Author Archives: Garry Rodgers

About Garry Rodgers

After three decades as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police homicide detective and British Columbia coroner, International Best Selling author and blogger Garry Rodgers has an expertise in death and the craft of writing on it. Now retired, he wants to provoke your thoughts about death and help authors give life to their words.

THE MAGIC OF SUPERLINEAR RETURNS

This is not a regular, bi-weekly Dyingwords post. It’s a special edition, and it’s an essay written by Paul Graham in October 2023 who shared it Farnam Street which is a critical thinking site I’ve followed for a long time. The topic is about superlinear returns, a concept of compounding growth. I feel it’s so important for long-term personal development to understand what superlinear returns are and how you can work this “magic” to your full advantage. Here’s Mr. Graham explaining superlinear returns.

One of the most important things I didn’t understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.

Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. “You get out,” I heard a thousand times, “what you put in.” They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor’s, you don’t get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business.

It’s obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we’ve invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity. In all of these, the rich get richer. [Note 1]

You can’t understand the world without understanding the concept of superlinear returns. And if you’re ambitious you definitely should, because this will be the wave you surf on.

It may seem as if there are a lot of different situations with superlinear returns, but as far as I can tell they reduce to two fundamental causes: exponential growth and thresholds.

The most obvious case of superlinear returns is when you’re working on something that grows exponentially. For example, growing bacterial cultures. When they grow at all, they grow exponentially. But they’re tricky to grow. Which means the difference in outcome between someone who’s adept at it and someone who’s not is very great. Startups can also grow exponentially, and we see the same pattern there. Some manage to achieve high growth rates. Most don’t. And as a result you get qualitatively different outcomes: the companies with high growth rates tend to become immensely valuable, while the ones with lower growth rates may not even survive.

Y Combinator encourages founders to focus on growth rate rather than absolute numbers. It prevents them from being discouraged early on, when the absolute numbers are still low. It also helps them decide what to focus on: you can use growth rate as a compass to tell you how to evolve the company. But the main advantage is that by focusing on growth rate you tend to get something that grows exponentially.

YC doesn’t explicitly tell founders that with growth rate “you get out what you put in,” but it’s not far from the truth. And if growth rate were proportional to performance, then the reward for performance p over time t would be proportional to pt.

Even after decades of thinking about this, I find that sentence startling.

Whenever how well you do depends on how well you’ve done, you’ll get exponential growth. But neither our DNA nor our customs prepare us for it. No one finds exponential growth natural; every child is surprised, the first time they hear it, by the story of the man who asks the king for a single grain of rice the first day and double the amount each successive day.

What we don’t understand naturally we develop customs to deal with, but we don’t have many customs about exponential growth either, because there have been so few instances of it in human history. In principle herding should have been one: the more animals you had, the more offspring they’d have. But in practice grazing land was the limiting factor, and there was no plan for growing that exponentially.

Or more precisely, no generally applicable plan. There was a way to grow one’s territory exponentially: by conquest. The more territory you control, the more powerful your army becomes, and the easier it is to conquer new territory. This is why history is full of empires. But so few people created or ran empires that their experiences didn’t affect customs very much. The emperor was a remote and terrifying figure, not a source of lessons one could use in one’s own life.

The most common case of exponential growth in preindustrial times was probably scholarship. The more you know, the easier it is to learn new things. The result, then as now, was that some people were startlingly more knowledgeable than the rest about certain topics. But this didn’t affect customs much either. Although empires of ideas can overlap and there can thus be far more emperors, in preindustrial times this type of empire had little practical effect. [Note 2]

That has changed in the last few centuries. Now the emperors of ideas can design bombs that defeat the emperors of territory. But this phenomenon is still so new that we haven’t fully assimilated it. Few even of the participants realize they’re benefitting from exponential growth or ask what they can learn from other instances of it.

The other source of superlinear returns is embodied in the expression “winner take all.” In a sports match the relationship between performance and return is a step function: the winning team gets one win whether they do much better or just slightly better. [Note 3]

The source of the step function is not competition per se, however. It’s that there are thresholds in the outcome. You don’t need competition to get those. There can be thresholds in situations where you’re the only participant, like proving a theorem or hitting a target

It’s remarkable how often a situation with one source of superlinear returns also has the other. Crossing thresholds leads to exponential growth: the winning side in a battle usually suffers less damage, which makes them more likely to win in the future. And exponential growth helps you cross thresholds: in a market with network effects, a company that grows fast enough can shut out potential competitors.

Fame is an interesting example of a phenomenon that combines both sources of superlinear returns. Fame grows exponentially because existing fans bring you new ones. But the fundamental reason it’s so concentrated is thresholds: there’s only so much room on the A-list in the average person’s head.

The most important case combining both sources of superlinear returns may be learning. Knowledge grows exponentially, but there are also thresholds in it. Learning to ride a bicycle, for example. Some of these thresholds are akin to machine tools: once you learn to read, you’re able to learn anything else much faster. But the most important thresholds of all are those representing new discoveries. Knowledge seems to be fractal in the sense that if you push hard at the boundary of one area of knowledge, you sometimes discover a whole new field. And if you do, you get first crack at all the new discoveries to be made in it. Newton did this, and so did Durer and Darwin.

Are there general rules for finding situations with superlinear returns? The most obvious one is to seek work that compounds.

There are two ways work can compound. It can compound directly, in the sense that doing well in one cycle causes you to do better in the next. That happens for example when you’re building infrastructure, or growing an audience or brand. Or work can compound by teaching you, since learning compounds. This second case is an interesting one because you may feel you’re doing badly as it’s happening. You may be failing to achieve your immediate goal. But if you’re learning a lot, then you’re getting exponential growth nonetheless.

