Mysterious Disappearance of MH370

Meghna Mukherjee

Class-12  Section-C

All the children were busy playing in the park. One among them, a little boy of six fell down and hurt his knee. The man sitting in the bench near by helped him with his wound and asked “Where is your mother little boy?”

The brightly lit face of the boy suddenly darkened and all he could manage to say with trembling lips was that “I don’t know.” Isn't it strange that a son does not know where his mother is? True indeed, this particular boy had no idea about where his mother was and in what condition. A feeling of uncertainty resided in his little heart which perhaps he will have to carry on through out his life as long as he will live. He was a victim of the mysterious disappearance of MH370 which had taken away his mother from him.

The world has been recently very disturbed by the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 on 8^th March, 2014. It was a scheduled international passenger flight which was traveling from Kuala Lumpur International to Beijing Capital International Airport. It carried 12 crew members and 227 passengers from 15 nations and regions, the majority of passengers being Chinese citizens. On that day, contact with the aircraft was lost and the last known position on 8^th March at 01:21 local time was 6^o55’N, 103^o34’E, corresponding to the navigational way point in the Gulf of Thailand. The crew was expected to contact air traffic control in Hi Chi Min city as the aircraft passed into Vietnamese airspace just north of the point where contact was lost. The captain of another aircraft attempted to reach the crew of Flight 370 just after 1.30 a.m. to relay Vietnamese Air Traffic control’s request for the crew to contact it; the captain said he was able to establish contact, and just heard “mumbling” and static. However, the Malaysian Airlines issued a media statement at 07.24, one hour after the scheduled arrival of the flight at Beijing, stating that contact with the flight had been lost by Malaysian ATC at 02.40. MAS stated that the government had initiated search and rescue operations. Neither the crew, nor the aircraft’s onboard communication systems relayed a distressed signal, indication of bad weather or technical problems before the aircraft vanished from radar screens. The last words heard were those of the co-pilot saying, “All right, good night.”

The police had earlier said they were investigating whether any passengers or crew on the plane had personal or psychological problems that might explain its disappearance, along with the possibility of a hijack or mechanical failure. On 11^th March, a very close inspection of the video footage taken at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport was done, studying the behavioral pattern of all the passengers. A huge search operation for the plane was mostly focused on the shallow waters of the Gulf of Thailand off Malaysia’s east coast, although the Strait of Malacca has been included since the second day of the search. Navy ships, military aircraft, helicopters, coastguard and civilian vessels from 10 nations crisscrossed seas off both coasts of Malaysia without success. The fact that at least two passengers on board had used stolen passports has raised suspicions of foul play. But Southeast Asia is also known as a hub for false documents that are also used by smugglers and illegal migrants. On 13^th March, India sent warships surveillance aircraft to the Andaman Sea on request from Kuala Lumpur. The hunt was turning away from the eastern waters and towards the vastness of the Indian Ocean in the west. Four Indian ships, two of them with on board helicopters and three fixed wing-aircraft was deployed by the Indian Navy and the Indian coast guard from the Andaman and Nicobar command and from Arakonnam in Tamil Nadu. Information emerged that communication satellites picked up faint electronic pulses from Flight 370 after it was reported missing, but the signals gave no information about its fate. On 15^th March, the Malaysian government asked 13 countries including India, to initiate background checks on their nationals among the 227 passengers on board as the search for Beijing bound Boeing 777-200 ER, which disappeared off fro Kuala Lumpur early on March 8, which turned into a criminal investigation. ‘It is an almost unprecedented request they want us to share data from both civilian and military radars to help search for the plane’, a senior Indian official involved in processing request from the Malaysian government told the Telegraph. Aviation Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) was disabled just before the plane reached the east coast of Malaysia. A few minutes later, near the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese air traffic control, the aircraft’s transponder was switched off. This aroused suspicion in many and Mikael Robertsson, a founder of Flightradar 24, said the way communications were shut down, pointed to the involvement of some one with considerable knowledge of the air route. Mackey, a pilot and an aviation safety specialist in Florida told, “There is no where to land along the southern corridor if the intention was to crash the plane, then why fly it for seven hours.” This statement struck a chord in the ones who were suspecting pre-planned suicidal mission. The police even investigated the suicide theory, in case, the two pilots of the missing plane (Zaharie Ahmad Shah and co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid), attempted in doing so.

On 20^th March, the investigators saw a new light when satellite cameras spotted new objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean that might be parts of the Malaysian Airlines. The Australian Prime Minister, Abott told the parliament in Canberra, the capital after analyzing the images that “two possible objects related to the search have been identified.”

