1) Missing pieces of a plane that disapeared and probably crashed in an unknown location in the Indian Ocean suddenly turn up near each other, lacking barnacles, etc.
2) Someone is sick enough to perpetrate a fraud to get attention or for other reasons.
In the case of very unlikely events, #2 is unfortunately always a serious alternative hypothesis.
Maybe some pieces are too smooth or the wrong flavour? The photo with barnacles attached seems to show them aggregating on the framework and edges only, so maybe they just don't like the paint.
I'd expect a lot of parts to show up together due to the action of tides and currents.
The only reason they'd be barnacle free is if the paint is in some way ablative, and comes off in layers - which is how marine anti-barnacle paint works - it's very unlikely they'd lack them otherwise.
Since planes are in a different environment, it's possible that they use paint that is toxic to barnacles (but perhaps is otherwise unsuitable as marine bottom paint).
The entire interest in the 370 is purely entertainment.
Missing planes, who's occupants are dead and we can learn nothing from are much more interesting than poor African kids, who are yet to, but will die of simple stoppable issues.
If someone faked this picture it's no more sick than this original interest. (And also unlikely, it's a boring punk)
FAA regulations are written in blood.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A lot of us find plane crashes are interesting for the same reasons that we read or watched detective stories etc at some point, only plane crashes and other real world events are far more interesting to me at least.
That doesn't mean we don't care about Africa. Some of us do and it might be helpful for you to know that to mea at least you come off as judging and not as someone I'd like to work with on those matters.
But that applies to anything that is not directly related to poor African kids, doesn't it?
You are not going to solve hunger by pouring ship fuel and airplane engineers into the pastures of Africa anyways.
I agree that MH370 story is entertaining though.
I've read a couple of reports. Quite apart from the issue of saving people's lives, it's good to see the work of someone who someone takes bugs seriously. They never seem to say "let's see if it happens again", "maybe it was a one-off, let's reboot" or "let's upgrade, maybe it's fixed in the latest version".
The report I read most recently described a chain of seven mistakes and other problems, described which ones combined and how, discussed how each of the seven could be prevented and/or made less likely, whether each of the actions was likely to be a net improvement, and finally made recommendations.
IMO, those of us who work with bugs should read one of those reports every so often, just to see/remind us how an unlimited-resources, all-dials-at-11 incident post mortem looks.
My guess would be it's because people like to blame somebody else. If it's a plane then there are large organisations to blame i.e. the airline and the manufacturer. While with cars almost always the blame is with the driver i.e. the people. When it's a manufacturer's fault however nobody bats an eye if they have to recall 500,000 cars to install something that would decrease the risk by 1/10th the amount if everybody uses seatbelts.
Bear in mind that a Boeing 777 like the one that went missing on flight MH370 costs on the order of $200M. You then have potential liability for the passengers (if the airline made culpable/criminal mistakes) of maybe $2-4M per head, for up to 400 pax on a 777 -- they're big (MH370 had only 239 people on board) and you're looking at a billion dollar accident. The airlines and manufacturers thus have a huge incentive not to let this happen again.
(Compare to a car accident: 90% or thereabouts are down to human error, and the vast majority of fatal ones "only" involve a couple of deaths, capping the potential liability two orders of magnitude lower.)
You can either have a good team of people drill down into the root causes of a particular mass-transit failure, or you can have them suffer the death of a thousand cuts by investigating every nose-to-tail collision on a highway because people get distracted. One's worth far more to society.
In that sense a large number of people are "affected" (as in likely to click/read the story) if 300 people on a plane die 1000 miles away than 1000 people dying in different accidents over longer period in my home state.
When there is public perception the government and politicians want to step in and want show that they are doing something. That something is more regulations and more checks. That makes air travel expensive and more safe.
That thing where you're trying to shame people because they have interest in one thing while there's some horrible problem in the world needs to be solved, is a bit of an old troll. "We're curing erectile dysfunction while people are dying of other diseases. What's wrong with you people?"
We should give this troll a name.