This is one reason Silicon Valley is so tolerant of failure. People in Silicon Valley aren’t blindly tolerant of failure. They’ll only continue to bet on you if you’re learning from your failures. But if you are, you are in fact a good bet: maybe your company didn’t grow the way you wanted, but you yourself have, and that should yield results eventually.

Indeed, the forms of exponential growth that don’t consist of learning are so often intermixed with it that we should probably treat this as the rule rather than the exception. Which yields another heuristic: always be learning. If you’re not learning, you’re probably not on a path that leads to superlinear returns.

But don’t overoptimize what you’re learning. Don’t limit yourself to learning things that are already known to be valuable. You’re learning; you don’t know for sure yet what’s going to be valuable, and if you’re too strict you’ll lop off the outliers.

What about step functions? Are there also useful heuristics of the form “seek thresholds” or “seek competition?” Here the situation is trickier. The existence of a threshold doesn’t guarantee the game will be worth playing. If you play a round of Russian roulette, you’ll be in a situation with a threshold, certainly, but in the best case you’re no better off. “Seek competition” is similarly useless; what if the prize isn’t worth competing for? Sufficiently fast exponential growth guarantees both the shape and magnitude of the return curve — because something that grows fast enough will grow big even if it’s trivially small at first — but thresholds only guarantee the shape. [Note 4]

A principle for taking advantage of thresholds has to include a test to ensure the game is worth playing. Here’s one that does: if you come across something that’s mediocre yet still popular, it could be a good idea to replace it. For example, if a company makes a product that people dislike yet still buy, then presumably they’d buy a better alternative if you made one. [Note 5]

It would be great if there were a way to find promising intellectual thresholds. Is there a way to tell which questions have whole new fields beyond them? I doubt we could ever predict this with certainty, but the prize is so valuable that it would be useful to have predictors that were even a little better than random, and there’s hope of finding those. We can to some degree predict when a research problem isn’t likely to lead to new discoveries: when it seems legit but boring. Whereas the kind that do lead to new discoveries tend to seem very mystifying, but perhaps unimportant. (If they were mystifying and obviously important, they’d be famous open questions with lots of people already working on them.) So one heuristic here is to be driven by curiosity rather than careerism — to give free rein to your curiosity instead of working on what you’re supposed to.

The prospect of superlinear returns for performance is an exciting one for the ambitious. And there’s good news in this department: this territory is expanding in both directions. There are more types of work in which you can get superlinear returns, and the returns themselves are growing.

There are two reasons for this, though they’re so closely intertwined that they’re more like one and a half: progress in technology, and the decreasing importance of organizations.

Fifty years ago it used to be much more necessary to be part of an organization to work on ambitious projects. It was the only way to get the resources you needed, the only way to have colleagues, and the only way to get distribution. So in 1970 your prestige was in most cases the prestige of the organization you belonged to. And prestige was an accurate predictor, because if you weren’t part of an organization, you weren’t likely to achieve much. There were a handful of exceptions, most notably artists and writers, who worked alone using inexpensive tools and had their own brands. But even they were at the mercy of organizations for reaching audiences. [Note 6]

A world dominated by organizations damped variation in the returns for performance. But this world has eroded significantly just in my lifetime. Now a lot more people can have the freedom that artists and writers had in the 20th century. There are lots of ambitious projects that don’t require much initial funding, and lots of new ways to learn, make money, find colleagues, and reach audiences.

There’s still plenty of the old world left, but the rate of change has been dramatic by historical standards. Especially considering what’s at stake. It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental change than one in the returns for performance.

Without the damping effect of institutions, there will be more variation in outcomes. Which doesn’t imply everyone will be better off: people who do well will do even better, but those who do badly will do worse. That’s an important point to bear in mind. Exposing oneself to superlinear returns is not for everyone. Most people will be better off as part of the pool. So who should shoot for superlinear returns? Ambitious people of two types: those who know they’re so good that they’ll be net ahead in a world with higher variation, and those, particularly the young, who can afford to risk trying it to find out. [Note 7]

The switch away from institutions won’t simply be an exodus of their current inhabitants. Many of the new winners will be people they’d never have let in. So the resulting democratization of opportunity will be both greater and more authentic than any tame intramural version the institutions themselves might have cooked up. Not everyone is happy about this great unlocking of ambition. It threatens some vested interests and contradicts some ideologies. [Note 8]

But if you’re an ambitious individual it’s good news for you. How should you take advantage of it?

The most obvious way to take advantage of superlinear returns for performance is by doing exceptionally good work. At the far end of the curve, incremental effort is a bargain. All the more so because there’s less competition at the far end — and not just for the obvious reason that it’s hard to do something exceptionally well, but also because people find the prospect so intimidating that few even try. Which means it’s not just a bargain to do exceptional work, but a bargain even to try to.

There are many variables that affect how good your work is, and if you want to be an outlier you need to get nearly all of them right. For example, to do something exceptionally well, you have to be interested in it. Mere diligence is not enough. So in a world with superlinear returns, it’s even more valuable to know what you’re interested in, and to find ways to work on it. [Note 9]

It will also be important to choose work that suits your circumstances. For example, if there’s a kind of work that inherently requires a huge expenditure of time and energy, it will be increasingly valuable to do it when you’re young and don’t yet have children.

There’s a surprising amount of technique to doing great work. It’s not just a matter of trying hard. I’m going to take a shot giving a recipe in one paragraph.

Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn’t matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, but up close they’re full of gaps. Notice and explore such gaps, and if you’re lucky one will expand into a whole new field. Take as much risk as you can afford; if you’re not failing occasionally you’re probably being too conservative. Seek out the best colleagues. Develop good taste and learn from the best examples. Be honest, especially with yourself. Exercise and eat and sleep well and avoid the more dangerous drugs. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to. [Note10]

And there is of course one other thing you need: to be lucky. Luck is always a factor, but it’s even more of a factor when you’re working on your own rather than as part of an organization. And though there are some valid aphorisms about luck being where preparedness meets opportunity and so on, there’s also a component of true chance that you can’t do anything about. The solution is to take multiple shots. Which is another reason to start taking risks early.

