THE JFK ASSASSINATION—SIXTY YEARS LATER

Sixty years ago, on November 22nd, 1963, United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot dead while riding in his open limousine through Dallas, Texas. Within hours, Lee Harvey Oswald was captured and charged with President Kennedy’s murder. Oswald was never tried as he, too, was murdered—in the basement of the Dallas City Police building of all places. Officially, Oswald was the lone gunman. However, to this day, many people don’t believe that and are convinced there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK.

Over my fifty years of being a serious student of the JFK Assassination, I‘ve dissected the investigation with a lot of folks. Some were sensible. Some were delusional. But the number-one person (in my opinion) who has the most in-depth knowledge of the Kennedy Assassination case facts is Scott Maudsley. Scott is here today for a discussion on the JFK file, so sit back and follow our thread. You might find it revealing.

Garry — Nice having you captive in the Dyingwords shack, Scott. We’ve been online and onphone friends for a long time, and it’s fitting you’re here for a JFK Assassination talk seeing as the 60th anniversary is upon us. To start, tell us about yourself and why does Jack Kennedy’s murder still captivate people’s interest?

Scott — Thanks for having me Garry. You flatter me. I’d say you are more knowledgeable about this case then I.

I’m 39 years old and a Toronto native. I have an honors BA in international development studies and currently work in security. I have a lifelong interest in history and politics and have been studying the JFK assassination since I was a child.

My chest is adorned with two large tattoos. One depicts the Titanic at the moment of collision with the iceberg, and the other depicts President Kennedy’s motorcade at the moment of the first shot. These are the events I’ve have spent my entire life studying.

Someone once said trauma is the closest thing we as humans have to time travel. Because when we think of traumatic events in our life, part of us is still trapped in that moment and always will be. We can often recall these moments in vivid detail.

I think moments in history, like the sinking of the Titanic or the assassination of JFK, endure in our collective minds because they’re an example of shared trauma that everyone experienced in the same way at the same moment.

Everyone who was alive to experience these events can recall exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news. Because it was so traumatic.

Garry — Intriguing perspective, Scott. I was seven years old when JFK was killed, and I remember the moment like yesterday. You weren’t born then, and it affects you today. But both of us weren’t a gleam in our grandparents’ eyes when the Titanic sank. How do these impersonal moments become imbedded in our inquisitive psyche?

Scott — It’s the cultural echoes of those events that stay with us. The idea of the unthinkable happening. These events can serve as a warning from history to not get too comfortable because life can change in sudden and unexpected ways.

So profound were the cultural echoes of both the Titanic and JFK assassination that they are still with us today, generations later. The discussion of the JFK case endures because of the supposed elements of mystery. People like a good whodunit.

Garry — Memento Mori.

Scott — Lol! Yes, exactly. I once read a book entitled The Dark Side of Camelot. In it, the author interviewed a woman who had a relationship with Kennedy. She said the lesson of the story of his life is that a person can live a privileged life and still meet an unexpected end.

John Jacob Astor was one of the richest men in the world. But none of that mattered when the ship he was on hit an iceberg in the middle of the night.

(Memento Mori – Tulip: Life, Skull: Death, Hourglass: Time)

Garry — Goes to show you… kings or billionaires… they’re all mortal and can leave this life at any time. Okay, let’s get into the case facts. If you had to present your evidence to prove your belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in murdering John Fitzgerald Kennedy, what would your irrefutable points be?

Scott — I would simply point to Oswald being at the scene of the crime, lack of alibi for the time of the shooting, an eyewitness seeing him shoot, and the weapon used in the shooting belonging to him.

Garry — For you and me who have seriously researched this case, it’s no mystery. The evidence that Oswald acted alone is overwhelming when you weigh the credible information. That and the fact there’s absolutely no credible evidence to indicate anyone else was involved. As they say, non events leave no evidence. But to so many people, the JFK case is still a whodunit. Why is that?

Scott — I think people see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe. If this case is still unsolved, in their minds, then there’s something more to be investigated and understood. There are still guilty people to be punished.

