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Jan. 31, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
54:27
Edition 516 - Florence De Changy
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the Unexplained.
Many thanks for all of your emails.
Please know that when you email me, if your email requires a reply, you will get one.
Thank you for all of the guest suggestions that you've sent in recently.
We are working our way through those diligently, as they say.
I hope that everything is okay with you, and I hope that at the end of your tunnel, there is now some light in our darkness, as they say.
Now, I'm not going to hang about here.
The guest on this edition of The Unexplained is very special.
A book is about to be released.
It may well be out already in your territory, about the disturbing and tragic case of Flight MH370, the Malaysian Airlines plane that simply disappeared.
All of these years on, seven years, they are still trying to find an answer to this.
I've been speaking with Florence Deshanche for my radio show.
She's written a new book talking about all of this and has done seven years of amazing investigation, covering many countries and talking to many people.
Nobody, I don't think, has investigated as a journalist this case better than Florence Deshangy in Hong Kong.
So we're going to speak with her on this edition.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work on the shows.
Don't forget, if you want to contact me, go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
You can follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
Florence, thank you very much for waiting while I said all of those words.
How are you?
My pleasure, Howard.
I'm fine, thank you.
I don't know whether you agree with me, but this is a mystery in aviation.
It seems to me, like no other.
In the modern world, we get answers, and here we don't have them.
Well, yes, I know, but precisely, that's my point.
From the beginning, I'm saying that's not a mystery because it cannot be a mystery.
We cannot allow to call it a mystery.
And when people say it's incredible, I'm trying to correct them and saying it is not incredible.
It is simply not credible.
You can't have a B777, which is basically the safest of the workhorses of civil aviation, disappearing, let alone in one of the most, if not the most monitored region of the planet.
You have both China and America looking very carefully at everything happening there, whether it's the Gulf of Thailand or Malacca Straits, where supposedly the plane has last been seen on radar.
So the whole thing doesn't make sense.
And that's what got me started, really.
How did you hear about this case first?
Where were you?
What were you doing?
Well, I was actually on a holiday.
I was born, I'm French Kiwi, actually, but I was born in Italy.
And I was in Verona.
And at that time, 2014, I had left Malaysia already almost 10 years before because I lived in Malaysia.
And I remember hearing this on the Italian radio and thinking, what's going on?
I was very familiar with Malaysia Airline because when you live in a country, you usually use the flagship airline.
And I knew that Malaysia Airline was a good one, not as good as Singapore Airline, maybe, but almost.
And I really listened, puzzled, and I was annoyed that I was not in the region so that I would be sent to cover it.
But luckily, by the time I came home in Hong Kong, my newspaper, Le Monde, decided to send me all the same because it was a few days later.
But Najib, the Prime Minister Najib, had just said that there was probably a deliberate act, etc.
So the story really became even stranger because you remember that it always takes a few days, at least three, and sometimes up to five or six days to find traces of a plane that has crashed in the middle of the sea.
So it took them a week to come up with this weird statement that the plane, I mean, had made the U-turn and that it was a deliberate act, etc.
And that's when Le Monde decided to send me over to Kuala Lumpur.
And that's when I started covering the story.
But honestly, initially, I was just following like everyone else, just kind of not repeating the nonsense, but we had no idea.
It was very chaotic at the beginning.
I mean, it does seem by, you know, British European ears, it seems odd for them at that stage to make a statement to claim, and we'll get into the depths of this and the full detail, of course, later in our conversation, but it does seem very, very unusual to come out after a week or so and say this looks like a deliberate act.
Because from what I remember, we didn't know, well, who knows what the authorities know, but journalists didn't know anything about this.
There was almost no information.
We knew that people had boarded a plane.
We knew the plane had disappeared, and that's about it.
Yeah, and there were all kind of theories going on which were fascinating to follow.
But interestingly, the first coup that the plane had continued to fly was actually originated from the Wall Street Journal.
They were the one to really break the story after about four or five days.
It was the Wednesday or the Thursday that the plane had continued to fly for several hours.
And that really created a wave of shock because the story became completely different.
And interestingly, initially, everyone resisted that story, including CNN.
I have a piece where CNN is quoting their best sources, aviation sources, saying that the Wall Street Journal is mistaken and that their story is erroneous.
