastrophic failure.
Like the plane blew up, it impacted the ocean, it suffered a fire so intense that it just destroyed all the equipment simultaneously before anyone could issue a Mayday call.
But the plane's debris was still not found underneath the spot where that disruption and communication occurred.
If it wasn't catastrophic failure, what's option two?
The only really obvious possibility is that somebody on board the plane deliberately turned off its electronic communication signals.
And if that's the case, the question is who?
So he goes on to say, if you want to find links between the Russians and this plane, he's not taking it to the pilot.
He's taking it someplace else.
There were three Russians on board this plane, and one of them could have gotten down into that hatch I mentioned, messed with the comms and the other tech that was down there and thrown everybody off.
Perhaps the plane is sitting to this day, someplace in Kazakhstan or elsewhere.
Well, I happen to know Jeff Wise.
He's a friend of mine.
Let's say that I have always respectfully and sort of vehemently disagreed with him.
And I've always told him that, you know, he has presented his arguments to me at length.
And I worry about it, frankly.
So it's not in the realm of reality.
So, yeah, that's all I can say.
He's a great guy.
Well, the question is, for what, you know, who would have had the sophistication to get down there and the ability to get down there right in the middle of the other passengers and then had the sophistication to turn off, you know, communications equipment and throw off the Amarsat data.
I mean, that is one, that is next level sophistication by a potential hijacker.
And then the hijackers typically, when they hijack, they want something as a result of their feet, and they usually claim credit.
You know, none of that, none of that happened here.
Of course, you're absolutely right.
I mean, it's that's number one in all of this theorizing that this was a hijack.
It's not a high, it was not a hijacking.
Also, it would that particular theory required a level of sophistication in terms of understanding the handshakes that we were talking about before that even in Marsat didn't have when the airplane went down.
So, how would the functioning of these two forms of audio handshakes, not audio, electronic handshakes, was not known to really anybody for analysis?
So, if you don't know it in order to analyze it, how does somebody else know it in order to hijack an airplane?
It's the hoax theory, right?
So, it's just inconceivable.
And it delivers a level of expertise into the Russian hands when they can't even keep quiet enough on the front in Ukraine to get off their damn cell phones to keep from getting hit by drones and missiles, right?
Spotted.
There's not a huge level of sophistication going on in Russian culture and science.
And this would require some huge level of sophistication beyond anything to pull that off.
No way.
And for what reason, as you say, but also no way.
It's just inconceivable.
But, you know, the music there when you played that clip, you know, the drumming, the ominous drumming and all that, that helps, I guess.
Builds the drama.
Well, here was the biggest shock and to me, disappointment of the film.
They hold in abeyance this French journalist who pops up every once in a while.
And she's built up as a credible source who's probably got the answer as we spend time with Jeff Wise's theory and with the satellite woman who's analyzing the debris over in the South China Sea.
And they keep sort of teasing the French journalist as somebody who's going to be the straight shooter who might have real answers for us.
Debris Evidence Analysis 00:15:28
And then finally, they let her tell us what her theory is.
And her theory is we, the Americans, did it.
We downed the plane intentionally because it had some sort of goods in the cargo, lithium batteries, other things, perhaps something relating to tech out of Singapore, we don't know, that we needed to get rid of.
And here's a bit of this woman in the big reveal from the one they built up more than anybody on us in our role in it.
It's Satu.
So at 1:19 a.m., MH370 is requested to change over to the Vietnamese airspace.
Captain Zahari signs off with his now infamous good night.
And this is the perfect moment for an interception to take place.
So it's possible in that moment, the two U.S. AWOCs moved into action and jammed MH370.
Making it disappear from the radar.
Maybe it receives an order from the AWOCs to go and land somewhere nearby.
When Captain Zahra receives the order, it's possible that he says no.
He does not accept this order.
They still need to stop the plane and its precious candle to arrive in Beijing.