But, the truth is this case was solved within the first 48 hours of it occurring, as most murders are.

That does not satisfy some people. The killer was quickly caught and killed himself so in this way justice was denied and people never really got to have closure insofar as the concept of closure is a real thing that actually exists.

Garry — Yes, closure. For some, this case will never be closed because, deep down, they don’t want it to be closed. I think it’s very hard for some to accept that the All-American Boogeyman—the lowly, lone nut from a tall building with a cheap rifle—a crazy who took his gun to work and shot his boss—killed the highest person in the land. A king cannot be struck down by a peasant.

And as for the simplicity of the case, here’s a quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren, head of the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy Assassination, “I have no hesitation in saying that had it not been for the prominence of the victim, the case against Oswald could have been tried in two or three days with little likelihood of any but one result.” Moving on, let’s talk about the forensic evidence—the body and the ballistics. How strong do you believe the scientific evidence is?

Scott — The thing about the JFK case is that everything is in dispute, and nothing is universally accepted by all sides. I believe the scientific and ballistic evidence is very strong. The fact that the projectiles recovered match the firearm recovered is very strong confirming evidence.

Garry — Playing the Devil’s Advocate, Scott, can you make a case that supports the conspiracy theory crowd? How is this thinking justified?

Scott — I’ve found that conspiracy theorists, or CTs for short, often are simply not familiar with the facts of the case, or they get these facts through secondary sources that distort what the primary source actually says. It’s from these flawed or incorrect interpretations that conspiracy theories arise.

One issue would be the failed attempt to probe the back wound during the autopsy. CTs point to that as being proof that the back wound was shallow and that the projectile did not fully transit JFK’s body, which is incorrect.

Garry — Let’s talk about the autopsy. In murder cases, the body is considered the best evidence. Setting aside David Lifton’s book Best Evidence where he proposed the ridiculous theory that Kennedy’s body was surgically altered prior to the Bethesda postmortem to reverse the proof of the shot directions (support a Grassy Knoll shooter), there are some issues with the autopsy that led to later interpretation problems.

Regarding the back wound, probing was difficult due to the narrow 6.5 mm passageway that closed up—caused by rigor mortis and stiffening of the strap muscles. Also, they failed to identify the throat exit wound which had mostly been obliterated by the tracheotomy incision made during life saving efforts. Plus, the pathologists used two movable reference points as markers to locate the back’s entrance wound. Other than that, do you think the autopsy was accurate or was it in “bungled” as some say?

Scott — It was for sure accurate, but the science of forensic pathology has undergone a lot of evolution in the last 60 years so it’s not as accurate as modern people expect it to be. The so-called CSI effect.

None of the doctors who performed the autopsy were unqualified or incompetent in any way.

It’s interesting to note that while later investigations into the medical evidence might have been critical of the conduct of the autopsy, none of them disagreed with the fundamental conclusions. That the President was killed as a result of 2 projectiles both fired from above and behind.

Garry — I’ll go a step further, having a lot of experience in firearms. So many CTs don’t accept that all shots were fired from the rear. Especially the head shot so famously distorted from Oliver Stone’s movie JFK where Kevin Costner’s character repeatedly drills home “proof” of the fatal shot being fired from the front. “Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left.”

The infamous Frame 313 in the Zapruder film is a classic example of Newtonian physics in play — “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” It’s 100 % proof the fatal head shot was fired from Kennedy’s rear.

One time at an Emergency Response Team practice (I was the team’s trained marksman, sharpshooter, sniper, or whatever label you want to stick on my gunslinging back.), the guys got into a debate over the Kennedy fatal bullet direction. I went and got some melons and placed them 265 feet downrange which is the distance from Lee Harvey Oswald’s muzzle to JFK’s head when it exploded. I then shot the melons with a 5.56 and a 7.62. On every occasion when the melon exploded, the debris blew backward toward the bullet’s discharge point. Not forward.

