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05:59 PM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
March 11, 2014
Now, it is getting ridiculous. And so scary. You come to a point where there is this frightening realization that even though the world has shrunk courtesy technology and we are all in each other’s faces and snarled into trivia, we can still lose a whole wide bodied aircraft with 239 souls on board and have no clue where it went. Primitive is what we are.
There is no Bermuda Triangle here but the complete inability of the aviation industry to figure out what happened makes a mockery of radars, sonars, blips, transponders and all that other fancy fly by wire state of the art, cutting edge hi-tech era we live in. Try telling all this to the families of the people on board and witness what cold comfort you give them.
And while we are at it and life at airports is a torture in terms of security this total absence of it for Flight 370 raises another red flag. While there has never been failsafe security and so long as the human factor exists there will never be, a perfect solution this trail of false passports, Caucasians and Orientals, the murky role of the Thai mafias, the possibility of explosives on board or even weapons (you cannot rule out either) brings us back to total vulnerability. The next time I get patted down or taken aside or hear a ping on that walk through detector I need more reassurance than I get around the world.
Think of how it must be at the average international airport. Aviation travels from the most advanced systems to the most backward in one flight, thereby leaving those inside open to all sorts of problems. Even today 80% of airports are inadequate and this is official.
This plane did not just crumple up and have structural failure. There is just too much stuff loaded in the other pan for that theory. By now, all the floatable elements would have come to the surface. Dinghies, chutes, floats, seats, tons of debris, the tail, which survives most impacts. Yellow stands out as does red.
And yet nothing. The pressure of the ocean if the plane has gone down would have crushed it.
Is it possible that the plane has been taken at zero level under the radar to an undisclosed location?
I don’t know but until someone shows us the wreckage I won’t discount it. I won’t discount anything.
(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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