In this technology-stuffed age, how can an aeroplane simply vanish?
Let’s face it, we’ve all lost stuff. Keys, wallet, you name it – I’ve even spent half an hour trying to find my car in a multi-story car park once (I was on the wrong floor). But I’ve always found my missing stuff again. An aeroplane, especially one carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, isn’t the sort of thing you can easily mislay though.
So why is it, 14 days later, that there still seems to be no sign of it? Unlike the glossy, strange series ‘Lost’, it seems pretty unlikely that the aircraft’s occupants are now living some alternative existence on a desert island. Although, very much in common with the TV show, this real-life drama seems to have plot twists and turns that are sometimes bizarre and hard to believe.
When the flight from Kuala Lumpur disappeared, I sadly assumed I’d be hearing evidence of a disastrous crash into the sea, discovered shortly afterwards. When that didn’t happen, it seemed odd, but perhaps not surprising – we are talking about a big area of water to search.
But with no distress signal or message after a final “All right, good night” on leaving Malaysian airspace, there should have been at least some evidence that something had gone wrong. And then this week it was revealed that the flight’s transponder appears to have been deliberately shut down.
With 26 countries now involved in the search, recent information has revealed that comms with a satellite did occur, and that the flight may have continued for a further 7 hours after regular transmissions ceased.
The theory now seems to be that the cessation of transmissions, and an apparent change of course, were deliberate, and suspicion has fallen on passengers and crew alike.
But where has MH370 gone? It’s hard to hide an aeroplane, and even tougher to silence and hide 239 people. On it’s own, my knackered 3 year old phone seems intent on telling the world precisely where I am, so it would seem reasonable to think that if governments can spy on their own people, they should be equally capable of tracking down a whole load of them and a very big metal thing.
Similarly, Amazon seem to know everything I’ve ordered for the last decade, so you’d assume that tracking something as genuinely important as a plane should re relatively easy compared to knowing when my copy of Queen’s Greatest Hits III was despatched. But apparently not.
There is a precedent though. In 2009, an Air France Airbus A-330 crashed in the Atlantic, but it was two years before the black box flight recorders were recovered, and the sorry tale of it’s final minutes finally revealed.
Let’s hope that the families of those on Flight MH370 don’t have to wait as long to finally get answers to what happened to their loved ones.
This post may or may not have first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail, on the 21st of March 2014. It hasn't appeared on their website yet, so I don't know if it has actually been published until my print copy arrives in the post on Monday. You can always keep a look out for it on their website.
At the time of writing this blog post, the story had appeared to be taking a major turn as the last couple of days revealed satellite images appearing to show large pieces of debris, which were being investigated by Australian authorities. Sadly, whatever they were hasn't been found so far, so the mystery continues.
For me, this was quite a departure in terms of my usual writing style. As I have to submit the column on Wednesday night, I tend to avoid any topic that might suddenly change, and I actually wrote the piece on Tuesday. Clearly, Thursday and Friday involved me checking the news to see if my article had been rendered obsolete. Bar the later details of the search, it hasn't. Yet.
I should probably stick to what I know best - which is nothing, hence the usual random nonsense.
ManCave news! As of yesterday, I'm in the redecorated and reorganised room, minus record player and collection, and a lot less shelving. This (unsurprisingly) is resulting in me looking at boxes of stuff and thinking "where the hell am I going to put all that?". Some of it might have to take it's changes in the cellar...
(Compilation CDs still? Of course. This one features a bundle of mash-ups from the rather brilliant GoHomeProductions.)
Comments
Post a Comment