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Dec. 8, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
58:52
Edition 597 - MH370 Update
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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.
I don't know why I'm smiling to myself here in my isolation, because the temperatures are low here.
I mean, for us, you know, like kind of zero degrees minus one overnight.
I'm looking at the sky at the moment.
I'm recording this in the morning time on the Tuesday of the week that you'll probably hear this.
The sky is incredibly grey, and there's another storm coming in.
You know my thoughts about the winter.
The one thing that keeps you going, Ashley, are your communications.
I've had some lovely ones recently.
Thank you very much for your kind thoughts.
And if you require a reply for any email, please let me know.
If you get in touch with me through the website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much to Ian in Staffordshire.
Ian, I got your kind email this morning.
Thank you for that.
John, who's in the police in Leicestershire and listens to these shows after a long shift to help him get to sleep.
John, nice to hear from you.
And Ken, exceptional email from Auckland, New Zealand.
Good to hear from you today too.
And thank you to you if you've written recently.
And if you've donated to the online show, thank you very much indeed.
This is coming up to the end of the year.
And if you are able to donate to allow me to develop the online presence of this show, that would be terrific.
You can do that through the website, theunexplained.tv, maintained and devised through all of these years by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Couldn't do it without him.
And thank you very much to you.
You know, you won't ever know, I don't think, quite how your emails bolster me and keep me going.
Don't forget also my official Facebook page.
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Go there, check it out and tell your friends, won't you?
Because you'll get news there, not only about this online show, but also about the radio show, which at the moment is ongoing.
Okay, the subject on this edition of The Unexplained Online is one that we've talked about before.
It is Flight MH370.
It's now more than seven years since this plane disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, a Boeing 777, Malaysian Airlines.
The greatest aviation mystery of all time.
Bigger even than Amelia Earhart's disappearance, this.
With consequences for so many people.
A human tragedy and a technical mystery.
Both of those things all at once.
All of us, whatever connection we have with this, want to get answers and people connected with this tragedy require closure, which up to now they certainly haven't had.
Richard Godfrey, British aerospace engineer based in Frankfurt, has been in the newspapers in the last few days with some new research that might have finally pinpointed the wreckage of MH370, so we can get those answers.
He was in the Sunday Times last Sunday, as I record this, speaking to you on Tuesday at the moment.
So he was in the paper last Sunday and is kind enough to come on this show now, today, to talk in more detail than we were able to on the radio show last Sunday.
I think we did about four or five minutes on the radio show, so you're going to hear a full conversation now specifically for the podcast with Richard Godfrey.
And he is a man whose expertise is unquestioned and unquestionable.
He is a man whose dedication is equally unquestioned and unquestionable.
He is completely dedicated to this case.
And I think you're going to be interested in everything that he has to hear.
Some of it, of course, is very disturbing, but these things have to be discussed.
And it seems we may be getting closer to some of those answers.
And Richard may well have played a crucial part in providing them.
So we're about to hear him, Richard Godfrey, on this edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much, like I say, for your support.
When you get in touch with me as we come to the end of the year, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Like I say, it's like you're my family out there at the moment.
Oh, no, it started raining.
Good oh.
All right.
Let's get to Richard Godfrey now, aerospace engineer, and we will talk about MH370.
Richard, thank you so much for coming back on my show.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
As we will hear, you've been an incredibly busy man over the last week or so doing interviews everywhere.
The most recent one I saw was with Channel 7 News in Australia.
Everybody is interested in the MH370 case, which we will talk about.
Talk to me first about you, because your background is aerospace engineering, and that is a complex and fascinating field.
I wonder what it is that would make somebody whose background is aerospace engineering hone in and zone in on one particular mystery.
Howard, I was in Brazil in 2009 on business, managing a large project there.
I was booked from Rio to Paris on Air France 447 to return to Europe.
I had to stay on for a couple of weeks further on business and was rebooked on Lufthansa flight from Sao Paulo to Frankfurt.
But when I heard Air France 447 crashed in the Atlantic and all passengers and crew were lost, it somewhat took me back and I got involved.
I was following the search underwater for the wreckage, reading the final reports on that crash.
