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03:33 PM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
March 22, 2014
It is tough to believe that a 75 ft piece of debris still cannot be picked up. Thirteen days into the disappearance of Flight 370 one is hard placed to understand what is going on. That size of metal is the same as a decent yacht or a fishing boat. If it came to the surface why would it sink again and wouldn’t there be other pieces about.
Let’s go back a bit before we come to the very mystery of this aircraft being so many hundreds of miles off course, if this indeed is wreckage. Where was it going and who was piloting it when it disappeared. The media reports give the impression that all the electronics were switched off. There is no magic switch on such aircraft that cancels out everything.
On the contrary, the whole beauty of air safety lies in the fact that there are entirely separate systems and backups for power. You don’t lose both engines. You have APU batteries. You have electricity systems exclusive of each other. There is no way there could be a wipeout unless there is a massive laser oriented ‘snap’ or someone blasts the plane out of the sky. If she flew several hours at gunpoint or on auto pilot because everyone on board was incapacitated for some reason we then have to ask how that could happen. There is enough time lag for the crew to send out a Mayday call.
This is not a Bruce Willis or Wesley Snipe movie. This is a reality bite. And in real life aircraft do not go off onto another route from their lane on a commercial scheduled grid without ATC knowing why. If an aircraft that size was flying an illegal route someone would know.
And if the two impostors with false passports were somehow involved believe me they were incapable of policing a cabin (or several) on a plane the size of a 777.
Since it flew along for hours, we accept there was no catastrophic structural failure. So how did it get into that mode? If the flight crew were involved there would have been some communication with ground control over such a long time period.
There are so many discrepancies that you get the feeling there seems some reason not to locate the wreckage. Just a few days ago Maldivians (nowhere near the wreckage) saw a low flying plane. Clearly, they didn’t.
So, why all the mystery? Did something so bizarre occur (and why not, these two weeks have been absurd and unprecedented) that no one wants to talk about it. Was there some sort of weapon testing that could have fried the electronics? Don’t know but what if it is the wreckage and it still does not tell the story or offer a solution…
Then what?
Even as we write this, a Royal Australian Air Force P3 Orion for the area about 2,300 kilometres (1,400 miles) from western Australia.
A civilian Gulfstream jet and a second Orion were to depart later Friday morning and a third Orion was due to fly out in the early afternoon to scour more than 23,000 square kilometres (8,880 square miles) of ocean.
But answers are blowing in the wind. Too many questions and too much silence.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
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