The Missing Airplane

Last night I had dinner with co-workers, and one of them -- her eye caught by CNN in the bar where we started the evening -- said she was obsessed with the evolving story of the missing Malaysian airliner.  I said I was too, that I had been following the story off and on through the workday through quick looks online or on CNN.  This morning I've checked again, and there is no news, just the ongoing back and forth of reports of new information (the engines were in communication with satellites after communication was lost), denials (there were no such communications), and then other reports (the engines were sending "pings," not necessarily data).  I just hope that the best technical experts are there and that the Malaysians are including them in the investigation.

It's a mystery.  There's the Iranians with the stolen passports (who are unlikely to have anything to do with the planes disappearance), and the angry denunciations from the Iran that the United States is at fault for stirring up anti-Iranian feelings.  There's China's impatience with Malaysia, and Malaysia's struggles to manage the unmanageable, and what I hope is a huge multinational effort to search the area where the plane might be.  The passengers and crew -- 239 in all -- were people travelling for work or leisure or immigrants hoping for a better life.  And they have just disappeared, along with the plane.

Getting on an airplane is an act of faith.  Faith that this huge heavy vehicle, loaded with highly flammable airplane fuel, is actually capable of getting off the ground, flying through the air, and landing where it's supposed to.  We assume that the airline and the air traffic control system know where the plane is and that it won't just disappear.  We assume that there are back up systems and redundancies that will allow the on board systems to work even when things go wrong.  And we assume that even if something bad happens that the plane won't just disappear and our families left to wonder.  The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is profoundly disturbing (aside from the loss of the 239 people on board) because it suggests that all of these assumptions are wrong.

And of course until the wreckage is found, there is the hope that the plane didn't crash, that it landed somewhere and those 239 people are alive.  That someone decided to turn off the transponders and take the plane off course to some unknown destination, for whatever reason.  This doesn't seem like it's very likely but there is nothing about this that is likely.

So I keep following the story.  Hoping for some sort of news, and not hoping, at the same time.  Because until there is evidence that the plane crashed, there is still the possibility that it didn't.