The best example of a field with superlinear returns is probably science. It has exponential growth, in the form of learning, combined with thresholds at the extreme edge of performance — literally at the limits of knowledge.

The result has been a level of inequality in scientific discovery that makes the wealth inequality of even the most stratified societies seem mild by comparison. Newton’s discoveries were arguably greater than all his contemporaries’ combined. [Note 11]

This point may seem obvious, but it might be just as well to spell it out. Superlinear returns imply inequality. The steeper the return curve, the greater the variation in outcomes.

In fact, the correlation between superlinear returns and inequality is so strong that it yields another heuristic for finding work of this type: look for fields where a few big winners outperform everyone else. A kind of work where everyone does about the same is unlikely to be one with superlinear returns.

What are fields where a few big winners outperform everyone else? Here are some obvious ones: sports, politics, art, music, acting, directing, writing, math, science, starting companies, and investing. In sports the phenomenon is due to externally imposed thresholds; you only need to be a few percent faster to win every race. In politics, power grows much as it did in the days of emperors. And in some of the other fields (including politics) success is driven largely by fame, which has its own source of superlinear growth. But when we exclude sports and politics and the effects of fame, a remarkable pattern emerges: the remaining list is exactly the same as the list of fields where you have to be independent-minded to succeed — where your ideas have to be not just correct, but novel as well. [Note 12]

This is obviously the case in science. You can’t publish papers saying things that other people have already said. But it’s just as true in investing, for example. It’s only useful to believe that a company will do well if most other investors don’t; if everyone else thinks the company will do well, then its stock price will already reflect that, and there’s no room to make money.

What else can we learn from these fields? In all of them you have to put in the initial effort. Superlinear returns seem small at first. At this rate, you find yourself thinking, I’ll never get anywhere. But because the reward curve rises so steeply at the far end, it’s worth taking extraordinary measures to get there.

In the startup world, the name for this principle is “do things that don’t scale.” If you pay a ridiculous amount of attention to your tiny initial set of customers, ideally you’ll kick off exponential growth by word of mouth. But this same principle applies to anything that grows exponentially. Learning, for example. When you first start learning something, you feel lost. But it’s worth making the initial effort to get a toehold, because the more you learn, the easier it will get.

There’s another more subtle lesson in the list of fields with superlinear returns: not to equate work with a job. For most of the 20th century the two were identical for nearly everyone, and as a result we’ve inherited a custom that equates productivity with having a job. Even now to most people the phrase “your work” means their job. But to a writer or artist or scientist it means whatever they’re currently studying or creating. For someone like that, their work is something they carry with them from job to job, if they have jobs at all. It may be done for an employer, but it’s part of their portfolio.

It’s an intimidating prospect to enter a field where a few big winners outperform everyone else. Some people do this deliberately, but you don’t need to. If you have sufficient natural ability and you follow your curiosity sufficiently far, you’ll end up in one. Your curiosity won’t let you be interested in boring questions, and interesting questions tend to create fields with superlinear returns if they’re not already part of one.

The territory of superlinear returns is by no means static. Indeed, the most extreme returns come from expanding it. So while both ambition and curiosity can get you into this territory, curiosity may be the more powerful of the two. Ambition tends to make you climb existing peaks, but if you stick close enough to an interesting enough question, it may grow into a mountain beneath you.

Notes

There’s a limit to how sharply you can distinguish between effort, performance, and return, because they’re not sharply distinguished in fact. What counts as return to one person might be performance to another. But though the borders of these concepts are blurry, they’re not meaningless. I’ve tried to write about them as precisely as I could without crossing into error.

[1] Evolution itself is probably the most pervasive example of superlinear returns for performance. But this is hard for us to empathize with because we’re not the recipients; we’re the returns.

[2] Knowledge did of course have a practical effect before the Industrial Revolution. The development of agriculture changed human life completely. But this kind of change was the result of broad, gradual improvements in technique, not the discoveries of a few exceptionally learned people.

[3] It’s not mathematically correct to describe a step function as superlinear, but a step function starting from zero works like a superlinear function when it describes the reward curve for effort by a rational actor. If it starts at zero then the part before the step is below any linearly increasing return, and the part after the step must be above the necessary return at that point or no one would bother.

[4] Seeking competition could be a good heuristic in the sense that some people find it motivating. It’s also somewhat of a guide to promising problems, because it’s a sign that other people find them promising. But it’s a very imperfect sign: often there’s a clamoring crowd chasing some problem, and they all end up being trumped by someone quietly working on another one.

[5] Not always, though. You have to be careful with this rule. When something is popular despite being mediocre, there’s often a hidden reason why. Perhaps monopoly or regulation make it hard to compete. Perhaps customers have bad taste or have broken procedures for deciding what to buy. There are huge swathes of mediocre things that exist for such reasons.

[6] In my twenties I wanted to be an artist and even went to art school to study painting. Mostly because I liked art, but a nontrivial part of my motivation came from the fact that artists seemed least at the mercy of organizations.

[7] In principle everyone is getting superlinear returns. Learning compounds, and everyone learns in the course of their life. But in practice few push this kind of everyday learning to the point where the return curve gets really steep.

[8] It’s unclear exactly what advocates of “equity” mean by it. They seem to disagree among themselves. But whatever they mean is probably at odds with a world in which institutions have less power to control outcomes, and a handful of outliers do much better than everyone else. It may seem like bad luck for this concept that it arose at just the moment when the world was shifting in the opposite direction, but I don’t think this was a coincidence. I think one reason it arose now is because its adherents feel threatened by rapidly increasing variation in performance.

[9] Corollary: Parents who pressure their kids to work on something prestigious, like medicine, even though they have no interest in it, will be hosing them even more than they have in the past.