When MH370 happened in 2014, I saw the parallels between MH370 and Air France 447 lost in the middle of a large ocean, the underwater searches and so on.
And it immediately grabbed my imagination and drew my attention.
A very different kind of aviation situation.
I mean, you know, as the years have rolled by since it in 2014, we've come to see this as an enormous great mystery.
But, you know, I've become during the lockdown period and beyond A fanatical watcher of aviation videos, sometimes produced by and for professionals, analyzing the nature of mishaps and crashes in the air, which can sometimes be as we know, as in the case of Air France 447, which I think was due to a stall mid-ocean that I think could have been avoided.
But these things boil down to three things, usually, it seems.
Maintenance is used, where perhaps the wrong components are used or procedures are skipped over, not done properly.
There was one famous case of a British plane that we will both remember, where they didn't replace the windshield properly.
They didn't put the right screws in.
And the pilot, I think it was, or maybe the co-pilot was sucked through the windshield.
He actually survived and continued to fly after that amazingly.
They had to hold him in place, but that was a maintenance issue.
Inability to communicate within the cockpit, issues within the crew, often a factor where the crew don't agree on something, they haven't coordinated what they're doing, they're perhaps using the controls differently, unbeknown to each other, pilot, co-pilot.
That's one factor.
And basic design flaws with aircraft that only become apparent when something terrible happens, like the tail comes off a 747 mid-flight, or as in the case of maybe one of the most famous cases, the first of the jet era,
where the Comet aircraft, a British de Havilland design that led the world, was hobbled effectively by a series of crashes caused by a design problem with the windows, which were square, and nobody knew at the time that that caused structural issues, and they had to make the windows round, but the plane's reputation was damaged forever after that.
So those are the things that mostly cause issues in the air.
MH370, it seems to me, doesn't adhere to any of those, really.
It's not easy to pinpoint the cause of this loss of an aircraft to one of those.
Is that what makes it so different?
Yes, it certainly is different category.
The aircraft continued to fly for seven and a half hours.
There have been theories, for example, that there might have been a fire on board or there might have been a cabin depressurization.
But an aircraft does not continue for seven and a half hours if there was a fire on board.
Normally, they have to get back down on the ground, make an emergency landing within 20 minutes or so.
If there was cabin depressurization or hypoxia, then it's difficult to explain how the aircraft made so many turns and changes of speed.
They can't all be programmed in an autopilot.
So I think this is a different category and not due to maintenance issues or communication issues in the cockpit or design flaws.
And when you decided I want to know more about this, it is nagging at my curiosity.
What did you start to do?
Well, I just looked in the internet, just, you know, Googled MH370 and see what people were saying.
I found a website run by Duncan Steele in New Zealand, and he gathered quite a number of scientists and engineers onto his website.
We shared our analyses and our data.
And eventually out of that, a group was formed, which came to be known as the Independent Group, a group of analysts, scientists, engineers who delved into MH370 in more and more depth.
Many of us are actually acknowledged in the official report by the ATSB on MH370 for our contribution.
So that was a very key part of my interest in MH370.
Understood, just to remind listeners who perhaps are refreshing their memory on this, this was a flight in March 2014.
It was from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and 239 people are to this date unaccounted for after that and presumed after all of this time to be dead.
You mentioned the NTSP report.
What did the National Air Transport Safety Board report actually say?
What did it resolve?
It couldn't come to a conclusion.
They reported on what facts are known.
They reported on what underwater search areas were covered, areas as large as 120,000 square kilometers.
But in the end, they couldn't report that they'd found the wreckage.
They couldn't report that they had resolved the mystery.
So it was more or less cased closed and about 200 million Australian dollars were spent and there wasn't an appetite to spend any more money.
Of course, in an investigation, the investigators look at the crew initially.
They also look at the plane.
What was the record of any issues, any problems, anything that might have been flagged up to do with this particular plane?
Boeing 777 has a very good safety record.
There have been no other crashes in the Indian Ocean area.
So when we find wreckage, we almost certainly know if it's Boeing 777, it must have come from MH370.
There was one incident in Cairo Airport where the cockpit fire on the ground, where either the oxygen mask had a leak in it, or there was an electrical short circuit which came first, was also not conclusive in the report.
