The search of the area where “pings” were heard…
…thought initially to possibly be from the missing Malaysian airplane is complete, and it has turned up nothing.
Back to the drawing board.
The linked article calls the fate of the airplane and its passengers “one of aviation’s most baffling mysteries.” But I’d say it actually is aviation’s most baffling mystery so far.
Here’s a list of ten other supposedly baffling mysteries involving aviation. Some aren’t even baffling; they’ve been solved. Others continue to baffle, but I don’t think any of them are in quite the same league as Flight 370. They either occurred before instrumentation and tracking had reached today’s sophisticated level, or they represent a mystery in the sense that we don’t know why they crashed or why they weren’t found. No single event presents the depth of mystery that Flight 370 offers, involving these questions and more: why did the entire communication system turn off while the plane continued to fly for a long time? Did the plane even crash? Why has no debris ever been found, if the plane landed in the ocean?
With a few alterations, the world can quickly change from a small connected place to a big isolated place.
The fallacy as Eric points out is that we’ve been conditioned to believe that technology is so good today that a plane cannot be hijacked by a motivated and skillful group of people, working together.
Stealing a plane seems like a big undertaking, but it took more planning and coordination to crash airliners into the World Trade Center and the pentagon- nobody saw it coming or dreamed it possible. If it hadn’t been for some quick thinking when they grounded every plane in every airport, it would have been worse. When you think about how widespread it was, and how easy it was for them to evade detection, It was one hell of a bold and more difficult operation than making one plane disappear.
Humans haven’t even explored 50% of the Earth’s surface, given the amount under water.
I’m still betting that it’s in Pakeestan. Haven’t been proven wrong yet. 🙂
This restates some of the above, but there are a lot of technological dark spots in the world, more than is acknowledged.