[10] The original version of this paragraph was the first draft of “How to Do Great Work.” As soon as I wrote it I realized it was a more important topic than superlinear returns, so I paused the present essay to expand this paragraph into its own. Practically nothing remains of the original version, because after I finished “How to Do Great Work” I rewrote it based on that.

[11] Before the Industrial Revolution, people who got rich usually did it like emperors: capturing some resource made them more powerful and enabled them to capture more. Now it can be done like a scientist, by discovering or building something uniquely valuable. Most people who get rich use a mix of the old and the new ways, but in the most advanced economies the ratio has shifted dramatically toward discovery just in the last half century.

[12] It’s not surprising that conventional-minded people would dislike inequality if independent-mindedness is one of the biggest drivers of it. But it’s not simply that they don’t want anyone to have what they can’t. The conventional-minded literally can’t imagine what it’s like to have novel ideas. So the whole phenomenon of great variation in performance seems unnatural to them, and when they encounter it they assume it must be due to cheating or to some malign external influence.

(With due credit and sincere appreciation to Paul Graham. His original essay can be read here.)

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT 370

What really happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is aviation’s great mystery. On March 8, 2014, the doomed Boeing 777-200ER left Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, China with 239 souls on board—227 passengers and 12 crew members. They never made it. Nearly ten years later, their disappearance remains unexplained. Either it’s a tragic accident of unprecedented proportion with no plausible reason, or MAS370 is a mass murder.

Malaysia Air Flight 370 (also called MH370) routinely lifted off KUL runway 32R at 12:42 am local time. The jetliner headed north-northeast for a 5.5-hour trip crossing the South China Sea towards Vietnam and on a course for China’s capital city. Its predicted arrival was 6:10 am with Beijing being in the same time zone as Kuala Lumpur.

MAS370’s first 27 minutes appeared normal from Kuala Lumpur Air Traffic Control (ATC) voice and radar records. The last radio transmission between the airliner and ATC Kuala Lumpur was at 1:19 am. This was the pilot acknowledging the controller’s direction to turn over Flight 370’s supervision to Vietnamese airspace at ATC Ho Chi Minh City on the 120.9 radio frequency. The last words from the plane were, “Goodnight. Malaysian three seven zero.”

At this time, the jetliner leveled to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet with a ground speed of 510 knots. This was normal for the flight. However, at 1:22 am something completely abnormal suddenly occurred. Malaysia Air Flight 370’s transponder stopped, and the plane’s electronic image vanished from ATC Kuala Lumpur’s radar screen.

A vanishing transponder image should raise a red flag and set off alarms. This, however, was an unusual situation because the airplane was at a critical location where it was changing from one Area Control Center (ACC) to another. Coincidentally, it also happened at a moment where the responsible controller at ATC Kuala Lumpur was distracted by another matter and didn’t catch Flight 370’s transponder loss.

But ATC in Ho Chi Minh noticed the vanishing transponder. They were expecting the flight and knew it was being handed over as it flew into their airspace. What the Vietnamese controller didn’t know was a formal protocol that they were to immediately notify Kuala Lumpur ATC of the issue. Instead, ATC Ho Chi Minh repeatedly tried to radio Flight 370 but got no response. 18 minutes passed after the transponder stopped before ATC Ho Chi Minh telephoned ATC Kuala Lumpur and alerted them to the disappearance.

Hindsight is usually 20/20, but there was considerable confusion—if not incompetence—within both control centers. Kuala Lumpur looked at the issue as being in Vietnamese airspace when it vanished and therefore their jurisdictional problem. Ho Chi Minh viewed it as a Malaysian airliner belonging to them. By 6:10 am, Flight 370 was overdue in Beijing, and it wasn’t until 6:32 am before Kuala Lumpur’s Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Center was notified to begin an emergency response. 5 hours and 10 minutes passed since Flight 370 disappeared from both ATC radar screens.

The Search Begins

The search for Malaysia Air Flight 370 is the most extensive and expensive aviation hunt in history. Officially, the Malaysian government headed the search and the subsequent investigation. Unofficially, Australia took the lead because of their resource capabilities of searching the air and the sea. Many countries joined in including the United States, France, Great Britain, China, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Between March 08 and April 28, the combined forces involved 19 naval vessels and 347 aerial sorties. They crisscrossed 1,800,000 square miles of ocean and land surface as well as examining a seafloor area with sonar and bathymetric methods. Not a trace of the plane was found during that period.

Initially, the search focused on the location where the transponder contact stopped. From there, the searchers followed a logical path along the airplane’s destined route of approximately 38° northeast over the South China Sea. It took approximately a week until an investigation into radar records showed something drastically different.

The aviation industry and national defense forces use two radar types. One is primary radar that sends a signal that “pings” or bounces off an object like a plane. When struck by a primary radar wave, the aircraft has no choice but to be seen. Primary radar is the preferred choice of all military installations. The enemy can’t hide except under stealth conditions.

Civilian air traffic controllers like the secondary radar system. This involves cooperating airplanes volunteering a data-rich signal through their on-board transponders. A transponder signal gives the controller vital details like the crafts identity, its altitude, flight plan, speed and so forth. The problem with secondary radar and transponder signals is they can be voluntarily turned off.

It was soon evident Flight 370’s transponder was intentionally disabled. Primary radar images and records obtained from the Thai, Viet and Malaysian military showed 370 stayed in the sky for a long time after its transponder stopped. Military radar proved Flight 370 made an abrupt left turn immediately after the secondary civilian radar lost the track. Flight 370 turned into an extremely sharp bank towards the southwest and flew on an approximately 230° course back over Malaysia and to Kuala Lumpur’s northwest.