And the Malaysian Minister of Transport and Defense, Ishamuddin Hussein, at the time also denied the story.
So you had a little moment where that initial new narrative was put out and challenged, but it didn't last long because the Thursday, so less than 24 hours later after the Wall Street Journal story,
you had the White House, which had been very quiet until then, that came out and the spokesperson basically reinforced and corroborated that story and said that yes, the plane had continued to fly and they were looking at a new region, meaning not the South China Sea or the Gulf of Thailand anymore, but rather the southern Indian Ocean.
And the plane could basically be anywhere from Kazakhstan to Antarctica.
And so that really was like a new start.
Utterly bizarre, because one thing that in most aviation disasters or mysteries we know, pretty quickly we know location.
But in this instance, and again, we'll unpick a lot of this in the conversation that's to come, we are unclear as to locations for reasons that we'll go into.
Talk to me about the plane.
This was a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur, wasn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Flight MH370 is a daily flight.
So it's a flight that many people in Malaysia are familiar with, either if they have connections with China, I mean, and also Chinese people who have connections with Malaysia, they know very well MH370 and its return flight, MH371.
It's a red eye flight because it leaves after midnight and it gets you there early morning, 6.30 in Beijing.
So it's not a pleasant flight, but it's a very convenient one.
And it also had 10 tons of cargo on board, which is completely normal because most passenger planes carry cargo.
It's a way of financing their business.
And you had 239 people on board, including very sadly three babies, 12 staff, including the two pilots.
And these people were mostly Chinese, but basically two thirds Chinese, a few dozens of Malaysians, and then passengers from 12 other nationalities, including French, Indian, Indonesian, Taiwanese, Australian, yeah.
So then Ukrainian, Russian.
There was nothing then unusual about those on the passenger manifest.
I read among the people who were on board that flight, I think there were 20 engineers in a group.
There was one famous calligrapher, but there were no diplomats, politicians, or anybody like that.
Actually, there were quite a few suspicious people, I think.
For some reason, in the book, I've chosen not to go that way too much.
Number one, because I find it difficult to accuse people who are not there anymore to defend themselves.
And I've actually taken the opposite stance for the captain, because the captain has been, in my opinion, wrongly accused of being suicidal, etc.
And I completely, I'm probably the only journalist who's covered that.
I mean, no, no, no, I don't mean that, but I'm one of the very few people who is basically convinced that he had no nefarious, sinister plans in mind and is certainly not the reason for the disaster that took place.
But among the passengers, yes, honestly, there are a few dubious people.
You really wonder what they're doing there.
Why are they seated in business class?
Why are they seated under the SETCOM?
Why are they on this plane in the first place?
For example, people traveling between Bali, I mean, Indonesia, and Ukraine, Kiev.
Traveling Kuala Lumpur, Beijing is not exactly the shortest way to come home when you are in Indonesia and you're trying to reach Kiev, etc., etc.
So there are a few people, just to remain a little bit vague on this, but there are a few people who could qualify as kind of either mercenaries or special unit forces.
That's interesting.
And I understand why you chose not to go too deeply into all of that, because that is, you know, it's an interesting, but it is a side issue.
One of the things that you do, though, remark that at the airport end, there were, I think, five no-shows, five people who did not show for the flight, and some baggage had to be taken off the flight because those people didn't turn up.
And you make the point that that's a lot of people.
Five no-shows is a lot.
Yeah, yeah, that's one of the strange things.
It was announced, it was confirmed, then it was denied.
And we never really found out what exactly happened with these no-shows.
I suspect there were actually no associated luggage because otherwise the plane would have left with a delay.
I actually myself missed a flight recently, and I was not only very annoyed because you basically lose your ticket and everything, but I was also very sorry because they had to take my case out and my mistake costed a delay of a significant amount of time to everyone else.
So the fact that the plane left on time makes me think that whoever these news shows passengers were, they would have been traveling with no luggage, actually.
Why do you think it was so difficult for you to obtain through various means a copy of the video from the airport of people boarding the plane, Florence?
Actually, I never thought about that.
It's a good point.
You would think that the authorities could have made it available, but it's true that in my case, it's been through someone who basically had inside connections.
