A WING AND A PRAYER

We all love a mystery, don’t we...?

Ever since that ill-fated flight MH370 vanished a couple of weeks ago, just about anyone and everyone in the world who’s taken an interest seems to have come up with some crackpot theory or other, turning a tragedy into something resembling a parlour game or an intellectual exercise whilst seeming to forget the real people behind the story and what they suffered and how they are suffering still.

From a complicated terrorist plot, or black holes, to a bizarre bullion robbery ripped straight from the pages of one of those brick-sized novels that they seem to sell, rather ironically, mostly in airport bookshops, and other more mundane solutions, just about every possibility has been raked over endlessly because, quite simply, at the time of writing we simply don’t know anything yet.

And, as human beings who now like to think we can micromanage every single aspect of our lives, we simply do not like that.

So instead, in an age of “24 Hour Rolling News”, when not knowing anything has just as much currency as knowing something, expert after expert is wheeled out to underscore the latest theory, and repeat it hourly until yet another theory comes along which has just as little validity as the last one, and so it cycles endlessly until a more “interesting” or “newsworthy” story breaks.

Personally, whilst I hope that the story does find a satisfactory answer, I’m also hoping that it doesn’t, given that hope will probably have to turn to despair for the families and friends, and between the bittersweet satisfaction of finally knowing, and the heartbreak of finally knowing, we’ll have endless “I told you so” idiots claiming that they “knew it all along” in our day-to-day lives, whilst the rolling news juggernaut will have to comb over it all again in that “news porn” way they have of going about things nowadays.

Meanwhile, given where the search was finally taking place towards the end of last week, at the limit of all those huge ovals on the maps showing the flight’s maximum range and based upon those few photographic blobs which must have taken days to distinguish from all of the other blobs on those satellite images (and picking them out is a highly-skilled and laborious, time-consuming job, by the way) we cannot rule out an aircraft simply flying along on autopilot until the fuel ran out.

Mundane, I know but there you are.

The problem is, of course, that we all hate a mystery, don’t we...?

This awful realisation that we can just fall off a radar in this day and age and nobody, but nobody, would know quite what happened to us. After all, in this age where almost everyone we meet insists on being in almost constant contact with everyone else they know, and nobody wants to be anonymous, many people seem to be wondering how this is possible.

Yet we forget that people disappear every single day and, quite often, not through their own choice. Also, despite being a small world, it’s a great big world out there into which people vanish all of the time, and that’s only on the land.

Once you consider the vast, inhospitable emptiness of those huge oceans, massive unforgiving open spaces into which sailors have been able to get lost for years over the centuries, it’s suddenly far easier to understand, especially when you realise that signals and radar contacts can fade once you disappear over the horizon, and that mobile phone masts aren’t dotted around the seas like some people would have you believe.

From the Daily Mirror
(NOT to scale)

Ah yes, the sheer vastness of the oceans. To read that fount of all unknowledge, the mighty TwitWorld, you'd think that some believe the graphic of the plane and the graphic of the world behind it on all of those news items are actually to scale and that the sea is naught but a rockpool in which to look.

However, they’ve still not found Glenn Miller and he was only crossing the channel…

Meanwhile, part of the sad reality of jet travel is that the only reason we know where most of these flying aluminium tubes are most of the time is because they are able to transmit a signal and be seen by other airliners. If, for whatever reason, that signal stops and there’s nobody around to see what happens next, everything else is just extrapolation and hope.

They call it “A Wing and a Prayer” for a reason, you know…

Still, the press loves a mystery and they can fill page after page or hour after hour of conjecture and speculation and they know that we, the readers and viewers, will lap it all up as we struggle to come to terms with something unknowable, rant and rage about not being told anything by people who don’t know anything, and fill the void with ever more ridiculous conspiracy theories in lieu of anything resembling an actual fact.

Because the press hate a mystery and so, instead, they turn every plausible theory and barely tangible fact into a news story in the hope that they too, like the pub bore, can finally tell us that they “knew” all along, or that they had “heard a whisper” about something which was too dangerous to reveal before everyone else knew it anyway, which is always the “get-out clause” of the totally ignorant.

Still, it is unusual for anyone to admit in this day and age that they don't know anything, which is why every bugger's got a theory, but until the (presumably) sad conclusion of this tale is revealed, we really do need to remember that nobody knows anything, and everything else is just idle and ignorant speculation.

And the world needs to start thinking more about the people involved than the intellectual puzzle they’ve left behind them.