Another thing regarding the brain matter blowing back and to the left which is so blatant in Zapruder 313 and 314. The limousine was moving forward at 11 mph into a 25-mph headwind. That’s a combined air movement force of a 36-mph frontal wind. It’s no wonder the mess went rearward and into that poor motorcycle cop’s face who was back and to the left.

Scott — Yes. There are many factors that led to the backwards motion of the head after the final shot. But it’s not because the shot originated from the front as most people suspect when viewing the Zapruder film.

Garry — I’ll bring up another elephant in the CT room. The police Dictabelt recording that allegedly proves four shots were fired, not three. What’s this all about? Go into detail here as this is what the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) review shamefully hung their hat on when they wrongfully concluded that JFK “was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy”.

Scott — So what happened, there was a police motorcycle parked at the Dallas Trade Mart (Kennedy’s destination) with a stuck microphone which was constantly recording. The motorcycle backfired, and this was interpreted as a gunshot. Something important to note is the quality of the audio in this recording is not great. The original audio was recorded using a simple blunt stylist and a rotating wax drum.

The HSCA report totally supported the conclusions of the original investigations, but at the 11th hour this audio evidence and an incorrect interpretation of it (the backfire recorded on a separate channel) was inserted into the final version of the report saying that the audio evidence indicated a possible 4th shot and thus a probable conspiracy.

However, the HSCA report also concluded that this possible 4th shot failed to hit anything or anyone. So right away this caused a stir, and the issue was taken up by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.

Their investigation concluded that what had been interpreted as a gunshot on the audio recording had actually been recorded after the shooting and therefore could not have actually been gunfire.

In 2013, Professor Larry J. Sabato, Ph.D. commissioned a study on the Dictabelt recording using more modern analytical techniques. The report concluded that the recording did not contain sounds of the assassination gunfire and that it would be of “doubtful utility” as evidence to prove or disprove a conspiracy.

The presence of background noise of an idling engine and doppler shifting of the sound of sirens passing the microphone made during the recording prove the motorcycle with the stuck microphone was actually stationary at the Trade Mart (when the recording was made).

So, the audio evidence is nothing more then a red herring. One that got a lot of people excited but unfortunately proved of no evidentiary value.

Garry — Okay, so it’s conclusive that three shots were fired, not four. All from the 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that, conclusively, Oswald owned and used that day from the 6th floor window of the Dallas School Book Depository building. Go through each of them and describe what happened to the bullets.

Scott — The first shot was a little early. Oswald might have seen the branch of a tree creeping into his sight profile and fired early. This shot missed and we are not entirely sure what happened to it exactly.

One eyewitness later reported seeing a spark on the road behind the President’s limo as it passed. He thought that someone had thrown a firecracker at the parade, but I believe that what he saw was the projectile hitting the pavement and either disintegrating on impact or ricocheting somewhere and was never to be recovered.

The second shot was the much-vaunted magic bullet, or Commission Exhibit (CE) 399, so called because of its relatively undamaged appearance. This projectile hit JFK in the upper back and passed through his neck without making any bony contact.

Once out in the open air, the projectile began to tumble and when it went into Governor Connally it was flying sideways.

Once it passed through the governor’s chest breaking ribs and collapsing a lung, it exited out, still tumbling, and passed though his wrist breaking the radius bone and ended up in his thigh, just having enough energy to break the skin and embed in a shallow wound from which it later fell out and was recovered from a stretcher in Parkland hospital.

The 3rd shot hit JFK in the back of his head and exited out the top of the head above the right eye. This projectile hit a chrome strip above the windshield and possibly the windshield itself before breaking into a nose and tail section which were recovered from the floor of the front passenger seat of the vehicle.

