The Secret History of Flight 149 · Crowd Network

Estonia | Ep 7 | A new discovery

February 20, 2023·54 min·5 clips

In September 2020, a documentary revealed a four-meter hole in the Estonia's hull, challenging decades of official explanations.

Host Stephen Davis opens by recapping earlier episodes: the widely criticised 1997 official report blaming mechanical failure of the bow visor, survivors' accounts that contradicted the official timeline, millionaire Greg Bemis's disputed explosion evidence, the military-electronics smuggling whistleblower, and forensic naval architect Dr Jaschanowski's call to raise the wreck. In September 2020 a documentary team led by Henrik Evertson and Bendik Mondahl from Norway and Sweden sailed from Rostock on a German-flagged vessel to reach the Estonia wreck. Swedish law forbids diving at the site, and the team was monitored by a coast guard aircraft and then by the Finnish Coast Guard's 114-metre vessel Turva before being allowed to proceed. Using a small commercially available ROV with a GoPro camera, they descended to the starboard side and within ten minutes found a hole four metres high that appeared in no prior report. When the documentary aired the story went worldwide, with calls from the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, and prompted heads of state of the affected nations to comment publicly for the first time in years. Henrik, a Swedish citizen, was subsequently prosecuted under Swedish law; he was acquitted in the first hearing but the case has progressed through multiple court stages. A second private investigation, led by former Estonian state prosecutor Margus Kerm alongside Dr Jaschanowski, used photogrammetric ROV technology to build a 3D model of the wreck. The ROV travelled approximately 70 metres inside the ship to inspect the central casing, a key area where official theory claimed passenger doors had collapsed under water pressure, allowing flooding below the car deck. Kerm's team found at least two of those doors closed and intact, directly contradicting what had been treated as self-evident. Kerm stated the official report's failure to explain how water reached below the car deck — covered in two sentences — was 'not acceptable'. Dr Jaschanowski declined to characterise individual findings as more or less significant, but confirmed the hull breach finding is fundamental and that the original commission's evidence was incomplete. Lars Ångström, a former Swedish MP, visited the naval base in Karlskrona where the bow visor and cut samples are stored. Using drones and a sky lift he examined the visor's bottom plate and found no mechanical marks despite the official claim that a 64-tonne visor had struck the fore-peak deck with force. He retrieved stored metal samples, had them analysed by a Norwegian professor who found evidence of heating to at least 1200 degrees Celsius and strong pressure-wave deformation without mechanical marks. While the professor could not formally conclude a detonation occurred, Ångström asserted no other mechanism explains those findings. Jonas Bäckströnd, chair of the new Swedish official inquiry, told Davis that the starboard damage was most likely caused by the ship striking a known subsea rock ridge when it sank, noting geological surveys from 1995 documented the ridge. He said tests for explosives in 1994 were negative and that a Norwegian professor's recent analysis of visor material showed heating consistent with welding rather than explosion. Bäckströnd stood by the technical conclusions of the 1997 JAIK report while acknowledging the sinking timeline should have been more thoroughly investigated. Davis closed by noting that Bäckströnd's statements conflict with the explosion evidence presented by outside experts and questioned the official framing.

As heard by us

A new finding reopens the Estonia sinking and unsettles the official account.

Stephen Davis returns to the Estonia case at the point where it was upended: the September 2020 discovery that challenged the old bow-visor account and forced the sinking to be reconsidered.

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Why you'd press play

A fresh wreck finding reshapes how you think about the Estonia sinking.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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