So either through a missing strike or a mid-air collision, MH370 met its fate.
The theory there being, this is how she says it, the cargo, they say inside MH370's cargo were 2.5 tons of electronics, including lithium batteries, walkie-talkies, and accessories, that the cargo was loaded without being scanned, which caused this journalist, Florence de Changer, to believe that the cargo contained highly sensitive U.S. technology.
And these two U.S. AWOC planes, which are military planes, spotted it, and that she says they were also spotted near MH370 in the air.
They asked him to land so they could inspect the cargo.
He refused to do so.
And then they shot down MH370 over the South China Sea.
You know, conspiracy stuff like that demands belief in the perfection of government agencies, also evil intent and desperation.
It's just nonsense, right?
Nonsense.
And also, by the way, how do you explain the debris then in the Indian Ocean?
But anyway, that's what the movie suggests is fake.
It's fake news.
Yeah, don't mention that.
But it's fake news.
It's just nonsense, obviously.
And, you know, if you look at the history of airplane accidents, airline accidents, rare is the airline accident where somebody doesn't come up with a reason that it was either a bomb or shot down, preferably by the American military.
And I know of only one case where the U.S. military has shot down an airliner, and that's the Iranian Airbus.
And I believe the ship was the Stark, I believe, mistook it for an Iranian war plane coming at it and shot it down and full of passengers.
That was a truly horrendous mistake.
But typically, how long did it take for that to get out?
A few hours.
You don't keep secrets like that in the U.S. military.
The U.S. military leaks like a sieve.
So, no, that didn't happen.
Yes, every time, not every time, but many times when airplanes go down, people come out of the woodwork to say it was a missile, it was a bomb, you know, and it sometimes is, but very rarely.
I mean, we know the Russians shot down a Korean Airlines, I believe, 747 that strayed over their territory way back when, the closing days of, I think, 83 of the Cold War.
Well, there was one happened.
There was the Russians shot down MH17 not long after.
Oh, that too.
Was it after?
This one?
Absolutely.
That too.
That too.
But again, it wasn't any big mystery about what happened there.
It's like, you don't keep secrets like that.
And the Russians say, well, we didn't do it.
They did it.
They didn't do it.
We did whatever, you know.
Yeah, you shot it down.
And it was a mistake, almost certainly was a mistake in this, in this case, in Ukraine.
So, you know, they didn't intend to shoot it down.
So, to have intentional shoot down of this Malaysian flight, no, sorry.
I know, because it had lithium batteries on it.
We didn't want the Chinese to get the lithium batteries, so we killed 210 civilians.
Doesn't really sound like that.
No, it doesn't.
It's completely unrealistic.
I think she's, I don't know what motivates her.
I think she probably believes what she says.
Most of these people do.
You know, that's that's the fever.
You know, you get into that, you get that fever, you start believing it.
And that's, you say, the fever of the rabbit hole.
Thank God, I'm not in that category.
I frankly haven't thought about this flight, you know, for a few years.
Well, the article is spectacular.
So, so walk us through what happened with the investigation.
Why, you know, you had the one guy, he was featured in the film as well, who was out there finding all the debris.
He had asked oceanographers, like, if a plane went down in the Indian Ocean, tell me about the currents, where would the debris wash up?
And the guy then went to those places, and sure enough, he started finding debris, which, as you point out, some had serial numbers, some didn't.
There were questions about whether he was plopping the stuff on the beach right before he miraculously found it with press in tow.
That's how the film portrays him.
Oh, really?
Yeah, Gibson.
Yeah.
Do you know him?
Yeah, I think you may have mentioned him in your article.
So, Blaine Gibson is.
That's really unfair.
You know, Blaine is a very complicated guy.
And, you know, the idea that he would manufacture this stuff in order to gain publicity for himself is ridiculous.
I know that from deep experience with him.
He's complicated and he is obsessive in life, not just with MH370.
He goes from one obsession to the other.
He's an adventurer.