And when I got to see that video, it was the same precautions.
I had to take the same precautions that if I was doing something extremely like dangerous or secret, I went in that place, which is a foreign city with no phone and I met the person.
I mean, it was all a bit extra cautious.
And when you think of it, there is nothing wrong with watching the video, apart from the fact that it's tragic and very, very sad to see these people for the last time.
But yes, I don't know why this video was never released.
It shows in a way that it's probably carrying some clues.
But for what I could see, it was mostly chaotic.
And yes, Malaysia Airlines should not be too proud of the way they do their security because it was very lax, very inconsistent.
Sometimes they ask people to take their bottles out and then you see another person coming through the screening and opening its bag right open and taking a big bottle of Coca-Cola and drinking from it, meaning that in some cases they let it through.
I mean, you see all kinds of things which are not perfect in terms of security.
And I also noticed on the one I saw that at the end, when everyone supposedly not boarded, but went into the waiting room, because that's how it's done in Kuala Lumpur, someone walked out and left.
And I mentioned in the book, I really wonder if that person, it was a young Chinese man, a bit dressed like a rock star.
He was all in black and white and with a very fancy hairstyle.
I really wonder if that man saved his life by walking out or whether he had just forgotten something, you know, maybe something he bought in the airport and then came back.
But I also wonder in that case, if they let someone out, would some other people who have been registered as having boarded the plane would have also gone out?
I mean, there are a few things there, but there is nothing, there is no smoking gun, let's say, on that video.
One of the great patchwork of strange potential inconsistencies in this story.
We're talking with Florence Deshangi in Hong Kong about her book on the mysterious and tragic disappearance of flight MH370.
So we've talked about what happened at the airport, Florence.
The plane gets into the sky, and for the first portion of the flight, it is absolutely routine, right?
Absolutely.
For the first 40 minutes, basically, the plane does its ascent.
It takes about 25 to 30 minutes.
Then it requested the right to go to its cruising altitude, which is 35,000 feet.
Shortly after that, the pilot signs off from Malaysian airspace because it's on its way to Vietnam airspace.
So it's got Malaysia in its back and it's heading towards Vietnam and later China.
And so the captain says, the last thing he says is, good night, Malaysia 370.
And that's basically the last words we ever heard from the plane and its 239 passengers.
And it was about 121.
And nothing else seemed to indicate that there was a problem.
Right.
And one of the things that I've learned from watching all of the documentaries about aviation disasters over this last few months is that sometimes those communications can hold clues in themselves.
How does the pilot and co-pilot, how do they sound?
Do they sound stressed?
Do they sound as if they're not paying attention?
Do they sound like it's routine?
What's going on in the background?
I'm guessing that there's absolutely nothing on the recordings to suggest anything amiss.
Yeah, at that point, it sounds perfect.
It sounds very normal, casual, relaxed, etc.
10 minutes later, there is another plane which is requested to try and reach MH370 because the air traffic control have lost sight of it.
And during that conversation between the other pilot of the plane that has not been identified, by the way, but we know that there was a communication, the other pilot said that the communication was of very poor quality.
It was all muffled and not clear, but he could not hear any stress.
He didn't hear the words Mayday.
And his impression was that it was the co-pilot who was now speaking, which is actually interesting because, you know, there is always the pilot in command who is the one who is basically flying the plane.
And then the other one is the one speaking.
So if you have, like we have at the end, I mean at the sign-off, we have the captain saying goodbye, meaning that he allowed his co-pilot to be flying, which makes sense because the co-pilot was actually on his last flight to validate his license as a B777, a pilot.
So it's quite normal that the old captain told him, you take the threat to you do the job, etc.
But then, now, if the co-pilot is speaking, it means that the captain has probably taken command back, which in my opinion is a sign that they would have identified something strange going on already.
But yeah, we haven't heard the recording of this morphold communication with the other pilot.
And is it true that the electronic identifier or the electronic tracking signal, ACAS, was turned off at roughly, well, in that initial stage of the flight?
Yeah, well, that's very interesting because it's the first clue to the fact that something extremely odd took place.
The Prime Minister Najib Razak at the time said that someone very skilled had basically turned off the transponder, number one, which is what makes the plane visible on the traffic controller screens, and the ACARS.