But there was a fire which resulted in a write-off of the aircraft.
But there were being on the ground, all the passengers deplaned successfully.
There were no injuries.
So MH370 for me is still a mystery and it needs to be resolved.
It needs to be resolved for the next of kin and the families.
They need closure.
I think for the aviation industry needs answers to make sure it doesn't happen again.
And I think the flying public, the 10 million plus of us who get on a plane every day, we want to know we're safe when we do so.
When in your memory did people first begin to speculate that there may have been factors in this incident that may have been beyond the norm, that it wasn't just a tragic, sad mishap, accident in the sky caused by some of those things that we discussed at the beginning?
At what stage do you think that people's perceptions began to change?
I think a very important discovery was made in the investigation that Captain Sahari Shah had an extensive home flight simulator.
And on this flight simulator on a discarded hard drive, they found a simulation where the data was actually deleted, but the FBI managed to restore the data.
And this was a simulation of a flight into the Indian Ocean until fuel exhaustion.
And I don't know about you, but the people I know who have a home flight simulator, they try to pick an aircraft and they do complicated landings in mountainous valley areas or on an aircraft carrier or something challenging.
They don't just fly to the middle of the southern Indian Ocean until fuel exhaustion.
So I think that was one thing that alerted people early on that maybe this was premeditated and planned by the captain Sahari Shah.
That was a very early conclusion.
Of course, there have been a whole variety of theories, as you will know, all of them widely discussed, many of them battered down fairly quickly.
But one of them was that the plane was hijacked, landed in Kazakhstan.
I spoke with Florence Deshangy, who wrote a book that was out this last year, lives in Hong Kong, very interested in this case.
We discussed the idea that the plane may somehow have been, by accident, possibly been shot down or missiled down by somebody for some reason.
The pilot is one theory parachuted out and is still alive, parachuted onto a boat.
Also, the pilot is supposed to have made a mysterious call to his aero engineer cousin one month before the flight.
Now, if that is so, and you add that to what you've just told me, that's interesting.
There was also, and this is true, you know, some of the cargo wasn't documented as publicly, I don't think, or was controversial in some way.
You can fill me in on that.
Another one is that it landed at a secret military base and disappeared along with all the people.
And then, of course, it was sighted over the Maldives and I think in a couple of other places as well.
So, you know, there is a kind of bingo-style array of possible explanations and theories, isn't there?
Some of them wackier than others.
Yes, there are 150 books out there on MH370 and even more theories than you've very carefully summarized just now.
Let me take a couple of them, which I have debunked.
Florence Deshangy's theory that it didn't turn back over Malaysia, but went out into the South China Sea and was shot down either accidentally or on purpose.
We have radar data of the track back over Malaysia.
We have satellite data that shows clearly the path into the southern Indian Ocean.
We even have detection of the co-pilot's mobile phone as it passes Penang on the path over back over Malaysia to the Malaka Straits.
So there's a lot of evidence that would refute the theory of Florence de Changy.
Another one you mentioned was the sighting over the Maldives.
We meanwhile have published a paper on this sighting.
Meanwhile, it's been discovered by one of my fellow independent group members, Don Thompson, and I tracked the aircraft.
There was a Saudi Arabian Royal Family VIP flight from Saudi Arabia to the Maldives that morning.
It was a Boeing 777 that was used for that flight.
And it fits the timing of the eyewitness sightings on the Maldives.
So mistaken identity.
Mistaken identity.
And we can go on about Kazakhstan or other possible theories.
Well, One of them in particular, as you will have heard, that keeps coming up actually as the years go by, is that the plane may have landed on some secretive military facility island somewhere and have been disappeared in that way.
Similar theories, of course, exist about 9-11.
Yes.
The satellite data which we have, and now with the WISPRNet data that I've added to that, the satellite data gives position information about every hour.
The WISPRNET data gives information on position every two minutes.
And I can assure you that it did not land on Diego Garcia or any other tiny island in the Indian Ocean.
And it did continue until fuel exhaustion.
It is to be found around 33 degrees south, 95 degrees east.
There are no islands anywhere near that point.
And I guess once we find the wreckage, then a lot of these theories will then will fold.
