The mystery of MH370

No large modern passenger aircraft has ever disappeared so completely as the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which vanished seemingly without trace, a year ago. There has been no wreckage, no bodies and none of the seat squabs and backrests that invariably and eventually surface after an aircraft comes down in the sea. The flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared over the South China Sea on March 8, 2014 with 239 passengers and crew aboard. The joint agency overseeing the ongoing search is led by the Australians. The Australian Defence Chief, Sir Angus Houston, stated on March 5 that he remains hopeful of finding the aircraft, and bring closure to the relatives of those on board. The search has now covered 43 per cent of the high-priority area where the aircraft is presumed to have come down, and Sir Angus said that he was “still quietly optimistic” of success, and that any scaling back of the search would be in consultation with the Malaysian authorities and the Chinese government. The governments of Australia, Malaysia and China are due to meet to review the search in April, and may reformulate their plans.

In the early stages, the Malaysian government appeared indecisive and was criticised by relatives for the inept way it handled the disaster. There was confusion about who would do the searching and further confusion about the radar tracking of the aircraft. Conspiracy theorists were much to the fore and everything from hijacking to abduction by aliens was at one time or another posited as the reason for the plane’s disappearance. A view currently in vogue is that the pilot, for whatever reason, may have committed suicide. In the entire history of civil aviation, there are believed to be only eight instances where pilots deliberately crashed aircraft, killing themselves and whoever else was on board — so a very rare event statistically but not unknown. Again, statistically, air travel remains the safest form of mass transportation; but in the 21^st century it should be possible to track every airliner everywhere — a level of surveillance unlikely to find many detractors.

Published in The Express Tribune, March  9^th,  2015.

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