Garry — I think one of, if not THE, most misunderstood issues in the JFK Assassination is the “Magic” bullet (CE399). Most folks can’t accept that this bullet passed through the mass of two men and came out in a fired but “pristine” condition. There’s no question it was fired from Oswald’s rifle which was found stashed on the 6th floor, but the CT stance is that bullet had to be planted at the Dallas hospital. I’ve spent a lot of time researching this issue, and a few years ago I published a detailed explanation for how CE399 behaved to end up in this semi-intact and somewhat flattened state. For any readers who are interested in the mechanics, here’s a photo of my notes and the link to my post:

https://dyingwords.net/the-magic-bullet-in-the-jfk-assassination/

As for the missing bullet—the first shot—I also did a piece proposing that it hit the metal arm of a traffic light and was deflected. Here’s the notes and web link to that post.

https://dyingwords.net/missing-bullet-jfk-assassination/

Now having done some shameless self-promotion, let’s talk about the timing involved in the shot sequences. Another misconception is that all three shots were fired within six seconds, and there is no possible way anyone could accurately operate a bolt-action rifle like the Carcano in that amount of time. You have an identical rifle. What’s your take on the shot timing? Is this possible?

Scott — The original report gave some time frames for the total amount of time available for Oswald to have fired the shots based on which of the 3 shots was the one that missed. If, as we believe, it was the first shot that missed, then the time frame for the shooting extends to 8 to 12 seconds.

But even the low-end estimate of 6.5 seconds is still totally possible. I have let people shoot my rifle which is an exact copy of Oswald’s and with no experience with it, they have been able to get off 3 shots in about six seconds.

Garry — So this “can’t be done in six seconds” theory from CT books like Six Seconds in Dallas is rubbish?

Scott — Right. It’s nonsense.

Accuracy and experience with the rifle matter. But it is physically possible to fire 3 shots in that time frame.  There are videos on YouTube of people doing it and I have personally seen people do it on my rifle.

Garry — At one point in my JFK deep dive, I extrapolated information from reference points documented in a legal survey done of Dealy Plaza for the Warren Commission and correlated them to frames in the Zapruder film. Here’s a photo of the notes along with what I worked out:

The first shot was fired at (Time) T-0:00, and it was 1:62 seconds before the Zapruder film started. The second shot hit JFK in the back at Zapruder Film Frame 223. Its impact was at T-6:54 or 6.54 seconds after the first shot was fired. The head shot struck at Zapruder Frame 312 and explodes at 313. It was at  T-11.42 or 11.42 seconds after the initial shot’s discharge. That’s a lot of time to fire what works out to be two shots, not including the first one.

Respectively, the distances from Oswald’s barrel to the back shot at Z-223 was 189 feet, and from the barrel to the head shot at Z-312 was 265 feet. For someone shooting a rifle from a rest station, as Oswald had built in the “Sniper’s Nest”,’ that’s not very far or difficult at all. Also, the limousine was moving directly away from Oswald’s sight picture at shots 2 & 3, whereas during the first shot (the one I believe hit the traffic light arm) the limo was moving across Oswald’s sight picture from his left to his right.

I calculated that distance to be between 75 and 80 feet. It was a tough shot where Oswald was looking sharply down and moving sideways, aiming at a close-in, mobile target. Even if the bullet wasn’t deflected, it might have simply missed and struck the pavement. But, I doubt that, as the limo with JFK in it was a huge platform and Oswald would have to have been way, way off his shot picture to miss this target—which he sure wasn’t in the following shots.

The second shot had a bit of vision issue from the tree branches, but the third was wide open making Kennedy a sitting duck.

Moving on from the ballistics and other forensics, let’s talk about Oswald’s escape from the Book Depository and his capture at the Texas Theatre. Walk the audience through what happened.

Scott — Oswald left the Sniper’s Nest on the 6th floor and descended the stairs to the 2nd floor. There he encountered the building manager and a police officer. The manager identified Oswald as an employee, the police officer dismissed him, and Oswald left the building through the front door, possibly giving directions to a pay phone to an AP reporter.

From there, he walked up the street to a bus that was stopped in traffic. He pounded on the door to get in, however, the bus was caught in traffic with the roads closed for the parade and was not moving. So, Oswald took a transfer and left. In an ironic turn of events, an old landlady of his was on the same bus and recognized him.

After leaving the bus, he walked a couple of blocks and got into a cab back to his rooming house. There he got his revolver and began walking. We don’t know where he was going or if he even had an intended destination.