Now, you have actually used the data in a new way and used some other data to come to this number crunching conclusion that puts the plane in that location, I think something like three miles down in the ocean.
Recovering it, I guess, is going to have its own problems.
We'll talk about that.
How did you crunch the data?
How did you do this?
The radio amateur community, there are millions of them around the world, they send hundreds of test signals every two minutes.
They actually collect all of these test signals in a database, which is publicly available.
You can go in and look.
I went in and looked at the data in particular for the 7th and 8th of March 2014.
When an aircraft flies through the path of a radio signal, it can disturb the signal.
And these disturbances can be picked up as anomalies in this Wispernet database.
The radio amateur community use it for checking their propagation signals.
So if someone in Switzerland wants to talk to his mate in Australia, he can check the propagation, what's the best time of day, what's the best day of the month, etc., to try and make such a radio communication.
I'm using it for a completely different purpose.
The idea was first put forward about a year ago by a radio expert and radio amateur himself, Dr. Robert Wesfahl.
He's now a colleague working together with me.
Meanwhile, there are several other radio amateurs working with me on this investigation.
And we're using the data in a way it wasn't originally intended to be used, but very successfully in terms of tracking aircraft.
One of the things that remains as a question for me, maybe it was Result, I don't know if it was, but there was a lot of talk at the time about, well, look, the engines operate almost independently when it comes to flight data, and they're constantly sending back data on their status to the makers, Rolls-Royce in this case.
What happened to that data?
We have all of that data.
It was, however, sent by the satellite system on board the aircraft.
The system used is called ACARS, and that was switched off shortly after or around the time of the diversion.
The transponder of the aircraft was switched off.
So we only have after the diversion, the civilian radar data.
There was military radar data available, but that's never been published.
It would be useful if the Malaysian authorities would be kind enough to publish that military data, because after seven and a half years now, it's no longer a state secret what their radar capability is.
And beyond that, we only have a sort of a housekeeping message on the satellite every hour or so.
It's not sufficient to actually pinpoint the crash location.
But with the WhisperNet data now, every two minutes, we can get very much more precise and reduce the crash location to perhaps a search area of just 300 square kilometers, which is a lot less than having to search 120,000 square kilometers.
You mentioned that some data was being withheld.
No matter whether that data turns out to be important to the investigation or not, you surprise and you shock me a little.
You would have thought that in a case like this, and we're dealing with experts like yourself analysing data, they're not people who are doing it for espionage.
They're doing it for reasons of legitimate investigation.
I'm surprised that anybody would withhold any data.
Yes, I am too.
But the Malaysian authorities have refused requests.
The next of kin have spoken to Malaysian authorities at ministerial level and to the highest military level, put in the request for the data to be released.
So far, that's been without any public release of any military data.
So it's sad and it's not in the interests of the next of kin, not in the interests of the Flying public or the aviation industry.
I'm deliberately not talking in detail at the moment about the captain or the crew or indeed the passengers on this plane, because I just want to talk about the raw data and how you were able to calculate this.
And also the mystery, Richard, as to why, when so many fingers were in this pie, and maybe this is part of the problem, so many jurisdictions were involved or had some kind of connection to this, you know, why firm conclusions about where this plane might be were not come to earlier?
Because they weren't.
I mean, there have been a zillion ideas about exactly where it might be.
Everybody seems to have had a different idea.
I think you'll tell me how many, but I think there have been two exploration crews, haven't there?
Exploration ships that have gone out.
Maybe it's just one.
But with all of these people and all of these governments and all of these vested interests involved in this, all pooling together, it is 2014.
You would have thought if we can find things on the moon, we could find this wreckage.
Yes, indeed.
And there have been more ships involved and they use various underwater technology to search vast areas.
There's been official analyses by experts, for example, from the Australian Defence Science Technology Group.
There have been a number of oceanographers who have been officially requested to track the floating debris that has been found throughout the Indian Ocean of where it could have drifted from, where it could have originated.
A lot of time spent by a lot of people to analyze the location of the crash.
But not always have these various endeavors been put together in one complete picture.
So you may have had the oceanographers sitting over here, the aerospace engineers sitting over here, the satellite experts over there, the manufacturers and authorities with their technical but also with their political interests.
