Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

And let's be thankful for that. We need it.

You don't need to master something to wreak it.

Sadly, our ignorance is doing both.

That is symptomatic of our child like relationship with the environment. We are deeply dependant but have little understanding or agency.

It is obvious that high fish stocks will allow more catches than near extinction levels. Catching 1% of 1 billion is better than 40% of 1 million. Yet we continue to treat fish as a short term commodity to be exploited.

We may lack mastery of the planet, but that is no excuse for burying our head in the sand. We have a huge impact and we cannot just opt-out of that.

Tourists seems quite shocked that there isn't more that could be done. Everything in a city is very safe, it's pretty hard to accidentally kill yourself. It stands to reason that we should put up some more signs, or have someone stop them from doing something silly.

We had storms last week. A car was found in a car park next to a beach. The guy was working somewhere near the beach. He was never seen again. No one knows what happened. The search and rescue do a days search, but where do you look?

I consider it to be interesting information. And the author has chosen to tell you an interesting story instead of just a fact fact.

If the goal was to show you something that would satiate the need to be interested then I think the story does a much better job.

Basically why can't we use the Inmarsat network for more than distress but any and all planes report to some tamper proof system every minute?

(Yes I know how many flights there are, but you don't need to store the data once a plane has reached its destination successfully)

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

Honestly, $130m is not a lot of money to an industry such as that. I'll bet the majority of it was covered by insurance anyways.

Well Wikipedia says a Boeing 777-200ER costs $261.5 million[1]. That's about double the cost for the search. If it's possible to prevent even one future mishap as a result of learning anything the cost is justified.

Besides closure is important for the families and friends of the passengers. Especially with crazy articles saying the plane could have landed in Kazakhstan[2]. Imagine the suffering people must be going through thinking their loved ones are 95% dead but 5% possibly maybe caught up in a crazy conspiracy. Even if it's 1% or 0.001% likely it could be enough to keep one awake at night.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777 [2] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370...

The ocean is deep. Sediment drifting down from above layers the debris. Ocean currents disperse the light aluminum fragments that remain from the ocean impact.

An undersea landslide covers the fuselage or it slides down into an underwater canyon, separating and breaking apart.

I vote "forever".

What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish? What makes you think the data analysis is easily crowd-sourced? I.e, what makes you think that analyzing the data requires no special experience or expertise?

>there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans

Why? What would be the economic case for doing this? Building machines that work at the extreme depths of the sea floor is incredibly hard. The search for a single lost airplane (and it really is just the one, not a single other commercial airliner is unaccounted for) certainly isn't going to fund this pipe dream.

So we assume for a moment that some organized group deliberately did something to this aircraft. Who has the motivation to execute such a scheme?

Government agencies I rule out - because of lack of a cover story. It does a government no good to leave a massive mystery open to the court of press speculation, especially for so long. It grows distrust in the populace and gives the perception of incompetence, which undermines power. Plus the political risks of being uncovered are too great. There needs to be a cover.

I'd rule out corporations or business moguls for the same reason - leaving mysterious loose ends is not in their best interest. Too much risk to reputation.

Terrorists I rule out as well - they are motivated by public gestures that further the cause. They'd have claimed it immediately and even if the plot was steal the plane and use it later, they'd have done it already.

So what nefarious organization is left? What group would be OK with leaving a mysterious unsolved disappearance out in the open? Criminal syndicates.

Professional criminals are in the business of doing bad things and getting away with it without a trace. To a career criminal, an unsolved mystery is a point of pride.

If there was someone or something of extremely high value aboard the plane, perhaps being smuggled, organized criminals would have the motivation to extract it, far away from law enforcement or even satellites, and bury the evidence without a trace.

But they would have a difficult time landing an aircraft of that size anywhere on land without detection. Eventually it would turn up.

So how about on water? Ditch the plane gently on the ocean, Captain Sully style, extract whatever is in the cabin and then let it sink slowly. Disappears without a trace. Do it far enough away from civilization and nobody will find it.

Pretty elaborate heist, and absurdly risky. But criminals aren't known for being overly risk averse. And even if they botched the job, we'd never know about it.

So that's my theory over who would be responsible. Definitely backed up by what you're saying about the level of organized crime in the Malaysian political world.

That plane was carrying some person or thing that a highly corrupt, well financed individual or group wanted very badly - either to take for themselves or destroy. And so far, they've gotten away with it.

They looked into the North Corridor to see if the plane flew there. I don't think they found anything.