So this is basically the first thing I looked at closely.
And as far as the transponder is concerned, I asked a lot.
I'm lucky to have lots of pilots, B777 pilots around me as friends and neighbors, etc.
in Hong Kong.
Cathay Pacific has a lot of B777, so it's very convenient.
And I asked them, how does it happen when you turn off your transponder?
And clearly, when you turn off your transponder, the plane just disappears altogether.
I mean, all the signals related to the plane disappears from the screens of the traffic controllers.
What happened in the case of MH370, and which is very clearly described in the official report, is different because it takes about 37 seconds for all the information about the plane to come off the screen.
There is a mode S and a mode C basically.
And when the, it's a bit technical, but it's actually a clue which is very interesting.
When the traffic controller are looking at their screens, they see a plane, I mean they see a target, and there is a call sign or a squawk which is usually a letter followed by four numbers, and then you have all kind of other indications.
If the plane turns off its transponder, everything will come off.
If you're on a secondary radar, if you're on a primary radar, you will still have a little dot, but you will have no indication.
So already here, we have the proof in a way that what was said when the prime minister said that the transponder had been turned off was not true.
Because if it had been turned off, you wouldn't have 37 seconds in the way the signals have come off the screens.
Now, the other thing that was said to have been turned off, which is the ARCAR system, I looked at that in every possible detail.
Number one, pilots never learned to do that, but the one who've looked at it have said that it was not that complicated.
But the fact is that we have no proof whatsoever that this ACAR system was turned off.
All we know is that the message, because ACARS is a system that sends message automatically, means automatic something sending message.
Basically, it's sending news about the plane on a regular basis.
And the ACARS message at 1.07 was sent, okay, no problem, and it goes through the second, fine.
And at 1.37, the message was not sent.
But that's all we know.
It doesn't mean that ACAR system was turned off.
So I've challenged that initially, and that was the beginning of my dismantling of the official narrative, because I proved that we can't say for sure that neither the transponder nor the ACAR system have been turned off.
Which makes it an even bigger mystery.
Do you think that the public were told that those systems had been turned off or might have been turned off simply to put an end to this?
That the authorities, the airline, everybody wanted an answer, wanted some kind of road to closure.
And that would have helped the road to closure, do you think?
I think it helped hinting at some guilty people inside the plane, mostly, and possibly the pilots, because they also said that it would have to be someone qualified with good knowledge, especially the hackers aspect, because Transponder is pretty basic.
But yes, it was part of building, creating basically a narrative that people could kind of grasp or start, you know, have their imagination work about.
But yeah, it was not based on anything.
And everything that came after that was not, I mean, I finally proved that it was not true either.
The concept of the U-turn, the fact that the plane flew over Malaysia, that it went up the Malacca Straits and eventually ended in a southern Indian Ocean.
All of this, according to my investigation, was, as shocking as it may sound, a fabrication.
It's a false narrative.
It hasn't happened.
I have looked at, we can take these things one by one, you know, the U-turn, the flight over Malaysia, and then the crash in the southern Indian Ocean, and you will see that none of this stands.
Yeah, we can pick any of these if you want.
We probably don't have time to discuss them.
Well, let's try and weave them together because what that narrative, those three points meant, was that the searchers deployed a lot of resources of many nations, including Australia, in the wrong place.
Yes, absolutely.
And the search in itself is another big problem.
The Australian search, in my opinion, was possibly just, I mean, deliberate or passive act of diversion.
Because when you look at the search, how it started and how it's being managed, it is not credible at all.
Number one, why is Australia appointed to do not the initial surface search?
That's fair enough, you know.
If they suspect that the plane crashed there, it is Australia SAR, Search and Rescue Region.
So it's normal that it's Australian planes, Australian ships that try and find debris.
Okay, that's normal.
Now, Why is it Australia, who has only, I think, four passengers aboard the plane, that is appointed to lead the sub-sea search?
This is a very technical and kind of specialist job, and Australia has no experience in that.
And they also have pretty bad reputation at the time.
The ATSB is just out of a big scandal, and so it wants probably to restore its reputation, but that's not a good reason to pick them and put them in charge.