And bringing all of these groups together and all of the information together and combining the hard data.
It's a bit like a puzzle with 100,000 pieces.
I'm beginning to see a picture, but I still have pieces of the puzzle which I can't fit.
They don't fit in the picture, but I put them on one side and I carry on with the puzzle.
And then maybe later I find, ah, this piece will now fit here.
It's a complex exercise and requires multi-disciplinary scientific approach.
This must be obviously a concern for the planemaker because they have one of their jets over which a question mark still hangs and it's this many years.
Yes, Boeing have indeed got that issue.
They point naturally to the very good safety record of the Boeing 777, but here we have a situation which is still unresolved and it needs to be resolved.
Boeing have, of course, been helpful in the initial analysis, but I get the impression that when the official search was closed, that Boeing then also officially lost interest.
Because time moves on and I guess they have a business to run and they're going to wait for the conclusions when and if they emerge, I assume.
What about the passenger manifest and the cargo manifest as far as we know that?
What bearing do you think those things have or any?
What interest?
I think the passenger manifest revealed two young individuals who had bought fake passports and were trying to seek asylum in Europe.
They were particularly investigated, but nothing was found of any serious terrorist hijacking or nefarious nature.
There were a couple of Ukrainians on board and people were wondering whether they were really secret service agents, but nothing came of any investigations there.
There were a number of people on board working for a semiconductor company and they were into a very interesting new technology.
But again, it seems a pure coincidence that they were on the wrong flight at the wrong time.
As far as the cargo is concerned, I think the biggest issue there was there was a significant cargo of lithium batteries.
Lithium batteries are well known for causing spontaneous fires and combustion.
And so that was seriously investigated.
They were properly packed and protected, but there's an open question there.
But again, if there was a fire on board, I would have expected that the pilot made an emergency landing at the nearest airport, which was Cotabaru Airport, only 20 minutes away.
But the plane continued not only past Cotabaru, but past several other major airports, well capable of taking a Boeing 777.
They passed Penang, Lengkaui, Banda Achi Airport, all without Going in for an emergency landing.
So, somehow I'm fairly sure there wasn't a lithium battery fire on board.
This plane was going to Beijing.
Do you think that has any bearing on anything?
There are lots of theories, and there are theories that try to combine MH-370 with the shooting down of MH-17.
But it is pretty clear that that was a Russian missile and Russian-backed Ukraine separatists.
That's got nothing to do with Beijing.
And the Beijing government supported the search.
They sent aircraft, they sent ships.
And the majority of the passengers, 153 of them, were Chinese nationals.
So there was incredible support from China, as there was from Malaysia and Australia and many other countries in the early search.
But again, I think the attitude is officially we've closed the search.
It's time we spent a lot of money, 200 million Australian dollars, and it's time to move on.
In my reviews of all of these documentaries that I've watched in my downtime since lockdown, and I've watched an awful lot of them.
As I say, some of them made for professionals, some of them made for a normal viewing audience.
All interesting.
Very frequently, when wreckage is washed up or discovered, and I know in this case, maybe there's been somewhat less wreckage than you would expect, in spite of the location, which we know to be remote.
The wreckage very frequently, because it's analyzed in such depth and detail, throws up clues.
But the wreckage from this plane hasn't, has it?
There have been some very interesting clues.
We've got 33 items of wreckage from all parts of the aircraft, exterior and interior, from the wings, from the nose, from the tail, from the engines, even from the landing gear doors.
And one analysis shows that it is very possible that this aircraft was in such a steep dive towards the end that pieces separated from the aircraft.
A number of control surfaces from flaps and ailerons along the wing have been found.
And it is even possible that one of the wings separated before impact.
So that's one point.
Another interesting piece of analysis was one of the flaps was found in Pemba in Tanzania.
And the ATSB analyzed that in Australia and concluded that the flap showed no signs of being extended.
If there was any attempt at a ditching in the ocean, then the normal procedure is to extend the flaps, at least partly, and for the ditching.
that doesn't appear to have been the case.
So the signs are...
I'm jumping in.
Forgive me for that.
The signs are of the descent was catastrophic and violent rather than an effort to control it.
Indeed, that's the case.
The average weight of the 33 items found is 4.88 kilos.
The weight of the aircraft at the end empty of fuel is 174 metric tons.
At that rate, if we keep up that average, there were 35,000 pieces of debris, which means a number did float, and we found 33 of them, but there's a lot more to be found on the ocean floor.
If a plane comes down and it has fuel on board, we assume that there's going to be fire.
And what you find may be affected by fire, even if the plane comes down in the ocean.
The pieces that have been found, I'm presuming, were not affected by fire, in which case that would tell us, would it, that the plane had no fuel on board when it came down?
Yep, that's correct.
There's been no evidence of fire found on any of the 33 items that have been washed up on various beaches in the Indian Ocean.
So we've looked at the various parties involved in this, including the passengers.
We've talked about the various vested interests involved in this, including the airline, various governments, investigation authorities, and so it goes.
Now we have to zero in on the crew, and in particular the pilot.
Now, we mentioned that the pilot had run this on a simulator.
From what I understand from people who do aviation, it's not unusual these days for air crew, since they can't always go to the company's simulator facility, to practice and play at things at home.
That isn't unusual, is it?
That's certainly not unusual that a pilot has an extensive home flight simulator.
As you say, time in the company's level D simulator is very expensive and sometimes hard to come by, although all pilots are scheduled on a regular basis to do certain practices in the company's simulator and are observed by the training staff when they do.
I think for me, one of the interesting things is not only was a flight into the southern Indian Ocean to fuel exhaustion on the home flight simulator of Sahari Shah.
At one point, the actual track of MH370, as I've determined from the WISPRNET data, followed a track with an ultimate waypoint the same as the crash waypoint on Sahari Shah's home simulator.
So when I put the home simulator together with the actual track and see that, it's a bit of a smoking gun for me.
It's not perhaps evidence that would be conclusive in a court of law, but it does raise a serious question as to whether Sahari Shah hijacked his own plane.
Aviation records, thankfully, few cases where pilots have deliberately downed their own planes and plotted their own demise in so doing.
I mean, there was a famous case in Europe, of course, where a pilot known later to have been suffering depression and various other things took his plane into a mountainside, but there have been other cases too.
So you're thinking that here we have, for whatever reason, a pilot who set out on that night, knowing what he was going to do?
Yeah, that's my current view.
That earlier that day, Friday, the 7th of March, 2014, one of the opposition leaders in Malaysia, a man by the name of Anwar Ibrahim, was sentenced to five years in prison on what his supporters believe is a trumped-up charge.
And one of his supporters was Captain Sahari Shah, who in his spare time was active in opposition politics in Malaysia.
He was also known to be concerned about the level of corruption in Malaysia with the government at that time.
And whereas this is not conclusive that that would disturb him to the extent of diverting, hijacking his own aircraft, it may have, together with other issues, triggered, might have been the final straw that triggered this act of terrorism.
The theory goes, doesn't it, that there is a 20-minute period in which, if this is the case, if he was an activist on behalf of this person who was being held and had perhaps other grievances that went along with it, this 20-minute period might have been a period you think where he was in some way negotiating by radio with somebody.
Is that so?
Yes.
It is a well-established fact from my analysis of the WhisperNet data that there was a holding pattern about 150 nautical miles off the coast of Sumatra for about 20 minutes.
And it begs the question, why, if you're trying to just make an aircraft disappear into the southern Indian Ocean, why enter a holding pattern for 20 minutes?
You're wasting time, wasting fuel, and you could get even further into the southern Indian Ocean and further away from Australia or anywhere else.
So one of the theories that came up was this was waiting for a negotiation result.
Now, an aircraft has five radio systems.
We know he didn't communicate via the satellite telephone because we've got the satellite records, but there are five radio systems, both VHF and HF.
The HF systems are good for global communication over longer distances.
And you can't scan all possible frequencies all the time to check whether someone was communicating.
So there may have been a radio communication that we don't know of.
Right.
And that might be something that is being withheld so somebody might know something about this.
Equally, talking about that 20-minute holding pattern, if there was a member of the crew or somebody on board who had some kind of nefarious intention that only they knew about, they would have to neutralize anybody who might oppose them, wouldn't they?