Thai and Malaysian military radar records showed Flight 370 passing over the island of Penang at 1:52 heading out and over the Strait of Malacca. Just past Penang, Flight 370 again altered course to a west-northwest bearing of approximately 275°. This alteration avoided crossing Indonesia. The last primary contact was at 2:22 am when Flight 370 left the outer limits of the Malaysian military’s radar. At that time, the plane was at 29,500 feet, traveling at 491 knots and located 285 miles northwest of the Penang military installation.

This might have been the last radar contact with Malaysia Air Flight 370. But it was far from the last time it was tracked. Two minutes after flying off primary radar, the airplane automatically connected with a communications satellite which continued to monitor the plane until 8:19 am. That’s 6 hours and 57 minutes after the transponder went silent.

The Inmarsat Satellite Information

The satellite was a British-based Inmarsat-3F1 in geostatic orbit above the Indian Ocean. The Boeing 777 was equipped with an Aeronautical Satellite Communication (SATCOM) system that allowed cockpit voice communication and critical in-flight data to be sent from anywhere in the world. Boeing designs these jets to be always in constant electronic contact regardless of where they are.

It’s impossible to get lost in a 777, but it’s easy to hide in one—if the operator knows what they’re doing. Aside from the transponder going silent at 1:22 am, the aircraft’s electronic systems were also disabled. This lasted until 2:25 am—just after leaving the last grasp of primary radar range from Penang.

The Inmarsat was minding its own business when it got an unsolicited ping from Flight 370’s Satellite Data Unit (SDU). As it’s designed to do, the satellite recognized Flight 370’s “log-on request” and responded with a protocol interrogation process known in the industry as a “handshake”. The plane’s SDU automatically replied to Inmarsat and the plane & satellite entered into an agreement of regular 30-minute interval check-ins. It continued until 8:19 am when contact was permanently broken.

Human monitors at Inmarsat’s ground monitoring station in Perth, Australia immediately recognized an unidentified airplane had unexpectedly contacted them. They made two ground-to-aircraft telephone calls to Flight 370. The plane’s SDU acknowledged both, but no one on board the mysterious jetliner answered.

Inmarsat continued 30-minute “handshake” contacts with Flight 370. At 7:13 am the Perth station tried another ground-to-air phone call. It, too, was unanswered. At 8:19 am there was a log-off interruption from Flight 370 followed by an immediate log-on request and another interruption.

It took a week after Flight 370 disappeared to analyze the full Inmarsat information and put it to use in locating the plane’s final location when it signed-off at 8:19 am. Essentially, the Inmarsat data showed the first contact with Flight 370 right after it left conventional radar range. That was at 2:25 am and the Boeing 777’s location was approximately 300 miles northwest of Penang.

However, in the 3 minutes since going off military radar and connecting with Inmarsat, Flight 370 had drastically altered course. Now the jet was bearing approximately 190° in a south-southwest direction. It had made an 85° left turn once it was off military radar.

Inmarsat technicians spent a lot of effort analyzing data transmitted by Flight 370 in the period they tracked it. This was a difficult chore because the Inmarsat spacecraft was made to communicate with ships and planes, not to track them. They worked with principles called burst time offset (BTO) and burst frequency offset (BFO).

Ultimately, Inmarsat experts calculated a series of Doppler Arcs which gave them a high-probability flight line. By working with Boeing engineers, the team extrapolated information about the plane’s speed and fuel capacity. This allowed them to zero-in on a likely location where Flight 370 exhausted its fuel, extinguished its engines, and crashed into the sea.

The suspected crash site was in the Southern Indian Ocean. It was approximately 1,400 miles west of the Australian continent and about the same distance from the northern regions of Antarctica. This is one of the most remote ocean locations on Earth and an area where the seafloor was unexplored.

With this apparently credible military radar and Inmarsat information, the search for Malaysia Air Flight 370 moved from the South China Sea to the rough and hostile waters of the lower Indian Ocean. The Australian Navy did its best to search for the telltale pings from the Boeing’s black boxes, however, the batteries had a 30-day energy period that expired. A private American company conducted a second underwater search but also came up empty-handed.

Debris from Malaysia Flight 370 Washes Up

Despite the massive air and sea search done in the months after Flight 370 vanished, not one scrap of physical evidence surfaced to conclusively prove the plane had, in fact, crashed. That changed in July 2015 when an aircraft component called a “flaperon” washed up on a beach of Reunion Island. This remote volcanic landmass is a French protectorate situated 500 miles east of Madagascar and about 3,000 miles northwest from the calculated crash area.

A flaperon is a component from a jetliner’s trailing wing edge. It’s part of the air-braking system where flaps get lowered to slow the airplane down and give it more lift. French authorities who received the flaperon from Reunion’s shore made a conclusive connection to Flight 370 due to a serial number etched into the metal.

This was the first proof that Flight 370 had crashed. Engineers were able to tell that the flaps were up, or in a non-extended position, when the jet impacted the water. They also concluded from the stress fracture damage that the plane had hit the water at high speed and in a downward, nose-first angle.

Finding a smashed part from Flight 370 was a devastating blow to families of the doomed passengers and flight crew. To this point, some held hope that somehow the plane’s disappearance had some other explanation than crashing and that somehow—somewhere—their loved ones survived and waited rescuing.

Over the following months of 2015 and 2016, more than 20 more demolished parts of the shredded passenger jet were found along Indian Ocean shorelines. Oceanographers familiar with wind, wave, tide, and current behavior tend to agree that the washed-up debris pattern was consistent with originating from the previously calculated crash location.

To this date, no bodies or personal effects of the victims have been found. There are no more planned searches, and the official investigations by the Malaysian government, their police and their transportation safety authorities have stopped. All acknowledge that Flight 370 crashed into the Indian Ocean, but none make any conclusion of why it happened. The official cause is listed as “Undetermined”.

What Caused Malaysia Air Flight 370 to Crash?

