Truth is, nobody knows where that plane is. At least, none of the people looking for it do. If they did, wouldn’t they announce it, and end this expensive search?
Over the last week, the public has been fed enough malarkey to fill a grain silo. The Chinese and Malayasians have proven themselves especially inept at managing press relations, probably because they have no experience in dealing with uncensored press, and fail to appreciate that unmuzzled journalists who have nothing to report to a news-hungry world will report something anyway. Like wives, they can’t stand a vacuum, so fill it with noise.
Thus, the media breathlessly reported that a Chinese satellite spotted plane wreckage floating in the Gulf of Thailand. Never mind that nothing on a Boeing 777 is flat, floats, and measures 70′ x 90′. Or that half of Southeast Asia’s trash ends up in the Gulf of Thailand. This item was news, but not in the way most people think. It’s newsworthy because we just learned how lousy China’s satellite technology is. I don’t think we have to worry about them pinpointing the locations of our land-based ICBMs anytime soon, even though they’re marked on most tourist maps.
Another thing we learned this week is that China’s geologists don’t know where the earth’s fault zones are, either. They said their seismographs picked up the impact of a plane crashing into the sea at a spot where natural seismic activity doesn’t occur. Really? They must have a damned sensitive seismograph if it can register surface splashes. Every time Seattle’s Twelfth Man stomps his feet and cheers, they know! That’s how they follow our game scores when the livestream isn’t working. Well, it’s easy enough to verify seismic detection of plane crashes, you just send a ship there to look for wreckage on the sea bottom with sonar. Oops, nothing there except an active fault zone.
An oil worker on a platform in the South China Sea saw a burning plane in the night sky. The first thing to consider about this piece of evidence is that it’s EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY. Now ask any lawyer how reliable eyewitnesses are. No, wait, I have a better idea: Ask the Innocence Project how many people convicted by eyewitness testimony have been exonerated by DNA evidence, and how many more such cases are in their pipeline. Me, I’m always impressed by the uncanny ability of eyewitnesses to see things that don’t exist, or are something else altogether.
We’re told the plane’s engines transmitted a continuous stream of flight data to the engine manufacturer as part of the plane’s maintenance regimen. No, wait, they didn’t; we’re given a revised story that the engines sent out several “pings” which prove the plane kept flying for another four or five hours after contact with it was lost. Based on this, the media tells us the plane may have landed on an island in the Indian Ocean. A more plausible analysis is that somebody mentioned something that circulated through the room in which all those government officials who don’t know anything are milling around, changing with each retelling, until a guileless Malaysian press flack fed it into the sucking maw of the news vacuum.
The most plausible scenario is that nobody involved in this search has any goddamned idea where the plane is. If they did, that’s where they’d look. Instead, they’re aimlessly searching all over hell and gone. The fact they’re doing that tells you they don’t have a clue. Do any of you believe a 777 can crash into the middle of the world’s busiest shipping lane, the Malacca Strait, without anyone noticing? Really, now. It struck me how much this search effort resembles Mrs. Rabbit looking for her car keys.
Some of you may be tempted to assume that our government knows everything, and therefore knows where the plane is, and is pretending it doesn’t in order to cover up a mass kidnapping by Mossad of Chinese engineers working for a Texas company that develops software for Iran’s uranium centrifuges. I admit this hypothesis is intriguingly creative; however, I think it exaggerates Mossad’s capabilities, plus it has several glaring holes in it. First of all, it’s not all that easy to hide a 777 on a deserted island. The Chinese might not be able to find an ocean liner at a dock, but I’m pretty sure the Russkies can, and would Putin keep quiet if he had an opportunity to embarrass the United States and Israel, and stir the Mideast pot? Not a chance. An even bigger hurdle is Washington’s inability to keep secrets. Ever hear of “leaks”? Hell, our government can’t even keep military secrets; I read yesterday the Chinese have already stolen the technology for our new F-35 fighter plane. In any case, the NSA is too busy reading our e-mails and listening to our cellphone chatter to keep track of where all the airliners — there are thousands of them — are. My inbox alone is a daunting task; I get so many e-mails I’ve asked the NSA to send me daily summaries. With their responsibilities for spying on innocent citizens like us, they simply don’t have time to monitor pilot and terrorist chatter.
Amidst all this useless speculation, one idea makes sense. Ask the guy who fueled the plane how much jet fuel was in its tanks. Use that to calculate how far it could fly. Center a drafting compass on the Kuala Lumpur airport and draw a circle that wide on a map. It came down somewhere in there.
Come on!
All of this is fine except one thing … “nobody knows where that pane is” is either ungrammatical, untrue or both.
1. The statement is circular. How can nobody ever know anything?
2. Given that the evidence is for the plane being flown actively, we can guess that somebody was alive during that flight and can not assume that nobody survived the putative crash. IF it is not true that nobody survived then it is not not true that nobody knows where the plane is.
3. Knowledge does not imply experience. If the plane was hijacked, it is likely that the planner survived even f the pilots did not. So nobody may have survived but not nobody may know what happened.
4. Using diagramming to parse your second sentence, I come up with “wouldn’t none of the people looking for (the plane) announce (the plane) and end this expensive search? Do you mean if somebody “looking for the plane” knows wouldn’t they say so? I guess, bit what is someone NOT looking for the plane knows where it is?
Roger
Come on. Hogwash? Is that what bunnies wash on?
C’mon, Charlie, the world wants good-tasting Tuna, not Tuna with good taste.
Maybe we’ll find out where the plane is when someone smashes it into a building. I hope not, but can’t rule anything out at this point.