Finding MH370

Civil aviation has entered a dangerous new era now that Russia has expanded its campaign of sabotage in northern Europe to attack civil aviation directly.The question we’re going to address in today’s episode is whether those attacks are limited to the planting of incendiary devices on board aircraft, or whether Russia has also started hacking navigational sytems to destroy aircraft and kill flight crew, in particular with the November 25 crash of a DHL 737 freighter in Vilnius, Lithuania.To be clear, we don’t yet know the answer to this question, but a point I’ve repeated several times in this podcast is that in compromised environment we have to ask the questions before we can find the answers.To help us understand the issue, we’re joined today by Harshad Sathaye, a cybersecurity researcher who in 2019 published a paper describing an attack which, if carried out, could cause a crash like the one that occurred in Vilnius. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

In early 2009, Iran’s secret proram to build nuclear weapons suffered a series of mysterious failures. Centrifuge machines used to purify uranium suddenly spun out of control and tore themselves apart. More than a thousand machines were destroyed, and Iran’s pursuit of the bomb was seriously delayed. It turned out that the machines had been sabotaged by a computer virus called Stuxnet, a sophisticated malware developed by Israel and the United States.The attack demonstrated that hackers can not only take control of computer systems, but also reach through those systems to create physical effects in the real world. Today there’s a whole subspeciality of the cyber security field called “cyber physical” devoted to stuydying this kind of attack, and I’m fortunate to have with me today one of the leading lights, Dr Krishna Sampigethaya, a professor at Embry Riddle Aeronatical University, who will talk to us about its relevance to aviation and specifically to MH370. I ask him whether, in his view, MH370 could have been the victim of a cyber-physical attack. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

In today’s episode we discuss a new approach to gathering the Lepas data that could help us finally understand how long MH370’s debris was in the water. By tapping into a worldwide community of oceangoing sailors who convence on the social media site No Foreign Land, it might be possible to retrieve data from barnacles that are just about anywhere in the ocean. I tried out this approach by reaching out to cruisers Leslie Graney and Peter Sheaff after I noticed that there boat “Itchy Feet” was quite close to an interesting Global Drifter buoy near the island of Vava’u in Tonga. With incredible graciousness and pluck Leslie and Peter immediately set out on a quest to intercept the buoy, while I looked on from halfway around the world. While the experiment didn’t succeed in achieving all of its goals, it was a great demonstration of how the idea could work in the future, and gave us important ideas for improvements going forward. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe

The ocean is a big place. So maybe it isn’t that surprising that MH370 wasn’t found.At least, that’s what you hear a lot of people say.It’s pretty widely accepted among the general public that the seabed search failed because, well, the ocean is big, why wouldn’t it be hard to find a plane in it?But actually, the scientists who defined the search area had good reason to think that they knew where the plane had flown to, with a pretty good degree of accuracy. In today’s episode, we discuss how Australian scientists wrestled with the Inmarsat data, trying and discarding several approaches before settling on a method that allowed them to state, with mathematical certainty, where the seabed search would find the plane.That search, of course, failed. But math is math — if the calculations failed to yield the correct location of the plane, there must be a reason why. A branch of statistics called Bayesian inference offers guidance on what to do next. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe