Monday 10 March 2014

MH370 - The worst aircraft disappearance in history

The MH370 disappearance is the worst in history, it looks like. Out of the approximately 1400 people who have vanished in air travel, the 239 lost in the MH370 disappearance would be a good 17 percent of that total. It's like the Oceanic Airlines flight from Lost or something from Stephen King or The Twilight Zone - this kind of thing is just not meant to happen. Unlike Air France 447, which sent a whole set of automated distress signals before it went down into the mid-Atlantic in stormy weather in 2009, there hasn't been so much as a squeak from the missing 777.

More blogging on this later, if any, but apart from terrorism, the kind of rapid structural disintegration of the aircraft required to cause it to so completely vanish implies either an internal fuel explosion or something literally outlandish (a meteorite strike, for instance). Tracking actually was effective only to above 30,000 feet, and the loss of altitude data in the last track suggests incredibly rapid descent - it's hard to imagine anything that would cause a commercial airliner to lose 35,000 feet in two minutes.

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