"How Crazy Am I to Think I Know Where MH370 Is?"
Jeff Wise writing for the New Yorker about what he thinks happened to Malaysian Airlines flight 370:
Meanwhile, a core of engineers and scientists had split off via group email and included me. We called ourselves the Independent Group,11 or IG. If you found yourself wondering how a satellite with geosynchronous orbit responds to a shortage of hydrazine, all you had to do was ask.12 The IG’s first big break came in late May, when the Malaysians finally released the raw Inmarsat data. By combining the data with other reliable information, we were able to put together a time line of the plane’s final hours: Forty minutes after the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, MH370 went electronically dark. For about an hour after that, the plane was tracked on radar following a zigzag course and traveling fast. Then it disappeared from military radar. Three minutes later, the communications system logged back onto the satellite. This was a major revelation. It hadn’t stayed connected, as we’d always assumed. This event corresponded with the first satellite ping. Over the course of the next six hours, the plane generated six more handshakes as it moved away from the satellite.
His research gets more fascinating after each coming paragraph. I wonder if he’s right.
A (much) further deep dive on the search from MH370 can be found at Wise’s personal site.
More: A quick Google search finds people speculating that the plane went down in the South China Sea and Antarctica.