On 24^th March, Malaysia’s P.M. said that an analysis of satellite data had confirmed that the missing airliner went down in the southern Indian Ocean. The airline officials said that all 239 people on board were presumed dead. The announcement narrowed the search area but left many questions unanswered about why the plane had flown to such a remote part. P.M. Najib Razak said “This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.” Relatives of some Chinese passengers screamed, cried and collapsed on the ground after the Malaysian P.M.’s announcement. China immediately demanded that Malaysia share all information and evidence. On the morning of March 25, relatives and friends of many of the 153 Chinese passengers on Flight 370 Gathered outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing to demand the truth about the fate of the flight. The group shoved past the police officers and arrived on foot at the embassy. One diplomat came out to talk to the protestors, who presented the embassy with a scathing collective statement saying the families wanted an answer and would consider Malaysian officials to be ‘murderers’ if the families found that mis-steps have led to the deaths of their loved ones.

In spite of its havoc, the missing MH370 does not stand out alone because if we dive into the depths of time, we will find a series of mysterious disappearances of aircrafts that occurred in the past. Perhaps the most famous plane disappearances of all time as it involved aviation pioneer and the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Amelia Earhart. She disappeared during an attempt to fly around the world in 1937 along with her navigator Fred. In her last known transmission at 8.43 a.m. on July 2, Earhart broadcasted, “We are on the line 157,337. We will repeat this message. Wait.” But nothing more was heard from the American aviation pioneer. A massive multi-million search effort was abandoned and she was officially declared dead two years later in 1939. The Bermuda Triangle mystery rankled in the minds of the people for about almost two decades. Labeled as the ‘Devil’s Triangle’, this vast area of ocean that has imaginary points in Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico has seen scores of ships and planes vanishing without trace over the decades, in effect giving  the region an unshakeable notoriety. The instances of disappearance of planes have occurred mostly between 1940s and 1960s. These include two passenger jets in January and December in 1948, carrying 25 and 36 passengers on board in January 1949. In 1945, five American bombers were on training mission in the same area. But an hour and a half into their flight, they complained of disorientation and said they could not recognize the landmarks below, one of them even saying that their compasses had stopped working. No trace of the aircraft was found. What’s even weirder is that one of the planes sent to look for them also disappeared. Even today the mystery remains obscure and unsolved. Another example follows in 1947 when a British South American Airways flight named Star Dust with 11 people on board, vanished in the Andes Mountains during a routine flight from Buenos Aries to Santiago in Chile. Searches for the aircraft came up blank and conspiracy theories soon emerged. The air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris plunged into Atlantic Ocean in 2009, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board. It took five days for crews to even find wreckage and another three years to determine the crash’s cause and nearly two years before its “black boxes” were found. Most of the bodies were recovered in the months that followed, but 74 passengers were never found. It became known as the deadliest crash n the Air France’s history.

So, it is clear from the above examples that time and again the world has been inflicted with these mysterious disappearances. This leaves us in doubt once again, regarding the age old question of whether science is a ban or a boon. Had it only been a machine, then the problem could be given less importance. The fact that those machines contained hundreds of valuable lives makes it a serious issue. The reaction to these incidents might be short lived but yet there are things beyond what the media could show the world. The effects of these incidents on the near dear ones and on the relatives of the victims are long lasting. Especially when the fate of the plane remains unknown, even after a lot of investigation, a fear of uncertainty imbibes in the minds of the relatives of the victims. Fears regarding a lot of things, for example, in exactly what condition their relatives are, exactly what amount of pain they went through when they died haunts them through out their lives? Lots of questions remain unanswered and doubts unclear.  We talk of technological advancement, we use big and sophisticated terms like ‘globalization’ where a nation promises to assist another nation in times of distress yet when it comes to practical application  we start thinking politically safeguarding the interest of our own nation, thus ignoring the essence of humanity. Even at times like this the leaders of the nations reach the height of their selfish interests by trying to utilize the situation to their own advantage, blaming the entire thing on its rivals. Today we are living in the 21^st century and we call ourselves ‘modern’ and we like to think ourselves as the supreme creature in the living world. But where is this modernism and supremacy leading us to? Science has gifted us with problems, yet it is unable to provide us with solutions to these problems. I know it sounds like I am an old-fashioned, orthodox, techno phobic but I can’t help saying these because the faces of those grieved people in the newspapers torments me. The hundreds of victim of the disappearance of MH370 will never meet justice as the as the world will term it as an ‘accident’. The tears behind the havoc remain unseen. We can only hope that someday in the near future we will be able to avoid such situations.