MYSTERIES ABOUND DESPITE MODERN TECHNOLOGY
PLENTY OF
THEORIES, NO PROGRESS AS SEARCH CONTINUE
VAST SEARCH
AREA, SCANT IN-FLIGHT DATA BEFORE
FLIGHT MH370
LOST CONTACT MAY HAVE HAMPERED
INITIAL
RESCUE EFFORTS
TAGS:
MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT MH370, NO TRACE OF WRECKAGE, TRANSPONDER STOPPED
SIGNALING AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS, TERRORISM NOT
COMPLETELY
RULED OUT, 2 PASSENGERS USED STOLEN PASSPORTS,
(Tuesday March 11, 2014 Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia) The search efforts continue
today over a vast expanse of oceans and dense jungles from this capital city
northeast towards Viet Nam over the South China Sea and has expanded to the
north westward over the Adaman Sea. The
combined search area covers approximately 226,000 square miles. Aircraft and
naval ships from a number of countries in the region as well as from the United
States have deployed resources to the massive search which has expanded
significantly since the plane carrying 276 passengers and crews went missing
sometime last Saturday night local time. The transponder signal was lost after
and the exact location that radar last made contact with the Boeing 777 remains
in dispute. That no debris or other
evidence of the massive jet own by Malaysia Airlines has been located is
confounding officials conducting the search as well as aviation experts and
aeronautical engineers.
Of all the possible explanations
and theories being debated about what happened to Flight MH370 one that seems
most difficult to comprehend is that the big plane somehow “disintegrated” in
midair. Yes, the square miles being
searched by air and sea are enormous; the vast expanse of the sea can swallow
up all manner of boats, ships and planes of every kind. However, for a jet liner like the Boing 777
to disintegrate without a trace in some ways defies logic. The plane itself contained structural
elements that would float; the seats and luggage of the passengers would also
be visible for some time before they too were swallowed down into a sea that
tells no tales. There have been two oil
slicks reported off the coast of Malaysian closer to Viet Nam’s air space that
have been accessed to not be consistent with the slicks the 777 would have
left.
Perhaps it is just the term
itself that is so unsettling – disintegration.
For most of us it implies a cataclysmic event of such force and
magnitude that it all but rendered the plane, its parts, the passengers, crew
and luggage into small enough particles that have been forever stolen by the
prevailing winds. In recent memory there
have only been two other large commercial jet liners that allegedly
“disintegrated” and they both transpired on September 11, 2001. The plane that crashed into an open field in
Shanksville, Pennsylvania and the plane that crashed into one segment of the
Pentagon both leaving no recoverable evidence of the planes or passengers. For vehicles of this size to merely
disintegrate, no matter the circumstances and details such as on board fuel and
airspeed at the time of the crash, seems preposterous. The two equally violent
collisions that transpired that same day toppled the mighty Towers of the World
Trade Center in New York City. But from
the 16 acre site of twisted steel, pulverized concrete and the total contents
of 220 acres of office space, several important parts of those planes were
recovered.
Perhaps the wreckage or
remnants of Flight MH370 will be discovered in the dense high canopied jungle
of one of the countries in the area.
That type of event would leave traces although they may not be
immediately identifiable while the focus has been focused on large sectors of
the high seas. It appears the lack of
accurate data concerning the last time radar bounced off Flight MH370 and the
lack of any distress signals or transponder “pings” may have erroneously
directed the searchers in the wrong direction.
That is hard to determine at this time.
Surely with each passing hour without finding a trace significantly
diminishes the chances of rescuing possible survivors.
AIR SAFETY: THE LEGACY OF LESSONS LEARNED
Even the most cursory glance
of the statistics of commercial aviation over the last 35 years clearly
illustrate, considering the millions of in-flight hours, that flying is
generally speaking the safest mode of commercial transportation. The numbers of flights into and out of
American airports per day and the massive numbers of passengers moved is
staggering. At any given time of the day
or night there are approximately 3,620 commercial air planes over the
continental United States. More
Americans die in a one month period on our surface roads, highways and byways
in one month than have died due to fatal aviation events collectively over the
last 6 years. The comparison as a simple
ratio proves this point unequivocally. The
aviation industry learned many of its lessons the hard way. Flawed design, in flight stresses, structural
load were the cause of most of the fatal flights well into the 1960’s. Throughout the 1970’s with the advent of
modern technology in the form of Computer Aided Design (CAD),
Vital advancements in
materials sciences such as metallurgy, plastics, insulations, and epoxies
dramatically altered the way planes were designed and constructed while more
regulated maintenance and service standards were initiated due to increased
scrutiny from Federal Aeronautics Administration (FAA) and the fledgling
National Transportation Safety Board, a federal agency tasked with
investigating accidents in all modes of the transportation industry from trucking
to flying.
The forward progress propelled
commercial aviation (and, for that matter, Military aviation as well) to newer
and safer methods of developing and incorporating the latest advances in
sophisticated technology and all the corollary branches of the sciences thereby
heralding a new age in commercial flight.
Since the late 1970’s aviation accidents, be they midair collisions,
catastrophic failures, human error, natural anomalies and even on the tarmacs
around the world have declined to be, not that any loss of life is not awful,
statistically negligible.