He's a world traveler.
I think he's gone to 180 countries or 190 countries.
And that's his goal in life.
He's complicated, but he's not a cynic.
In fact, he should be more cynical, more doubting.
So if the press is following him, which I didn't know, but I don't doubt that he showed up with some press in tow.
But the idea that that would be his motivation is wrong.
It's unfair to him as a person.
Now, what he did is, I think it is much less.
Sorry, go ahead.
It's much less significant than he thinks.
The finding of that debris.
Other people, the first debris that was found was not found by him.
It was found on Réignon, the island of the French Island of Réignon, by a beach cleaning crew.
And that had a serial number on the flapper on and was off that airplane.
So, and that's the debris that was then analyzed by the French.
And the American NTSB got involved in north of Paris at the French laboratory.
And that's a serious piece of debris and evidence.
And it was not Blaine Gibson who found it.
Blaine Gibson did find debris that is either certainly assignable to MH370 or likely to be MH370, along with a lot of other debris that turned out to be a fishing boat caught on fire, that kind of stuff.
And he never claimed to know the difference, really.
So he like him a lot, actually.
There's room in this world for all kinds of eccentric people.
He's one of them.
What happened to the rest of the debris?
That's one of the questions so many people are asking and why they spent three years in the Indian Ocean looking for something, luggage, human remains, the rest of the plane, God willing, the black box recorder, you know, all of that stuff.
It's hard for some people to wrap their arms around the fact that it's all gone.
We only have little pieces.
Like, where's the main debris?
We know the answer to that is it's at the bottom of the ocean, probably in some deep canyon.
It's a very deep ocean there that has been searched at least once, maybe twice, and missed, because searching of the deep ocean, that ocean there, where it went down, then first of all, it's a vast area, as you said.
It also hadn't even been mapped, essentially, at least in a non-classified way.
So it's lying at the bottom of the ocean in pieces, because we also know that it didn't hit.
This was not a water landing that occurred, right?
This was a high energy, high, high energy impact.
And the airplane shattered as airplanes do if they hit the water at high speed.
So it's little pieces.
Probably the most intact pieces are parts of the engines.
But try to find a couple of mediums.
I mean, big engines, big jet engines, not that big compared to the size of the ocean and the depth of the ocean and the irregularity of the ocean in that part of the world.
It's not a flat plain ocean.
It's cut by canyons and mountains.
And you can drag devices across it and you'll easily miss things down there, the size of skyscrapers.
So it's down there somewhere.
The question is, why?
And I came to this very early on.
Like, why are they doing this?
It was ongoing when I, the search was ongoing when I was writing the piece, basically.
And I said to many people, why are you doing this?
You're not going to find anything.
I mean, if you do find anything, it's not going to matter because the black box is not going to tell you anything you don't already know.
The cockpit voice recorder is a two-hour loop.
And so you hear the cockpit and that's the guy reciting his apologies to the cockpit voice recorder.
It's almost certainly not.
And the system recordings, the flight data recorder, it's not going to tell you really very much of interest.
It'll tell you which engine quit first, which end quit second, some stuff about the fuel, some stuff about the final speeds.
That's a longer loop.
But it really wouldn't save anything we don't already know.
So why are you spending all this effort, all this money to drag the ocean in the hope of finding this thing?
And my impression at the time was, if you find it, so what?
And I think that became the overall conclusion.
It really didn't matter to find it.
Enough is enough.
It was driven as many, in many cases, driven by political pressures and the families of the dead.
Now, that's a legitimate thing.
I mean, people don't want to just walk away from their dead loved ones and say, oh, well, you know, we'll never find them.
So there's a huge amount of political pressure to be compassionate.
And I understand that completely.
But from a logical point of view, strictly logical point of view, it didn't make any sense.
And they finally said, okay, enough is enough.
Who's funding this?
Do you think that There's reason to believe that he downed the plane there, knowing that it would be impossible to retrieve the remnants.