Then beyond all this, because this is almost anecdotal, you have also to realize that they started the sub-sea search without any shred of tangible evidence that the plane was there.
And I know someone, actually a French expert who led several previous sub-sea search, the one of AF447 in particular.
He was asked initially, I mean, the Malaysian approached him and asked him whether he would want to be in charge.
And he said, maybe, but we're not going to start a sub-sea search until we have some reason, some reasonable reasons to believe that the plane is there.
And in that case, they basically had no tangible evidence whatsoever.
The only thing they had was very sophisticated extrapolation, mathematical, whatever, based on inmarsat satellite communication data.
And that is not enough to start such a big operation.
So are you saying, Florence, sorry to jump in, that it was a premature thing to assume that the plane had done a U-turn and those things had happened and the plane had come down in the Indian Ocean where they thought it had.
In fact, that was all too premature.
The search and the effort should have been much broader.
Premature or not, the fact is that they had no real evidence that the plane ever crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
And when you think of it seven years later and you see that indeed they haven't found anything at the bottom of the sea, in a way it's the proof that it was wrong in the first place.
Because Australia searched for two and a half years and then you had this amazing new venture called Ocean Infinity, which is 10 times more efficient than the operation that was initially done.
Didn't they send a ship from South Africa?
Wasn't there a ship that had been involved, I think, in diamond mining or something like that?
You know, seaborne mining.
And this was a very specialist ship.
And I remember doing an interview with somebody about that.
And they said, we have an excellent chance of finding the wreckage if it's there.
They were very hopeful they were going to do it.
And that fizzled out, didn't it?
Yeah, I have a slightly cynical theory on what happened there.
I don't know if you want me to share it with you.
But basically, this company called Ocean Infinity was unheard of when they suddenly said that they would search with no fee.
You know, I mean, basically, they're not paid if they don't find it.
And I thought, that's incredible.
And many people who are expert there said, why would they take such a risk?
Because it's so expensive to have ship of that scale with, especially them, they had an extra flotilla of unmanned vessels and submarines, etc.
And what I think, having had a good look at this company, is that they were actually launching themselves to do that at the top, I mean, with the best possible means, etc.
And claiming that they were going to find MH370 gave them a fantastic platform for their launch.
But on their website, to give you a little example, they said they had 90 years experience, whereas actually MH370 was their first ever operation.
And the way they calculated their 90 years experience was to add the 20 years of the secretary with the 30 years of the CEO plus plus plus.
I mean, there was a lot of, I mean, they were cheating a little bit with their marketing, but in the end, they were a very powerful and very efficient company.
And the thing is that they got the maps that Australia and Malaysia basically had done during their initial three years of mapping and searching.
And I suspect that they had, they made a deal where, I mean, it's not that they made a deal.
They would have needed the maps anyway to search the bottom of the ocean.
But Ocean Infinity's specialty is to search for wrecks.
And they have found quite a few since.
And they basically treasure hunters.
So, yeah, I don't think they were really in for MH370, basically.
Right.
So that was more time effectively wasted in the search that could have been spent looking somewhere else, perhaps.
Let's talk now to conclude this segment about the concentration on the co-pilot first and then the pilot, because the pilot was in all the newspapers.
People were talking about his background.
He had a troubled personal life, I think.
He had a flight simulator at home and I think had been running this particular route on the flight simulator.
Talk to me about that.
I believe that the captain was nothing of what has been described.
I got to meet quite a few of his friends and some members of his family, in particular his older sister, who is an amazing, very wonderful and brave and wise woman.
I looked Closely into the pilot because I realized that he was obviously a key to this enigma.
And I became convinced that he was absolutely fine.
He was a decent, very decent, very good, very generous, gentle man.
He was passionate about his job.
He would teach when he had free time, but he was also very handy.
He would spend times explaining how you repair this or that.
And there was absolutely nothing, contrary to what has been said, in his life, which could have pushed him into a suicidal act of the kind required to kill 238 passengers and yourself.
So the moment I realized that everything that had been said about Zari Ahmad Shah was not correct and that this man was actually a fantastic man and probably the best you could hope to be in the cockpit.
Right.
Oh, so you were calling me again, I think, on Skype.
I think that may be somebody else.