The flying public has enormous
confidence in the flying industry and that too can be statistically tracked;
every year the number of commercial passenger flyers increases. There are those in certain businesses that
fly as regularly as others walk, drive or take mass transit to work every
day. It is not uncommon for these
frequent flyers to amass anywhere from 5 to 25,000 air born miles annually. If ever there was an American industry that grew
at such an amazing pace as aviation it is hard to find. From the Wright Brothers initial first flight
at Kitty Hawk to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking the dusty plain of
Tranquility Bay on the Lunar surface a scant 60 years separated those two
historic achievements. Think about that
fact for a moment, if you will. It
almost boggles the mind to consider the tremendous amounts of intelligence,
imagination, engineering, and the constant unrestrained march forward that took
man from a sandy beach in North Carolina to our most visible and close
celestial relative, the Moon.
LUNAR CONQUEST, TERRESTRIAL MYSTERY
All of the sophisticated
technology at our disposal today does not protect us from, nor immunize us against,
mysteries. Happenstance and circumstance
are as prevalent today as they were during the Stone Age. For all the vast quantities of knowledge
we’ve acquired, accumulated, documented and proven since the dawn of
civilization that has been expanded upon exponentially in the last 100 years,
there remains so much unknown and, quite possibly, unknowable. Our world, the nature of our being, sentience
and workings of our brains retain their secrets as do the cold, dark depths of
our oceans. Oddly, the total vacuum of
space is more accessible than the deepest water covered terrains on Earth. There
have been periods in the past where we made huge strides in understanding of
our physical world and in medical science.
The high technology age we are still in began in earnest perhaps with
the Manhattan Project during World War II that produced controllable nuclear
fission initially for use as a weapon of mass destruction and afterwards as a
source of relatively clean, affordable energy.
The Digital Age was born full
term when President Bill Clinton predicted in 1992 that technology; networking
and even unforeseen applications were providing us entry onto the “Information
Superhighway”. And that it has done
beyond even some of the most forward leaning minds in the field back in the
1990’s. Our world today is defined by
devices and capabilities; by such sophisticated technology that it is now
everything from our communications and power grid, economy, trade and all the
other elements of a globalized world and it is the fiber optic cables that
weave this intricate, complex tapestry together.
So we read about a jumbo jet
suddenly vanishing from the skies as if into some sort of stratospheric “Bermuda
Triangle” and have difficulty understanding the difficulties of locating this
missing aircraft. As the science and
craft of aviation developed there were instances that remain mysteries. The female aviator Emilia Clark’s plane has
never been located and an entire squadron of Army Air Corps B-25 planes
vanished without a trace after a training mission in 1944. Yes, by today’s standards the capabilities
available in those much earlier days of manned flight seems dangerously, actually
recklessly primitive. We have such confidence and reliance on our digital
devices, networks, advanced radar, sonar and technological prowess that we give
little thought to how it works and what its limitations are. Oh yes, it all comes with some degree of
limitations.
When NASA landed two men on
the Moon and safely returned them to the Earth they did so armed only with slide
rulers and tables compiled from what was at the day cutting edge machinery,
massive house sized computers that could only read the punch cards fed by hand
into the machine. There is more memory
by a factor of several thousand megabytes in an iPad of today than the 64 bytes
in the Lunar Capsule in July 1969. Much of
the technology developed during the “Space Race” had applications on Earth;
from materials and the miniaturization and computing capacity of silicon chips,
to strides in a wide array of the sciences, NASA provided a Return on
Investment more than the entire SkyLab, Shuttle, and Space Station Earth
orbiting vessels have collectively. But here on Earth we have so much more to
learn and, although the demise of MH370 might remain a mystery forever, it is a
tragic mass fatality event and a harsh cup of cold reality tossed in the face
of our high-tech world where knowledge is a Google search away; we communicate
with people half a world away via satellite, organ transplants and imaging
modalities have revolutionized how the diagnosis and treatment of patients is
conducted. Sometimes it just seems like
there is nothing we cannot do; that there is an “App” for everything and
anything and if a system “crashes” for a mere hour or two millions of users
around the world feel untethered and lost.
We need to remain a respectful
sense of humility; we are often humbled by the forces of nature that have been
the arbiters of our biosphere, ecosystem and atmosphere for several hundred
millions of years; a length of time it is truly difficult to comprehend given
our oh so brief time on Earth.
For the time being we are left
with a profound mystery. Mystery not
only surrounds the disappearance of the plane and all its contents. The possible reasons for what precisely
brought this plane from out of the sky to God knows where are already generating
the usual conspiracy theorists. Sure,
anything is possible. It could have been
some catastrophic systemic failure that occurred in a nanosecond; it could have
been a bomb, some sort of terrorist event, it may have been mistakenly shot
down by the military of any of the countries in the region. The pilot or pilots may have deliberately crashed
their jet. Conjecture and supposition is
the coin of the realm today as the search continues.
Mystery, sometimes very heart
breaking mystery keeps us grounded. No
matter our sophistication and all that we can do, there will always be the next
Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy or Andy, a South Pacific tsunami, earthquake,
drought or any number of the arrows Mother Nature has in her quiver. She largely allows us to think we are in
control, that we have mastered our environment from the microbial level to the
universal laws. But every now and then
she slaps us with some calamity and it is Her, perhaps, who took Flight MH370
and left us to figure out where it is.
(Some
of these links have excellent graphics)
Copyright The
Brooding Cynyx 2014 © All Rights Reserved
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