I think so.
Impossible to retrieve the remnants, at least put a big hurt on the search.
But I don't know how much he knew about the sub.
I mean, nobody knew that much about the subsurface ocean in that place.
And he probably didn't know exactly where he was getting down.
The airplane, we know pretty surely it ran.
It went down because it ran out of gas.
One engine went first, the other engine went second, and then the APU little jet engine in the back cut in, cut out.
If that was all sort of, you could tell from the satellite handshakes what was going on in an approximate way, but he wouldn't have known that in advance.
And the simulation wouldn't have told him that.
It wouldn't simulate that to that degree.
So, you know, what were the winds?
So I don't, I think that he wanted to bury himself and bury the memory of what he did or was doing and bury and bury his life.
And I, I mean, he did a very, very bad thing.
And he wasn't a very, very bad person.
He went haywire.
And how soon before the flight he went haywire, there's evidence that he was going haywire for weeks before.
Oh, I forgot to mention to you that though the wife and the daughter were originally saying he was a happy, happy guy, well adjusted, and that's what they were maintaining when I was in Kuala Lumpur.
And I said, no, this is not true.
He was not adjusted.
Well, they then came out, I don't know how long afterward, and have since said two newspapers, I think an Australian newspaper, that no, he was very, very unhappy.
Journalist Expertise Shortcomings 00:11:56
Well, no kidding, of course he was unhappy.
You know, that so he was very unhappy.
Midlife crisis.
My God.
I mean, 239 dead.
Think of how we think about Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy.
They don't hold a candle to this guy.
Like there's this name does not yet live in infamy.
Say again.
Think about the children that were on that airplane.
That's what I think about.
The children.
You know, I mean, it's inexplicably evil.
A terrible, terrible thing.
Yeah, awful.
And the thing about an airplane is that more than most modes of killing, it lends itself to mass killing because they're big airplanes.
They carry a lot of people.
Now, why, if you want to kill yourself, you don't just go out and kill yourself.
I don't know.
Most people do.
They don't take others with them.
And when they do that, of course, they commit enormous violence on their friends and families.
Suicide does.
And it's enormously selfish.
And they should be ashamed.
But in this case, and we've seen these cases before, they decide they're going to take other people with them.
Can you explain to us the Malaysian government's role in this remaining, quote unquote, a mystery for so long?
Like, what was it?
They were just embarrassed that their pilot appeared to be suicidal and committed this terrible act.
And so they did everything possible to cover it up?
Yes.
And again, it gets into some sexual stuff.
It gets into really deep political stuff in Malaysia.
And I frankly have not tracked it because it doesn't interest me.
Malaysian politics, that's the one subject that really does not interest me.
But it certainly played a role here.
He was politically active.
He was a partisan, political partisan.
And there were, you know, his, the man he was in favor of as prime minister was in jail and blah, blah, blah, and then out of jail.
And, you know, the Malaysian government, whether on a political level or on a bureaucratic level, right, the staff, the deep state is scared.
They're afraid.
And they're afraid for their careers.
They're afraid for their reputations in a small society, a place that's a big country, but where very few people actually run it.
Their friends, their careers, their reputations, their ability to make money, steal money.
That's Malaysia.
It's a rough place.
You can go to Malaysia, as I've done a few times in the past for the Atlantic on different subjects, piracy being one.
And you find that it's, you know, you can see why there are tourists there, especially along the coast.
There's some beautiful beaches and resort hotels.
And Kuala Lumpur can be, you know, it's a shopping center city and whatever.
But you scratch beneath the surface there.
You start poking around areas that they don't want you to poke around and you're taking your life in your hands.
And there's no question about that.
People disappear off the streets.
They do now.
They did then.
And this is not something you just approach casually.
And I have said that, you know, Blaine, if he wants to really get at this and have a real adventure in life, go back to Kuala Lumpur and start asking questions.