So that 20 minutes might have been taken up with that.
We don't know, do we?
We don't know.
And I mean, I'm trying in my analysis to avoid too much speculation.
I make it clear when I have an opinion on something when it's just pure speculation without any evidence to support it.
And I prefer to stick to the data-driven analysis where I do have evidence to support my analysis.
And when I see from the data-driven evidence, the satellite data matches the WISPRNET data, matches the oceanography data, matches the aircraft performance data from Boeing, then for me, that's very convincing.
If this was a police investigation, you would have multiple converging lines of evidence, wouldn't you?
And that would give you some kind of positive feeling about it.
Yes, so a police investigation would be looking at motivation, opportunity, capability.
Certainly Sahari Shah had capability to divert his aircraft.
He was a very experienced pilot and knew the area very well.
He had certainly the opportunity to lock out the co-pilot From the cockpit, you know, to say we've now reached cruising altitude, go get a cup of coffee.
And then when you come back, I'll take over and then lock out the co-pilot.
Interesting, the co-pilot switched on his mobile phone, which is against the regulations.
So he must have been trying to communicate for some reason.
But whether the motivation was there, I can only speculate.
And I think that's why we need to continue with the investigation.
We need to find the wreckage.
Let's find any evidence from the wreckage, including the black box.
The cockpit voice recorder might have something still on it.
Will it be any use after seven years?
It will, as long as it wasn't left running without any noise being made in the cockpit, because it only records the last two hours and then it overwrites.
The digital flight recorder, a flight data recorder, will be much more helpful and interesting to retrieve.
So we don't know what evidence we might get from the wreckage until we find it.
It is three miles down, though.
Assuming the plane is there, what remains of the plane, it's going to be a hell of a job to get to it, isn't it?
Yep, it's at least 4,000 meters deep.
It could be 5,000.
The technology can go down to 6,000 meters of depth.
So that's not an issue from the technology point of view.
It is completely dark down there.
There's intense pressure.
It's very cold between minus one and plus three degrees.
So on one hand, that temperature would preserve anything that we can find.
But as you say, it's been seven and a half years.
It could be covered in sand, silt.
Even there are underwater volcanoes which could have spewed out some ash.
But the systems used to detect metal parts like engine cores or landing gear can detect metal even when it's buried in sand or silt or mud on the ocean floor.
So again, we won't know until we get down there and look.
And we've seen with the Titanic, haven't we, that being down at a great depth in those temperatures, in those conditions can actually be a preserver.
Exactly.
And, you know, I think we need to go and look.
Some people complain about the expense of doing that.
But that is actually with modern technology getting cheaper all the time.
You don't actually need to look a surface vessel with a large crew.
You can have autonomous vessels on the surface.
You can even parachute AUVs out the back of an aircraft and they will go and hunt on their own and come to the surface just to recharge their batteries and communicate via satellite.
So if you want to salvage, then you need a big ship with a crane and the expertise and equipment to salvage.
But you've got to find it first.
And that would be the first step, in my view.
Something that I discovered today reading about this, I don't know why I hadn't seen this before, and I mentioned it earlier on.
Just skipping back to the pilot for a second.
He made apparently, reportedly, a mysterious phone call to his cousin, who was an aero engineer, a month exactly before this flight.
Do you know anything about that?
Yes, I've actually had the opportunity to talk to the gentleman.
He was a cousin.
They went to school together.
They had a lot of catch-up about family and family news.
And this guy is a trained engineer working for Malaysian Airlines.
As far as I am told, there was no discussion about aircraft and capabilities of the Boeing 777 during that conversation.
But it is remarkable the length of the conversation and the timing of the conversation.
Whether we know the whole truth about that conversation, I don't know.
And again, it would be speculation on my part to try and make any statement further.
If you're the pilot or a member of air crew who plans to do something that will jeopardize an aircraft for whatever reason, maybe it's some difficulty that you've got, as we've seen through history, or maybe it's some kind of political terroristic motive that you've got, whatever it might be, the chances that you would not tell anybody about this or indicate to somebody your intentions are pretty slim, aren't they?
But he doesn't seem to have done that.
Yeah, you would think that somebody somewhere would spill the beans at some point.