There are many theories about what caused Malaysia Air Flight 370 to crash. Some are far-out conspiracy BS like it being abducted by aliens or stolen by the Russians and parked in a secret hanger in Kamchatka. There are internet posts and podcasts concluding the plane was struck by a meteorite and vaporized. Some part-time sleuths suggest that the Malaysian government who owns the airline ordered it destroyed as part of a cover-up for reasons unknown.

Setting aside the inevitable conspiracy theories that always arise in high-profile events, there are only two reasonable explanations for Flight 370’s erratic behavior and ultimate fate. One is the airplane suddenly experienced a massive depressurization which sent the flight crew into an immediate hypoxia event rendering them oxygen-starved and unable to function. The other theory is that someone very familiar with operating a Boeing 777-200ER intentionally sabotaged the flight that caused 239 human deaths.

The first scenario about catastrophic depressurization is worth exploring. An article in the respected journal Air & Space Magazine analyzes the mechanics of a depressurization event and how they’ve caused fatal air crashes in the past. It’s an interesting exercise in flight science but the article fails to deal with facts like intentionally disabling the transponder precisely when it happened and the erratic flight path which was certainly done by someone manually flying and aggressively handling a large commercial aircraft like a Boeing 777.

That leads to the other theory that a crew member went rogue. Before dismissing this as an impossibility, there are four previously recorded episodes of a flight crew member intentionally downing their plane and killing their passengers. They are:

  • 1997 — Singapore Silkair Boeing 737
  • 1999 — EgyptAir Flight 990
  • 2013 — LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470
  • 2015 — Germanwings Airbus in the French Alps

In these four cases, there was no pre-warning about the perpetrator’s awful intent. In hindsight of the investigation, though, there were signs of a troubled individual and considerable pre-planning. That seems to be the case with Malaysia Air Flight 370.

A Boeing 777 on short-haul flights only requires a two-person flight control crew. That’s the pilot-in-command, or captain, and the second-in-command known as the first officer. On fateful Flight 370, the first officer was Fariq Abdul Hamid and the captain was Zaharie Ahmad Shah. In Malaysian custom, they were known as First Officer Fariq and Captain Zaharie.

First Officer Fariq is a highly unlikely suspect to do anything as horrifying as intentionally crashing his plane and killing his people. Fariq was 27 years old and about to be married. He had flying experience on Boeing 737s and the AirbusA330 but only had 39 hours so far on the big 777. Fariq was a pilot-in-training on the triple-seven and under Captain Zaharie’s direct supervision.

The “Captain-Did-It” Theory

53-year-old Captain Zaharie, on the other hand, was highly experienced. He’d been with Malaysian Airlines for 33 years and had over 18,000 flight hours. A good deal of that time was as pilot-in-command on Boeing 777s. However, in his personal life, Zaharie showed signs of clinical depression and moving toward mental instability. His wife had left him, and he was living alone. Much of his off-hours were spent on his home-based computerized flight simulator.

At the request of Malaysian Air and Zaharie’s family, the FBI analyzed the history in Zaharie’s simulator hard drive. They found many plotted flights. One had the exact route fatal Flight 370 took. Zaharie simulated leaving Kuala Lumpur, then reached the radio hand-off position between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace. Here, he made a hard left-hand turn and followed weigh-points that kept him on an international edge between Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. That simulated flight plan effectively kept him from being intercepted by each country’s military fighter planes although he would have known they’d be monitoring him on primary radar.

The simulator also recorded the hard left-hand bank once past Penang and the long, steady line towards Antarctica. There was one distinct difference, though, between this simulated flight and many others Zaharie had in his computer. The others had him landing at a destination and safely debarking. This simulation did not.

There’s a reasonable case to be made that Captain Zaharie deliberately planned and carried out his own death and that of 238 innocent people. One big question is how he was able to quickly incapacitate First Officer Fariq, his cabin crew and all the passengers who had access to mobile communication devices. The easy answer is Zaharie sent Fariq out of the cockpit, locked it, then put on his oxygen mask and instantly depressurized the plane.

The theory carries that Zaharie cut the electrical runs and accelerated the aircraft, immediately climbing to 40,000 feet where his panicky occupants would be overcome by a lack of air. In the mass confusion and commotion, it’s unlikely anyone would have thought to make an outside call. At 40,000 feet, the emergency oxygen masks—the yellow cups hanging from the ceiling—would have been useless. Everyone on board that plane would be dead within minutes. Except for Captain Zaharie.

He would be perfectly fine breathing his cockpit reserve air until he was able to descend the plane back to 30,000 feet and re-pressurize the system. He made precise turns to avoid detection and, once off primary radar, he likely re-energized the plane’s electrical runs which set off the SDU’s automatic reboot. Zaharie might not have even known that Inmarsat was following him.

At what time Captain Zaharie’s life was over, we’ll likely never know. Perhaps he stayed awake and enjoyed the long and steady ride toward his doom in the Indian Ocean. It’s almost unfathomable to envision a lone pilot commanding a plane full of death but, then, it’s almost unfathomable to believe this really happened. As for motive—why Zaharie would’ve done this—it’s truly incomprehensible.

It the “Captain-Did-It” theory is wrong, then this is a tragic accident of unprecedented proportion with no plausible reason. If the theory is right, undoubtedly the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is a mass murder.

HOW AL CAPONE CRIMINALLY CAPTURED CHICAGO

Al Capone. The name signifies ultimate dominance in the Prohibition-era American underworld. Capone, aka “Scarface” (a nickname he loathed), grew to rule Chicago’s gangsters as well as overlording many police officers and public officials. And he did so while in his twenties, before hubris took him down through tax evasion—not murder, extortion, robbery, drug trafficking, racketeering, prostitution, gambling, and his running over a thousand illegal speakeasies. Being crime’s kingpin was a mighty accomplishment for a man so young, and there are two primary reasons for how Al Capone criminally captured Chicago.