But, you know, he's rather paranoid and frightened.
And to some extent, for good reason, he worries about being killed and assassinated or, yeah, basically not arrested, but just taken off, taken out.
And it's not entirely crazy.
Why aren't the Chinese, like the plane was filled mostly with Chinese citizens?
So why wouldn't China be putting its foot down and saying, we will find out, we will figure this out.
We do think it was your pilot.
You know, why would they be so hands off on getting to the real truth here?
It's a version of Malaysia.
I mean, it's kind of a more advanced, more populated version, more powerful version of Malaysia.
I mean, look at how they've responded to the COVID thing.
But they in this scenario don't have anything to cover up.
This isn't their sin.
You would think they'd want a real answer.
No, I'm not sure of that because they don't want their citizens making trouble.
So I can't speak for what the Chinese authorities.
I do know for sure that the Chinese authorities, after a little bit of sympathy, told them to shut up.
And expressions of sympathy or demands for further investigations that happened in China were absolutely shut down in no uncertain terms.
When that started to happen, I don't know, but it was a few months after the accident.
Initially, the Chinese were on the side of right.
You know, let's find out what happened.
It wasn't one of their airplanes, but their citizens started making too much of a fuss.
And the Chinese don't like fusses.
So I think that's pretty much why they did that.
I don't think they felt in any way responsible for this, but they just don't like rabble rousing.
They need to keep things calm, keep a lid on it.
And that's what they did.
They put a lid on us.
That does sound like them.
There's been so many theories.
I remember being on the air when this happened at Fox.
And it was such a mystery.
Right from the beginning, it was very confusing because nothing made sense to us civilians.
Right off the top, we've covered a lot of airplanes going down as news anchors, but nothing here was familiar or made sense.
You may remember at the time, Don Lemon over on CNN said maybe it was a black hole that swallowed up the airplane.
So there was a lot of non-based questioning going on out there, not well-founded questioning going on out there.
What do you think has been missed?
I guess I'm trying to ask the fact that most news anchors and news journalists have no background in aviation seems to me to have been a real handicap in covering this story well and some being sucked down conspiracy rabbit holes and so on.
As somebody who's both a journalist and a former pilot, what's been your impression?
Well, aviation lends itself to ignorance because it does require experience and education.
It's a little bit mysterious, not very, but it's a little bit mysterious.
And, you know, reporters aren't pilots or engineers and all of that.
So it's basically that.
I mean, especially in a case where you don't have the NTSB, NTSB was there, but they basically fled the investigation.
In Malaysia, they would not say that, but that's what happened.
That's why, because the airplane disappeared.
And it leaves, as I said, I don't really watch television, but I would expect that to be the case in this case.
On the other hand, I, who have covered major airplane accidents ever since the ValueJet thing in the Everglades, and I'm near France and Egypt there and things in Brazil.
I've been all over the world covering.
That's not what I really primarily do, but it's what I've been assigned to do at the request of my editors for years.
So I've been to many of the really big airplane accident investigations.
I know that I normally don't even start into them until a year has gone by and let the crowd wander on.
And then I come in with a very long article and very knowledgeable because frankly, I grew up around airplanes and my friends are my deep friends among accident investigators who talk to me both in Europe and in the United States.
They trust me because I don't write nonsense.
On the other hand, on the third hand, I had an early experience with the ValueJet accident in the Everglades where a DC-9, an airplane you don't see anymore, a little twin jet belonging to ValueJet went down in the Everglades.
And it turned out to be a cargo fire, oxygen canisters.
A really interesting story.
I went down to Miami for that for the Atlantic.
And this is a long time ago.
And I was holding myself to be superior to these reporters who were around.
These were television reporters, national and local reporters, normal reporters.
And I was naive and kind of snobby about it within my own mind.
I didn't make that clear to them, but I thought, you guys, I know what this was.
This was an electrical fire.
