The mystery of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370:
From
the murder of John F. Kennedy to this week's disappearance of a plane
midflight, Joel Achenbach explains why it's real life mysteries that intrigue
us the most.
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is the kind of mystery that's not supposed to be possible any more. The Information Age is also the age of surveillance, of interconnectedness, of cloud computing, of GPS satellites, of intelligence agencies that can monitor terrorists from space or call in a drone strike from a control console on the other side of the world.
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is the kind of mystery that's not supposed to be possible any more. The Information Age is also the age of surveillance, of interconnectedness, of cloud computing, of GPS satellites, of intelligence agencies that can monitor terrorists from space or call in a drone strike from a control console on the other side of the world.
But so far, all the technological eyes and
ears of the world have failed to find the missing plane. The Boeing 777
jetliner, with 239 people aboard, silently vanished early on Saturday on its
way to China, disappearing from radar so suddenly and inexplicably that it
might as well have flown into another dimension.
The civilian and military assets of multiple
nations are being devoted to the search for wreckage on both sides of the Malay
Peninsula, in the Gulf of Thailand and the Strait of Malacca. A commercial
satellite firm, DigitalGlobe, is crowdsourcing the hunt by asking volunteers to
scan images for signs of the plane.
But the satellite coverage of the planet
isn't as complete as some people might assume.
"Despite the impression that people get when they use Bing and Google Earth and Google Maps, those high-resolution images are still few and far between," said John Amos, president of SkyTruth, a non-profit organisation that uses such images to engage the public on environmental issues.
The pilots of Flight MH370 never communicated
distress. No one activated an SOS signal. No debris or fuel slick has been
found. The plane's flight recorders may be on the sea floor, buried in sand.
Scenarios abound. Did the plane disintegrate
at 35,000 feet from a mechanical failure and sudden decompression? Did the
pilot commit suicide by flying it straight down into the sea? Did terrorists
blow it up? Did a passenger plant a bomb so that his family would collect life
insurance? Was the plane shot down by a jumpy military?
Could it have crash-landed in a jungle
somewhere, where the passengers are now fighting to survive?
From a long list of possibilities that range
from the unlikely to the extremely far-fetched, the truth about what happened
to Flight MH370 will probably emerge eventually. For now, it's the mystery of
the year - and a source of immense anguish for the families of the missing
passengers and crew.
There were media reports on Tuesday, quoting
Malaysia's air force chief, General Rodzali Daud, saying that military radar
picked up the plane Saturday flying far off-course, to the west, far from its
flight path. That would suggest foul play - for example, a cockpit intrusion
and forced diversion - if the reports hold up. But these reports still do not
reveal where the plane is, whether it crashed on land or at sea, or is intact
somewhere.
The case has some similarities to that of Air
France flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic after leaving Rio de
Janeiro, killing all 228 people aboard, in 2009. But in that case, when
air-speed measurements failed and led pilots to put the plane into a stall, the
computers on the plane sent error messages to computers on land before the
plane disappeared. Wreckage on the sea surface was spotted five days after the
crash, and eventually most of the bodies were recovered, though it took two
years for the black-box flight recorder to be retrieved from the sea floor.
The lack of a solid explanation for the
Malaysia Airlines disappearance has spawned rampant speculation. Two Iranian
passengers travelling with stolen passports do not appear to have any
connection to terrorist groups, intelligence officials have told reporters.
Hans Weber, a US-based aviation consultant,
said a case such as this captures our attention in part because we like to
think such things can't happen.
"We like to think that we're in control.
That's our culture," Weber said. "Not knowing means you're not in
control. That's hard for us to take."
The missing plane may be a mystery, but the
search for answers is likely to produce some sooner rather than later. Space
aliens don't abduct Boeing jetliners. Anyone wondering whether there's the
equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle off the coast of South-East Asia should
remember that the Bermuda Triangle is a myth. The plane is out there somewhere.
The Washington Post
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