I really didn’t want to write about Flight 370, the missing Malaysia Airlines mystery jet. I didn’t want to take the news media to task right after I’d done that in my last post. But I can only take so much! Led on by an inept Malaysian investigation, the news media have obsessively followed every false lead, bungled report, and absurd hypothesis with all the dignity of a dog chasing its tail.
You’d think they’d have wised up on March 12, four days after the jet went missing, when the Malaysian air force chief announced that military radar might have spotted it considerably west of its intended course. Four lost days! The news outlets might then have asked, “Who’s running this show?”, declared “no confidence,” and pulled back until the elements of a plausible story came together. But no, they sensed an audience with a hunger for speculation and absurd minutiae, and so they fed it… Could the co-pilot have brought guests into the cockpit? Did a Chinese satellite see wreckage in yet another direction? Did the jet land on any of the 634 runways within its range? Wait! There’s a record of satellite transmissions (this announced a week after loss of radio contact). There are two possible routes: one north toward Kazakhstan, the other south over the Indian Ocean. Wouldn’t it have been spotted by military radar had it flown north? But what if it crashed before detection? Well, it appears to have flown for seven hours. The Indian Ocean is two miles deep—the wreckage will never be found. There’s nowhere a jet that size might land. A change of course was manually programmed into the cockpit computer! Pilots sometimes program a return course as a precaution. The timing of the transponder outage, experts say, reveals a careful plan. Is this a case of pilot suicide? Don’t forget a flight engineer is aboard. A Beijing woman has packed a bag, preparing to join her missing partner. The search area is 50% larger than the state of California! Why did the pilot have a flight simulator in his home? Some simulations have been deleted. No, the search area is only the size of Italy. A wooden pallet has been found—possibly used in the cargo hold. A Chinese satellite sees something large. A French satellite sees something large. A British satellite company confirms a crash into the Indian Ocean. Malaysian authorities say all are dead.
No news outlet has offered more obsessive coverage than CNN. They’ve entertained a myriad of speculations, called in experts both individually and in panels, broadcast opinions both reasonable and preposterous. They’ve cornered the market on interviews of loved ones crazed with grief. They’ve embraced the story with such energy that I can no longer think of them as CNN. Hereafter, they are “News 370” to me.
I also want to give a shoutout to the Associated Press. Their piece titled “7 Leading Theories on the disappearance of Flight 370,” published 11 days into the saga, is a masterpiece of idiocy. One of their theories is “Hidden Plane,” meaning the plane is hidden in a secret spot. Why hide? Perhaps to hold passengers for ransom [right, but with no communications and no way to escape unhidden] or make off with something invaluable in the cargo hold [which will be sold how? sold where?]. The only theory that makes sense—a sudden, suffocating fire—is dismissed with the thought, “Flight attendants and passengers would have had time to try to enter the cockpit and take control of the plane.”
What has amazed me even more than the obsession with “Where is it?” is the near absence of interest in “If this isn’t an accident, what’s the motive?” If the Malaysian authorities and the news media had pursued this path, days of pointless blather could have been avoided. For example, could the motive have been hijacking? No, the jet would have traveled over land and been detected. And if the intent had been to crash the jet, it would have happened soon after it went missing. Could the motive have been suicide? No, because, once again, it would have crashed soon after takeoff, and why bother to cut the communications? Could any malicious intent have played a role? No, not unless the perpetrator thinks of a flight into oblivion as a fun way to go. Given this reasoning, you have to conclude that a catastrophe occurred—probably a fire, which took out the communications and transponder and killed or incapacitated anyone capable of flying the jet. It was left to fly itself according to whatever programming was in its computer. After many hours, it simply ran out of gas and plunged into the ocean.
One tantalizing question remains: In the aftermath of the fire, with a dead or dying crew, were any passengers conscious and mobile? If so, we can imagine people—possibly hundreds of them—helplessly awaiting their doom as hours pass. This macabre possibility is surely too fascinating for CNN to ignore. I expect that their executives are meeting even now, deciding whether to finance the expensive mission to find and retrieve the jet’s flight data recorded, aka the “black box.” It could reveal a picture of despair that would thoroughly entertain CNN’s audience.
The Scratching Post 