I know that because I, as a cargo pilot, had had a series of electrical fires that looked a lot like the fire that took this airplane down.
And so I thought, yeah, you guys, whatever.
Well, it turned out they were right and I was wrong.
So now it was easy for me because I didn't have to write anything about it for a year.
So I ended up not looking like a fool.
So I earned an early lesson to respecting the non-technical aspect of normal reporters, the ability of reporters to get to a story that they are not experts in and actually maybe do better than an expert like me.
I am an expert in aviation, much as I sort of regret it.
They did a better job than I did.
And for me, it was a profound lesson.
So I'm the last person who's going to denigrate.
I don't know what they're saying about MH370.
I don't watch TV.
I don't know.
But I will never denigrate reporters.
Plus, I spent three years in Baghdad where, you know, where I watched my closest proximity to normal reporters, which I'm not, was I came away from that.
Well, very early on, I developed a deep respect for the reporters, the ordinary reporters, you know, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, blah, blah, blah, TV reporters, CNN.
They were around me that I had never really been around these people before.
I watched them almost as much as I watched the war.
And I came away from it with a deep respect for their courage, for their intelligence, for their ability to learn quickly.
And I, again, I'm the last person who's going to criticize normal reporters for their lack of expertise.
In Iraq, they had it all.
They knew exactly what was going on.
Very early, they knew we were losing the war.
And they had a problem transmitting that information to the American public because it had to be filtered by the institutions that sent them there, the editors and the readers and so forth.
But the reporters were incredibly smart, dedicated, brave beyond belief.
And so I'm a fan.
Air Travel Safety Reality 00:07:22
Well, let me ask you this, as somebody who has had lengthy experience reporting on these many accidents.
I mean, to someone like me, it affects me as a journalist.
It affects me as a mom, as a human, and as an airline traveler, because I'm not the strongest, most secure person when I'm up there.
I definitely have a fear of flying.
And things like this are very scary, you know, to the stuff you were saying about how he could just depressurize the airplane and in a couple of minutes, you'd be dead.
Like, I realize how incredibly rare this is, but just a word from you in parting on the safety of air travel and what people like me should be remembering when we go up there.
Well, I mean, it's often said and usually believed, but that airplanes are very, very, airline travel is very, very safe.
And that is correct.
I mean, statistically, you just, this cannot be denied.
So being afraid of flying on the airlines is sort of like being afraid of crossing the road.
And you would, of course, I mean, I would and do willingly send my small children.
I've got small children and older children.
Well, get on the airplane, no problem, whatever.
No problem.
I don't think about it.
Like, who's flying the airplane when I'm not flying the airplane?
You know, who's who's in front of me?
Fine.
And a lot of them are not very smart people.
But the system is so monitored and dependent on teamwork and training and this and that, that it turns out to be very, very safe.
And it's become that way partly largely through engineering, which starting starting with the advent of the jet engine in the 1960s.
And the airplane, the job got more and more boring and more and more safe, right?
So that's number one.
It doesn't take much to fly one of these airplanes.
And you got two guys or women, a man, a woman, whoever, who can do it in the front.
That's number one.
Number two, if you look at the thing that seems to scare people the most from my casual observation and conversation, you know, around dinner table, it's turbulence, right?
And I know that dominates in a terrible way the lives of airline pilots.
They go around, they tiptoe around the passengers' fear of turbulence.
It's terrible because they only have one life and the passenger threshold for turbulence is ridiculous.
The airplanes can handle a whole lot more turbulence than the passengers can.
There's no problem with turbulence.
When I get in severe turbulence, and I had a job, my last job is flying and hunting severe weather, right?
So going into severe turbulence and other forms of severe weather on purpose for a few years.
I did that.
And I was transitioning to journalism.
But, you know, we hunted the worst weather nationwide in the U.S., nationwide, and flew into it for days on end.
And for technical reasons, it was a job.
But point is, we were flying into conditions that no airliner ever goes into, ever, ever.