Okay, I'll just cut the Skype now because we are on this line.
So, sorry, where was I?
You were saying that you were sure that he was a fantastic man.
Yeah.
So once you have that in mind, you have to think of what could have happened in a completely different way.
Because if you have an excellent pilot in the cockpit when a crisis happens, and that crisis ends up as a disaster, there is only so many things that the best possible pilot can't deal.
And that helped me very much with my logic in the investigation.
So, Florence, we've talked about the complicated story of the search in the Indian Ocean that was in the wrong place and was premature in many ways because it meant that investigators were not looking in the places perhaps they should have been looking or you know, they should have been looking more broadly.
We've talked about the focus that inevitably shifted to the pilot and co-pilot, and we've worked out that we can probably rule them out of anything that contributed to this, any wrongdoing, let's put it that way.
But then there are all sorts of, I won't say spurious, but interesting reports that come from other places.
There were a couple that we can deal with here.
There was a report that the plane was seen in the sky off the Maldive Islands, and also the report, which sounds to me to be very much from the realms of conspiracy theory, but who knows, that the plane actually landed on the secretive island of Diego Garcia.
Is there a way to tie those two together for me?
I was interested in these theories, and actually I even went to the Maldives myself in May 2015 because I thought, okay, all these villagers who said that they saw a very big plane, very noisy plane flying low on the morning of Saturday, March the 8th, they must have seen something.
And I really wanted to work it out for myself.
Long story short, because really all my trip that was quite something, but I understood after speaking to quite a few of them that they definitely had seen a rogue plane, but there was no way it could be MH370.
Number one, I mean, yeah, number one, we could say just because of the description, they really did not match what you would say if a B777 was flying low above this super tiny atoll.
Number two, the direction.
They all pointed at the north, northwest, whereas if the plane was coming from Malaysia, it would have been due east.
And then number three, the time.
The time was like around 6.30 or 7 local time in the Maldives, which would have been 9.30 or 10 in Beijing.
And that was way too late.
It was basically three hours after the landing time of the plane.
And if a plane would always carry about two hours of extra fuel, there is no way it can carry much more than that.
So for all these reasons, I could very quickly dismiss the fact that what they had seen was ML370.
But despite that, that theory continued to have some people liked it, including because Diego Garcia, the infamous US military base, located south of the Maldives, and a few people said that the plane actually tried
But yeah, I don't believe in any of this.
And I could actually dismiss all of these theories which happen west of Malaysia in a way, because as I said from the beginning, I dismissed the U-turn and I dismissed the fact that the flight ever flew over Malaysia.
So if it did on U-turn and if it didn't fly over Malaysia, then there is no way it's in Maldives and in Diego Garcia.
So we come to the crucial points of this then.
You highlight the cargo of this plane, because this plane had on the manifest for the cargo a very strange listing.
It was carrying a huge amount, apparently, of fruit and a small amount of electronic components, but it was a strange makeup of the cargo.
And you think that the mystery is connected in some way to that.
Is that right?
Yes, definitely.
I think that part of the truth is in the cargo, not in the cargo list, because it's probably not accurate, but it what really was in the hold of the plane.
The 4.5 tons of fresh mango steams were very odd because the fruit is not in season.
It's a bit as if you had four tons of cherries out of London in January.
Right, so why would you carry a huge cargo of fruit possibly rotting, certainly not at its best?
Yeah, and just non-existent basically because you can't have them at that season.
But then I looked at all the cargo of the following flight MH370, what was planned, and you still had these fresh mango steens on every day.
So that became even stranger.
And then I realized when I attended a conference about illicit trade between Africa and China, you know, there is a lot of rhino horns and elephant tusk and pangolin scales and things like that, which go from Africa to China.
And I realized that Kuala Lumpur International Airport was the biggest hub for all this illicit trade.
So then suddenly my fresh mangosteens came and I thought, oh, that's what they call fresh mangosteen.
They put this kind of tag on it and it's all kind of thing.
But in any case, there was no, you know, phytosanitary things related to the fresh fruit, etc.
So I thought, okay, whatever these fresh mangosteens are, they're probably not fruits, but they're not related to the tragedy because all MH370 flights are always carrying some kind of fresh mangosteen.