And after seven and a half years, we've had no one coming and saying, I know something about this.
So it seems very much a lonely and isolated act.
One of the Facebook pages, I believe it was, from Sahari Shah, contained a poem about the lonely warrior.
And when you read this poem, if that poem portrayed the mentality Of Captain Sahari Shah.
Then he saw himself as a lonely warrior, and that people would never know what he was achieving and what he was doing.
So I'm not a psychologist, but I have spoken to a psychologist who's analyzed Sahari Shah's communications on the web in great detail, and they were seriously concerned about his state of mental health.
Well, that would suggest that somebody else should have been perhaps maybe his employers beforehand if they were aware of those things.
And, you know, maybe they should have been aware of those things.
But those are questions I'm sure have been asked by others before.
Indeed, and he was held in high regard by his employers and his colleagues.
He was a training captain.
So that doesn't match up a person with serious psychological issues.
Indeed, his record exemplary.
His sister said very forcefully, I think a number of years ago, and I don't think we've heard much from the sister, if anything, since then.
I think five years ago, the sister said that her brother was innocent until being proven guilty, and she felt that he was getting a bad rap.
Yes, and he's not there to defend himself.
So I think some of us, like myself, making such statements, we should be very clear.
These are speculations on our part.
These would not hold up in a court of law.
And we have no right to condemn the man when he cannot speak for himself.
So I have great sympathy for the view of his sister.
And indeed, we must all have sympathy for the relatives, the families, everybody connected with the 239 souls who were on board that plane, whose fate, as yet, we don't entirely know.
Yes, and there are 238 other people on board, passengers and crew.
I'm in constant contact with the families and friends, both in Malaysia, Australia, and in China.
They definitely want answers and they won't rest until they know what happened to their loved ones.
Richard, I'm grateful to you for making time for me, especially as you've been doing so many international interviews this last few days.
What has to happen now?
I think the first step is already underway as far as I'm aware, that they are reviewing the data that they have from back in 2015 and 2016, when I say they, the authorities like ATSB.
I know that Ocean Infinity are interested in going back and searching and have all of that previous data and are looking at it as well with their experts.
And I think once we've checked out whether there are any sonar contact points in this new identified crash location that might be of interest, I think the next step is to then organize a search.
It will take several months to get the equipment together, the team together, a deployment into the southern Indian Ocean.
But I think we owe it to the families and to the aviation industry and the flying public to go back and try to solve this mystery.
And just out of interest, the way that it's normally done in the cases of crashes that there have been in the past, famous ones, they've reassembled the wreckage into something that looks like an aircraft.
Are you hoping that we will be able to do that in this case?
Yes, it will depend on what we find after seven and a half years on the sea floor.
But I think certainly the Malaysian authorities have been clear that in their agreement with Ocean Infinity, that if the wreckage was found, they wanted certain items of the wreckage recovered quite clearly.
The digital flight recorder, cockpit voice recorder.
They wanted as much of the cockpit, the cockpit door and the aircraft systems recovered and any other items that could help us with clues as to what happened and whether they're actually able to reassemble the whole aircraft in a hangar somewhere, that remains to be seen.
I think it's in, as I said earlier, at least 35,000 pieces, if not more.
The deepest aviation mystery of all time, probably.
You've given a big chunk of your life to it, Richard.
Are you going to continue to do that?
Yeah, I've come this far, Howard.
I'm not going to give up until the mystery is solved.
So, yeah, some people think I'm a bit obstinate, but I think patience will pay off in the end.
And you're doing, in doing this, a tremendous service to all of those relatives and people connected with the people on board that plane, I think, Richard.
And I'm sure a lot of people must have told you that.
So I guess all you're doing now at the moment is waiting for the phone to go.
Indeed.
And let's hope, well, we'll see what transpires.
But the families have been very supportive of my work, and I'm very grateful to them.
And we'll continue until we get a solution.
Thank you so much for making time for me, Richard.
You're welcome, Hart.
Thank you.
Remarkable, I think, Richard Godfrey.
And I wish him every success with the rest of his investigation.
And hopefully we Will get finally for all of those people involved in this case the answers that they so deserve and have deserved for these nearly eight years now.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of 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, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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