He encountered Officer JD Tippit at a four-way intersection in a residential area, had a brief interaction with him, and then shot and killed the officer. Multiple eyewitnesses saw him either shoot the officer or being in the immediate aftermath with the gun still in his hands.

He gets away from the scene of the shooting but is spotted by an attentive shoe store worker who sees him duck into the store’s vestibule when some police cars go by. This worker follows him down the street where he sees Oswald duck into a movie theater without paying and he tells the movie theater attendant to call the police.

The police arrive and with the help of the shoe store worker identify and approach Oswald. He says, “This is it” and punches the officer closest to him. He also goes into his pocket and pulls out the revolver, but the arresting officer was quick and got his hand on it before Oswald had a chance to shoot.

Garry — If we think the evidence proving Oswald murdered President Kennedy is strong, the facts in the Officer JD Tippit case are airtight. Like eyewitnesses seeing him shoot Tippit, and then being caught with the murder weapon in his hand minutes later? Even if Oswald survived and beat the JFK murder charge, he certainly would have been convicted and sentenced to death for Tippit’s slaying.

Which brings me to Oswald not surviving. Jack Ruby? Like you couldn’t make someone like Ruby up. How in the hell did Ruby align with Oswald? Was this an incredible coincidence? What happened surrounding Jack Ruby being able to shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald?

Scott — Jack Ruby was a local Dallas nightclub owner along with his sister who came from a family with a history of mental illness and institutionalization. His nickname was “Sparky” because of his short temper and willingness to get violent at the drop of a hat.

Ruby was on friendly terms with the local police who often frequented his clubs, and this friendliness offered him greater access to public figures. He spent the weekend hanging around police headquarters and even got close to Oswald on several occasions.

On Sunday, November 24th, Oswald was supposed to be transferred early in the morning but continued questioning by detectives and his own desire to change clothes delayed this until later in the morning.

One of Ruby’s employees called him, waking him up to ask for money. Oswald was already supposed to have been transferred to a more secure jail by then.

Jack Ruby got up, took his dogs, and went downtown to a Western Union office. There he waited in line and sent the employee some money before leaving and driving about a block to police headquarters where he saw a crowd gathered.

When a police officer stepped into the road to stop traffic to allow a vehicle to exit, Ruby slipped down the ramp undetected and shot Oswald when he walked out a few moments later.

Garry — So the contact between Ruby and Oswald was absolute fluke timing? Fate?

Scott — Yes. Something that could only happen in real life.

Garry — A lot has been made of Ruby being an underworld agent hired to take Oswald out, to silence him. And a lot has been made of Oswald being some sort of secret operative for a foreign government, given his travels to Russia and Mexico as well as his promotion of Cuba. What’s your understanding of this? Can you put Oswald’s past into some sort of sensible clarity?

Scott — Well, neither one of those things is true. Ruby might have rubbed shoulders with some underworld figures during his time in Chicago or simply by virtue of his owning a business that is active at night.

Garry — Ruby wasn’t a mob hitman.

Scott — No he wasn’t.

Oswald saw himself as a political person and sought to be politically active at least in his own way, so he would not hesitate to initiate contact with various government entities, but that was him acting on his own, he was never working for anyone and there is no proof of that claim whatsoever.

He saw himself as a political revolutionary of sorts.  At a time when those ideas were gaining popularity in various parts of the world.

Garry — I think just an overview of Oswald is that he was a total loser. He had nothing that anyone would want—no secret, clandestine, or sinister entity needing him as fodder or setting him up as “a patsy” as he was quoted saying when he was paraded before the TV cameras at Dallas PD HQ. Never mind being so psychologically unstable. Like, who would recruit this guy?

Scott — Exactly. He was not a good candidate for intelligence work. Too emotional and unstable. He was completely unreliable and self-centered.

Garry — We’re wrapping up here, Scott. One thing I want to cover is the original United States Government investigation documented in the Report of the (President Johnson’s) Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, commonly known as the Warren Report. How accurate do you think it is? Has it stood the test of time?