But then there was this other very problematic cargo, which is under the name of Motorola.
And this time it's 2.5 tons, which is a very significant amount again.
And it's described as battery charges and Tokiwokis.
Okay, so these are small things.
It's light, it's not expensive.
So to have 2.5 tons of that, it would be probably a massive volume.
But in the official report again, and that's why these official reports, even though they are thousands of pages and no one reads them, they are actually a fantastic source of information.
They mentioned that the Motorola consignment was not X-rayed.
And when I saw that, I thought, what?
not x-ray.
Absolutely.
Everything gets X-rayed.
There is no exception whatsoever.
I asked someone I know who is the head of the cargo for one of the largest airlines in the world, and he said, no way.
You do not load something all the more in a passenger plane that has not been X-rayed.
So there is no good reason for that.
The reason they gave on the report was to say that it was too big and too bulky.
And then you think, excuse me, Tokyokees and battery chargers, they're too bulky to go in the machine.
So you think that there was something on the plane other than those things?
Something that somebody somewhere didn't want the world to know was on board that plane in the subsequent investigation?
Well, I'm really asking, what is this 2.5 motor-like cargo, which is described as Tokiwokies, and it's yet too bulky to go in an X-ray?
And there is an even better, I mean, more shocking element to that specific consignment is that, believe it or not, it's been brought to Kuala Lumpur International Airport before being loaded under escort.
Really?
Yes, and that's in the report as well.
So that's official.
That's not me making up crazy stories.
It's in the report.
It's only written once, mind you.
It will be for Motorola to prove and to explain very precisely what was this 2.5 tons of cargo that was supposedly battery chargers and Toky Wokies.
There was included in it, that was 200 kilos of lithium batteries.
And everyone talked about these lithium batteries.
They could set a fire, etc., which is true.
I mean, there is a slight risk with that because accidents have happened before.
But I think we concentrated on the wrong problem of that cargo.
The problem is that it was not what it is said to be.
The problem is that it was not X-rayed.
And why on earth did they need to escort it?
Whereas you never do that in Malaysia, not when I was living there and not since.
So it must have been extremely special.
Now, I can't say for sure that it's related to this, but the freshmengustins were suspicious.
This one is much, much more suspicious.
So as we get into our final minutes, what do you believe?
What is your best thought as to what happened to this plane?
What I think must have happened, and this is based on really a cluster of clues, is that the plane actually continued to fly for a bit more than one hour on its expected route.
I suspect there may have been some kind of cargo confiscation operation related to a problematic cargo.
And I also suspect that due to his strong personality, the captain may have refused to obey orders.
And then a disaster happened when the plane got closer to the Chinese airspace.
And there is there a cluster of indication which make me almost certain that the crash took place around 2.45 in the morning on the northern eastern coast of Vietnam and possibly, I mean most likely above The sea.
You have among these clues, you have a May Day message, which was immediately claimed as fake and dismissed, etc.
But it was published in the minutes, I mean, in the hours following the accident.
And in this May Day call, the pilot is said to request an emergency landing.
He mentions that his plane is disintegrating, and that is dated at 2.43 in the morning.
And it happens that a Vietnamese pilot who was flying nearby in the northeast of Vietnam said to TV and newspapers the next morning that he heard that Mayday message.
So that's enormous.
I mean, that's already pretty solid clue.
And on top of that, you also have the transcript of the air traffic controllers between Ochimin and Kuala Lumpur.
And at one point, you have the Ochimin air traffic controller telling its counterpart in Kuala Lumpur, the plane is landing.
So when you put all of this, and plus quite a few other clues that I have and which are in the book, together, it's very difficult to escape the scenario that I'm coming up with.
So you're saying that somebody knew, I'm sorry to jump in because it's important that we unpick this, that somebody knew what was really on board that plane.
You talked about the effort or the attempt to confiscate whatever was on board the plane and possibly the pilot becoming a little recalcitrant, a little argumentative about that something goes wrong.
And are you saying the plane was shot down?
I have no proof of that.
And at the end, I really had, because I was asked basically to build a scenario based on all the evidence I had.
And the evidence I have are the one I told you.