You get a few little bumps, which would be not even worth thinking about for a pilot.
And people are writing letters to the senator and the congressman.
They think they're dying.
That's a big problem.
And it's totally unnecessary.
The airplanes are extraordinarily strong.
And to give you an example, we would fly in a turbulence that is so rough that you couldn't see the instrument panels, right?
It's shaking so hard.
And also that would, depending on the design of the seatbelt and so forth, would bruise your thighs.
You know, you have a shoulder harness too, but you come away with it from it bruised, physically bruised.
The airplane, it doesn't care.
It's fine.
But tell that to the passengers.
So if there's one thing you can say very specific other than check the statistics, it's safe globally and safe for a reason.
Then you can say very specifically, learn about turbulence.
Don't be afraid of turbulence.
One more thing.
I had an assignment from Vanity Fair after the Atlantic was working at Vanity Fair.
They came up with the idea of sending me to find the worst airline in the world and fly with it.
And I, the most unsafe airline in the world and fly with them.
And I found them in Kinchaska.
That's a terrible assignment.
What are they doing?
Trying to kill you off?
No, I thought it was great.
No, no, it was great.
I had a great time.
And up in the cockpit of these old Soviet turboprops flying around Congo and just really a lot of them.
But anyway, these airlines are blacklisted, right?
You can't take them anywhere out of Congo and they crash all the time.
Okay.
They're not like airlines here.
They don't crash.
They hardly ever crash.
Those guys, they crash them all the time.
Sometimes they die.
Sometimes they don't.
Usually they don't die.
But I went and I truly had a great time doing that for a few weeks with these pilots.
Why?
How was that a great time?
You're a crazy man.
Say yes to that.
Who would say?
No.
How is that fun?
The point is that's how safe airplanes are.
You know, they don't crash.
And if they do crash, they're probably not going to kill you.
And whatever, it's fine.
And by the way, everybody dies sometime.
Oh, God.
That is of no comfort when you're up there and thinking it's this time.
It's right now.
Yeah.
But everything else you said.
That's a different thing.
That was a soothing balm.
I'm going to be thinking about that story about going into the bad weather and the plane can take a lot more than we allow it to.
You know, I would say that all you need is just like the, just the jolly word from the captain.
That's all.
I would bear out the turbulent ride.
If, you know, just be nice to have the pilot say like, oh, no extra charge for the fun ride, something like that.
Keep us going.
No, no, there's so much.
So burned out.
If you look at the air traffic control conversations, the percentage of those are ride, what are known as ride reports.
So they're seeking from air traffic control ride reports from airplanes that are going ahead of them.
And it's a lot of ride reports, ride reports, ride reports.
It's really awful.
It's awful for the lives of the pilots.
And so it put, it puts you in a bad mood.
And every time you get in turbulence, you have to excuse it to the passengers.
It makes you really surly in a hurry because it's such not a problem.
And it's messing with the lives of the pilots.
Okay.
Well, that also makes me feel better.
I mean, we need to be a little tougher because they do.
I mean, I appreciate when they tell you it's going to be bumpy.
Okay, it's fine.
It's going to be bumpy.
But they need to be saying it's going to be bumpy and we're going to be fine.
You don't have to worry about the bumps.
I mean, like that, that should be the second part of the message, which it isn't.
Turbulence Impact on Pilots 00:00:50
Yeah.
People don't believe it.
You have been wonderful, William.
Gosh, it's so nice to meet you and have such a clear thinker and researcher and talker on the show and something this complex.
What a pleasure.
Please come back.
Thank you very much.
Oh, what an incredible story.
My gosh.
Just a sad, strange mystery that may never get fully officially solved, but really gets you thinking, right?
And a perfect way to end our hot crime summer week.
I want to tell you that I am off next week, spending some time traveling with my family for our summer vacay.
We will be back with you on June 26th, live to talk about all the news.
Have a great, great week, and I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
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