Al Capone was a true anti-social mastermind. He was a sadistic savage who used brute force to achieve his ends, and he masterfully manipulated others to do his murderous bidding. “Big Al” (he stood 5’10” and weighed 260 lbs.) was also a master strategist who intrinsically knew the flaws in human nature—greed and fear—and how to take an entire city under his control.

Capone ran Chicago’s underworld from the mid-1920s to his removal through financial conviction in 1931. During that time, when Chicago’s population was slightly over three million, the city experienced nearly one thousand gangland murders. Many, including the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, were ordered by Al Capone.

Before analyzing Al Capone’s colossal success and spectacular failure as well as identifying two primary reasons for how he captured Chicago, let’s look at who Al Capone was and how he became America’s most notorious gangster.

Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 17, 1899. His parents were immigrants from the Italian Province of Salerno—his father was a barber and his mother a seamstress. Al Capone had eight siblings; two brothers going into law enforcement and two other brothers eventually taking roles in his criminal enterprise.

Capone was expelled from school at age 14 after assaulting a female teacher. He’d punched her in the face when she tried to discipline him for aggressive behavior. He then worked at odd jobs in New York City such as a candy store clerk, a bowling pin boy, an ammunition plant laborer, and a bookbinding cutter. But he found his calling at eighteen when he was hired as a barroom and brothel bouncer.

Al Capone was a large kid—a tough kid with a quick temper and a deeply ingrained mean streak. On the surface, though, Capone was charming, witty, and unusually clever. This character combination aligned him with one of New York’s leading criminals, Johnny Torrio.

It was in one of Torrio’s bars that Al Capone earned his nickname “Scarface”. A punk hoodlum called Frank Galluccio slashed Capone across the left side of his face leaving two huge gashes. Capone had insulted Galluccio’s sister which set off the fight. Capone was scarred for life, and he thereafter consciously avoided having himself photographed from the left.

Capone rose in the New York criminal culture. It was partly through Torrio’s influence and partly due to Capone’s natural ability to thrive in the underworld. It led to a move to Chicago.

Johnny Torrio was invited to partner with “Big Jim” Colosimo who headed the Chicago Outfit that operated in the Cicero suburb of west-central Chicago. Colosimo’s territory was constantly threatened by the North Side Gang run by the powerful Dean O’Banion who was supported by the infamous henchmen Bugsy Moran, Hymie Weiss, and Vincent Drucci. It was the eventual and ongoing rivalry between the Chicago Outfit and the North End Gang that caused most of the gangland hits.

Colosimo needed Capone’s muscle, and he needed Torrio’s brains. They created a symbiotic relationship, but there was one main problem. Colosimo was an old-school man. He approved of robbery, extortion, gambling, prostitution, and, of course, murder. But he was a pro-prohibitioner who disapproved of alcohol.

Torrio and Capone saw Prohibition as a gold mine. They saw Chicago as an untapped opportunity to make enormous profits by cornering the illegal booze manufacturing and delivery market. Colosimo, the boss, didn’t see it that way and had no plans to expand his enterprise into the bootlegging business.

On May 11, 1920, Big Jim Colosimo was shot dead as he went to a restaurant meeting with Johnny Torrio. History suspects Al Capone ordered the hit with Johnny Torrio’s blessing, but history shows Capone was conveniently in New York at the time. Regardless, Colosimo’s death allowed Torrio to take control of the Chicago Outfit with Capone as his right-hand man.

That arrangement lasted long enough for the Chicago Outfit to gain its upper hand in the illegal liquor business. Torrio and Capone made strong ties with Canadian alcohol manufacturers as Canada had no Prohibition rules whereas the US Act prohibited the manufacturing, distribution, and sale of all “recreational” liquor products. It was not illegal to possess or consume alcoholic beverages in the States—only to make and move them.

Tensions grew between the Chicago Outfit and Dean O’Banion’s North End Gang. On November 10, 1924, the Torrio/Capone alliance murdered O’Banion. In retaliation, the North Enders ambushed Johnny Torrio and wounded him so badly that Torrio resigned as head of the Outfit and returned to New York. This left Al Capone solely in charge and the gang violence quickly escalated.

Capone implemented every fear and intimidation tactic he could to eliminate his underworld rivals and force purchasing compliance on his marketplace. Capone’s loyal goons’ favorite weapon was the Thompson .45 submachine gun with 50-round magazines—the Chicago Typewriter, it was called. Capone sent multiple squads of gunmen after his targets, often shooting hundreds of bullets into buildings and passing cars.

One by one, Capone eliminated criminals like Hymie Weiss and Vincent Drucci. But a certain high-value hit, Bugsy Moran, played hard to get. This is when Capone set up the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. Capone’s men, three dressed in police uniforms, raided a Chicago garage where the North End Gang was holding a clandestine meeting. The men under Capone lined seven North Enders up against a brick wall and mowed them down with machine gun fire.

By sheer coincidence, good or bad luck depending on how you see it, Bugsy Moran was late for the meet and survived. However, with his gang decimated and his power weakened, Moran gave up and left the Chicago mob scene. This left Capone as the kingpin, except for a side rivalry.

In 1925, as Capone was ascending in Chicago’s crime hierarchy, he meddled in the Unione Siciliana which was a Sicilian-American benevolent society—a convenient place for money laundering. Capone deposed Joe Aiello as head of the society and replaced him with a Capone hack called Antinio Lombardo. This infuriated Aiello, and he made it his personal mission to take Al Capone out.

From this point forward, despite the North End threat, Capone lived under constant fear of being assassinated. He beefed up security by having fortified residences, hoards of bodyguards, a bulletproof limousine, and unpredictable travel habits. Capone began spending more time away from Chicago, buying a mansion in Florida and laying low in Las Vegas.

Rumors were that Al Capone had hideouts in Canada despite Capone’s famous quote, “I don’t even know what street Canada is on.” Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan claims fame for the “Capone Tunnels” under its city. So do places like London, Ontario, and Windsor across the river from Detroit.