Now, the scenario of the confiscation cargo is an assumption that I came up with because some military people told me you don't shoot, I mean, shooting down a civilian plane is never a plan A. It's probably the blunder or an act of war, but as a plan B or as the consequence of a plan A that went terribly wrong.
The problem with the scenario is that you have to extrapolate on the basis of the real clues that you have.
And I'm much more comfortable being a journalist with the solid clues that we have.
And I think just these clues, they allow you to reach the conclusion that the plane crashed around that time and around that place.
Now, why exactly and how, I can't say for sure.
And when you talk about confiscation cargo, who's doing the confiscating?
Yeah, that's another thing I'd love to know.
I really hope that after my book is released and many people read it, people will reach out to me.
It already happened after the book was published in French and then in Chinese.
When people understand that you are on the right track and you're getting closer to truth, it's easier for them to speak out.
So my aim is really that now that I've demonstrated that the official narrative was basically a fabrication, hopefully the truth will fall somehow.
So the plane is not where it's supposed to be.
Not quite where it's supposed to be.
It's not carrying what we think it's carrying, and it's out of contact.
It's a deeply strange case, isn't it?
It's deeply, deeply strange.
There is another element to this, as you say, and that element will only come when somebody contacts you and says, I know that the plane crashed and these are the circumstances, or I believe somebody shot this plane down and this is the reason for that.
But whatever, you think that this happened off Cambodia, and you say in the book that the reason we haven't got wreckage is that, in fact, a lot of the wreckage was found and was sold for scrap by people who found it.
Is that right?
Not quite in the sense that, so I think the plane actually crashed off Vietnam.
And I have, and I name in the book because it's someone who wants to be named, a witness who is swearing on his children's, which is a bit tragic, and he's also, he wants to be put to a lying detector machine or test.
He tells me that he has seen on Vietnamese TV the next day, I mean the very day of the plane crash, pieces being picked up by fishermen and being handed out to under-military guard, basically.
He also described to me some people bringing down the black box in a plastic see-through box full of water, which is exactly the way you should transport a black box when you recover it from the sea.
So this is a key and very important witness.
If it tells the truth, it's completely consistent with everything else.
And on top of that, I have dozens of people who have searched and studied satellite images who are adamant that the sea was full of debris in the following days.
And you also have the report of pilots flying along the coast of Vietnam the next day who made a report mentioning a massive field of metallic debris.
But if the situation was taken care of by all the big navies there, the Chinese one and the American one and the Vietnamese, even though they don't have a big navy, but maybe Singapore, whatever, it's possible that they managed to clear and do a cleanup operation.
But to be honest, I find this Extremely difficult to believe because, as I said before, a plane crash would create millions of debris, and sooner or later you would have another one which would appear in the Philippines or in Taiwan or wherever the current would take it.
So, yeah, I can't say for sure that we need a few more witnesses.
And even the fantastic witness that I have, it's only one witness.
We need more to corroborate what he said and what he saw.
So it remains a mystery, but perhaps we know a lot more about it now.
Last question then, Florence, and thank you for doing this.
I wish you every success with the book and your continuing research.
If it's a cover-up of what really happened, who's covering it up?
Well, that's the key question.
And I think the question to that question is who is able to impose a cover-up of such a big scale to everyone else?
And funny enough, depending to who you cast this question, people would not all have the same reply.
Some people would immediately think of Russia or China, but my educated guess would be more like the US.
But it's only an educated guess.
That's an astonishing assertion, and you would have to do an awful lot of further research on that.
And I wish you luck with all of it, Florence.
I hope that we've done your book justice here, but I recommend having seen it.
Anybody who's interested in this subject, if you want to know more about it, you have to read the book because this is seven years of diligent research.
And congratulations on it, Florence.
Thank you very much for speaking with me.
Thank you very much, Harry.
And just tell me what the title of the book is.
I know it's out in the UK February the 4th, just so people can look it up.
What's the title?
It's The Disappearing Act.
The Disappearing Act, MH370.
Florence Deshanchi in Hong Kong.
Thank you so much.
The disturbing case of Flight MH370, and I hope for the sake of all of the families and the loved ones of those who were lost in that tragedy, definitive answers are found and found soon.
Florence Deshanchi's book is available now.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained, so until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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