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Have you ever lost your keys? Put another way, have you ever lost your keys in a big house or at your office? The first step is to check all the usual places. What if they aren’t there? In the office, you check your desk, you think back to other offices you were in that day and then back to where you went to lunch. Here’s the thing: the more you look, the harder it becomes to find them because the search widens, instead of narrows. Once you have eliminated all the reasonable possibilities, you are left with a very big search area: the entire world or at least the world you have been in that day.
We’ve all been getting a lesson this week about the communications systems on big jet aircraft that travel across the oceans. Anyone who has delved at all into private flying knows what a transponder is, but, as we have learned, the engines on jetliners also send out pings that are picked up by satellites and sent to the engine manufacturers. Now, Inmarsat, the world wide communications system for ships at sea and moving vehicles on land, says they are trying to help find the last location of the airliner using the data that was sent through their system.
Even if the general location of an airline crash is known, it still takes considerable effort. Finding something from aircraft flying over the ocean is a matter of great luck, at best, unless it is a large debris field. As Laura Hillenbrand wrote in regard to searches for missing airmen in WW II, it is almost impossible to find a small object floating in the ocean. She wrote of downed airmen being passed over by searching aircraft on a frequent basis while those on life rafts died from lack of food and water and exposure to the elements.
The fact that there was never any other message from the aircraft after a certain point indicates, as long as it kept flying, that there was some sort of hijacking or an equipment failure of such a nature that no contact was possible. If the aircraft went into the ocean on a head down heading, it would break apart and most of the debris would go to the bottom very quickly. At high speed, that debris could be in small pieces. In other crashes, parts have survived and floated long enough to be found, but if you are looking in the wrong place to start with, the debris would, if floating, scatter widely and some of it would then sink. (Back to the key analogy: you can’t find them if there aren’t any keys.)
It seems very likely that something will be found and a search for the so called black boxes, which are actually bright orange, can begin. The probability that all of this began with a hijacking or some other takeover of the aircraft has increased greatly with the information coming out over the last couple of days.
Now that the search has turned over the Indian Ocean, it seems likely that this grand mystery will be cleared up in the next week or two, at most. If, in fact, the transponder was shut off and the aircraft headed off in a different direction, this was likely some sort of hijacking. It does not have the usual markings of a terrorist act, however, because the terrorists with which we have been confronted in recent years want to get “credit” for their deeds and they want the world to know what they’ve done. Some have speculated that the plane could have been hijacked, landed and is being held for other purposes. Possible, but it is very difficult to hide a plane as large as a 777, even more so to land it without attracting a lot of attention.
Doug Terry, 3. 13.14
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