Search 1, MALAYSIA, OPINION WHERE IS FLIGHT 370? – OPED MARCH 16, 2014 ARAB NEWS 1 COMMENT By Arab News By Bikram Vohra Do you get the feeling that Flight 370 has literally fallen off the radar? Five days later except for the anguish and agony of the next of kin of the 239 on board and the ripple effect of that loss, no one really wants to hold the ball. Like a bizarre game of musical chairs they are passing the parcel from one to another. More like a hot potato. The airline expresses its limitations in the search. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) says it’s the responsibility of the police and immigration to track down false passport users. The New York Times says the plane could have flown under the radar for five hours, which could put anywhere in half of Asia and the Far East. Now they have widened the search to cover the Andaman Islands and the Indian coastline. Boeing seems categorical that the aircraft’s integrity could not have failed so catastrophically. Even if the twin engines had stopped simultaneously that plane could have glided for twenty minutes. Political savvy seems to be a card trumping everything else. The theories are as thick as a snow flurry and some are outlandish. But somewhere on this planet is a 777 with 239 souls on board, dead or alive, and the world seems to have forgotten all about them. The Chinese profess to it not having entered their airspace. Eyewitnesses have seen an aircraft flying low but no eyewitness has been shown. People say the mobile phones were ringing but no one has come forward. A relative of one of the passengers said that he called his cousin 50 minutes after the flight went missing. So, none of the theories have any basis in fact and all the governments and the manufacturers and their subsidiaries are running for the chairs even though the music stopped five days ago. And as fragile as human nature is and often twisted we are now almost placing Flight 370 in the same unsolved mystery category of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart or the ships that vanished in the Bermuda Triangle and we’d be a tad disappointed if the wreckage suddenly came up. No one is seriously giving answers to the basic questions. Did the aircraft vector off course and make any turn? Did the captain send out any signal indicating any problem? Has anyone analyzed his voice for stress or tension from the ATC records? Has Malaysian authorities tried to verify those eerie mobile rings? Has anyone spotted any strip of land anywhere in that area which could have been a makeshift strip? What are those satellites doing up there? The pussyfooting we are witnessing is directly linked to the possibility of it being a terrorist attack and no one wants to go there and be found guilty of acts of omission and commission. Back off seems to be the silent agreement. No one wants to discuss how explosives got onto the aircraft. Who brought them? Above all, who was the target? A person? A government? A country?
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 15:24:50 +0000
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