Scott — Yes. 100%. Nothing in real life is ever perfect and although later investigations may have criticisms to make, all of them fundamentally get behind the conclusions of the Warren Report.

This case was solved long ago.

Really, it was solved within a couple of hours by the Dallas police.

Garry — Lone nut. Tall building. Cheap rifle. Opportunity chance of a lifetime. How was it that Kennedy and Oswald met in Dealy Plaza? Like the strands of fate?

Scott — To bring it full circle and invoke the memory of the Titanic again, someone once commented about the mix of ice and steel.

About all of the little factors that had to align in a certain way in order for those two things to be in the exact same place at the exact same time.

I think the JFK assassination is something similar, the mix of factors that had to align a certain way in order to produce an event like this.

Oswald was a malcontent. He was alienated from those around him and society to a more general extent.

He failed to get people to recognize his value as he saw it.

He failed to get others to see him as he saw himself.

His wife’s friend got him the interview for the job.

The job was hiring for multiple locations, he could have been hired for a location that was not on the parade route.

The parade route was selected because of the location of the luncheon. Which itself could have been held at a different location and thus would have had a different parade route.

It was raining that morning, it could have kept raining.

The mix of ice and steel.

Garry — Ice and steel. Great metaphor, Scott. There’s been countless books, articles, documentaries, blogs, pods, and whatever done about the Kennedy Assassination. Most are poorly reported and badly researched pieces of crap that promote any number of false conspiracy theories, some with incredibly stupid conclusions. I’ve read a lot of stuff, and I have five recommendations for anyone who really wants to know the facts—the truth—in the JFK murder case:

  1. The Warren Report
  2. Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi
  3. The JFK Myths by Larry Sturdivan
  4. Case Closed by Gerald Posner
  5. The Death of a President by William Manchester

One important point in our JFK Assassination discussion is motive. Now, I have no idea what Oswald’s motivation was, and motivation is not an element needed to prove for a murder conviction. But, it’s important to cover or speculate upon for the average reader who would be left wondering “Why”.

Me? I think Oswald’s motive was something like Alfred said to Batman about The Joker in The Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” What do you believe Oswald’s motive was for killing John F. Kennedy?

Scott — It’s always going to be difficult to assess a person’s individual motives for why they do anything.  Oftentimes, they themselves don’t even really know.

Lee Oswald, in my opinion, was a violent person. He was violent as a child, in the Marine Corps, and in his marriage.

He attempted to make a place in history by doing something revolutionary and moving to the Soviet Union, but when he became disappointed in that he attempted to get into Cuba. When he failed at that, he attempted to assassinate a local right-wing political figure, and when he failed at that he plotted to assassinate Kennedy when he found out he’d have the ability to.

The night before he went to the house that his wife and children were staying in where his rifle was stored. He proposed the idea of getting a place in the city with his wife and children, but she resisted these advances much to her later regret. Unable to reconcile with his wife he took his rifle to work and performed that revolutionary act that got him the attention and recognition he always wanted.

So, it was a mix of personal, social, and psychological factors.

As all actions are.

Garry — Lastly, if we can tie this bundle up, what’s the legacy of the Kennedy Assassination? Why is this still important after sixty years?

Scott — You know, as I prepare for my 4th and final trip to Dallas next week, I’ve found myself asking the exact same question. I definitely think there’s a generational aspect to it. At 39, I’m often the youngest person at events in Dallas.

It’s a shared memory and a shared trauma. When the Oliver Stone movie came out, it was a revival moment and led to a resurgence of interest in the case. That’s how I personally came to have my interest, but even that was decades ago now.

The conspiracy theorist side of it is at least partly responsible for keeping the story alive. So, we could never have had the interest we do were it not for the conspiracy theorists who keep people interested as the years go by.

Had there never been a controversy about the case, it would have faded from memory long ago.

They go hand in hand. One could not exist without the other.

Garry — Great chatting with you, Scott. Safe trip my friend.

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.