While Aiello went after Capone, so did the Revenuers. Until the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Al Capone was nearly untouchable in Chicago. Although Capone instilled mortal fear into his rivals, he had immense popularity with Chicagoans. Not only did the drinking public love Al Capone, so did the cops, the courts, and the civic authorities.

Capone played to the common greed as well as the common fear—two ingrained human condition frailties. He had hundreds, if not thousands, of people across the spectrum on his protection payroll. This included police at the patrol level as well as in high administration positions. He had the mayor in his pocket, the DA at his side, and enough goods on judges which forced them to hold his line.

The Roaring Twenties in Chicago was a time when law enforcement and the judiciary were pretty much of a joke. Officers were severely underpaid. Many had second jobs to make ends meet so they were wide open to bribes. So were politicians who appointed the court staff.

Capone knew he could intimidate enemies with the fear of brutal terror, and he knew he could buy his way to having greedy officials look the other way. He also knew he could purchase the hearts and minds of the common people with donations to churches, food pantries for the poor, housing for the displaced, funding for orphanages, and pensions for widows.

To most of the overlooking public, Al Capone was not a gangster. He was a successful businessman—a guy you’d like to have drinks around the pool with—who supplied liquor to a majority who hated Prohibition and viewed the law as wrong. Leave Al alone was the thinking. All he was doing was supplying entertainment to the city. Getting witnesses to testify against him was nearly impossible.

February 14, 1929, was a turning point in Capone’s criminal career. The tide of public support turned from this outrage in violence. Walter A. Strong, publisher of the Chicago Daily, turned to his good friend, newly inaugurated President Herbert Hoover for help to smash Capone and the Chicago Outfit. As Hoover recorded in his memoirs:

“Walter Strong made an argument that Chicago was in the hands of the gangsters, that the police and magistrates were completely under their control… that the Federal government was the only force by which the city’s ability to govern itself could be restored. At once I directed that all the Federal agencies concentrate on Mr. Capone and his allies.”

A second movement went against Al Capone. On March 24, 1930, Capone’s face appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. The caption and story weren’t flattering. On April 23, The Chicago Crime Commission issued its first Public Enemies List. There were 28 names on it and Al Capone was in first place, He became Public Enemy #1.

1929 wasn’t kind to Al Capone. Neither was 1931. Here’s a summary of Capone’s downfall:

March 27, 1929 — Capone was arrested outside a Chicago courthouse for contempt of court.

May 16, 1929 — Capone was arrested in Philadelphia on weapons charges.

May 17, 1929 — Capone plead guilty to the weapons charges with a plea deal. He received a one-year sentence that was served in an open prison setting.

An intense investigation into Capone’s finances was conducted in 1930.

March 13, 1931 — Capone was charged with income tax evasion for the year 1924.

June 5, 1931 — Capone was indicted on 22 counts of federal tax evasion for the years 1925 through 1929.

June 16, 1931 — Capone’s lawyers and the prosecution worked a plea deal to one single count of tax evasion. The judge refused to allow it. All counts went to trial.

October 17, 1931 — A jury convicted Capone on 5 counts of tax evasion. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison, fined $50,000, assessed court costs of $7,692, and made subject to $215,000 in interest due on back charges.

The prosecution proved a case that Capone’s traceable income was $1,038,654 from 1924 to 1929. The real amount was likely much higher. Some investigators estimated it to be $100 million which in 2023 inflated value is $1.7 billion.

Al Capone went straight from trial to jail. First, he was incarcerated in the U.S. Penitentiary, Atlanta. In 1934, Capone was transferred to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. He stayed there until 1939 when he was paroled due to medical conditions.

Capone suffered from an untreated syphilis infection which ate away his brain. He was nearly non-functional when he returned to his Florida residence. He lingered on in an invalid state until he died of heart failure on January 25, 1947. Al Capone was buried just outside Chicago and in the Capone family plot.

This post opened by stating there were two primary reasons for how Al Capone criminally captured Chicago. They’ve been mentioned throughout the text, but there are many supporting characteristics to Al Capone’s character that allowed him to achieve his power. Here’s a few of them:

Charisma and Leadership — Capone possessed a commanding personality—highly energized, witty, yet serious. He inspired loyalty among his associates and maintained discipline throughout his organization.

Outstanding Presence — Al Capone was meticulous in appearance. Clean-shaven, short hair, impeccable suits, shirts, and ties, with perfectly polished shoes. He knew how important turnout was for respect, and he demanded the same professional look in his men.

Strategic Mindset — He was a shrewd businessman who saw opportunities, weighed risks, and focussed on reward. One of these was the immense opportunity offered him through the Act of Prohibition.

Adaptability — Capone was quick to change tactics when necessary. He understood the concepts of overall strategy supported by flexible tactics.

Exploiting the Civic Environment — Capone instinctively realized how malleable humans are. He knew most folks, public, private, and civil officials, naturally take an easy route out when offered a choice.

Corruption and Political Ties — He and his gang infiltrated the highest levels of Chicago’s political circles. He exploited them through bribery, blackmail, threats, and rewards that were impossible to refuse.

Community Support — At the street level, those who weren’t terrified of Al Capone worshipped him. He was instrumental in supplying the common person with the basic securities and necessities of life.

Absolute Ruthlessness — Those who opposed or crossed Capone ended up dead. And not dead by nice means. Capone had his enemies tortured, maimed, and exterminated in horrible ways… and the word got around.

If Capone had put his intelligence, organizational skills, and drive toward legitimate purposes, there’s no telling what he might have achieved. But he didn’t. It was the nature of this beast to be a bullying antisocial reprobate. He thrived knowing humans primarily respond out of greed and out of fear. He played to those flaws, and that is how Al Capone criminally captured Chicago.