I'd like to say I'm no conspiracy theorist, but the longer there's no hard evidence -- ANY evidence -- of what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the more likely it is that I'll succumb.
I can't help it; nature abhors a vacuum, and the longer we go without anything more substantial than a couple of rumored oil slicks somewhere west of Honolulu, my cluttered brain just naturally drifts to the fantastic and the absurd ...
... like this morning, when I saw a report that some smartphones of Malaysia 370 passengers are still active. What's that mean, exactly, I'm not sure, but I had visions of a 777 jumbo jet disappearing into a cloud bank, taking a quick left, flying low across the crest of the Himalayas, and landing at some abandoned military airport in Afghanistan.
And that, er, ah, abandoned military airport has to have places for the passengers to recharge their smartphones, right? And changes of clothes so the passengers can assume new identities, uh, and Iranian intelligence agencies are involved, yeah, and somehow some of the passengers' families are in on the con, and ...
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Then I had another thought: who, by now, has secured the movie rights to this tale?
At this stage I almost don't WANT a plausible explanation for what actually happened -- with heartfelt apologies to the 227 passengers and 12 crew members aboard the missing jet, as well as to their families who are frantic and grasping to any scrap of hope they can find ...
... like those reportedly active smartphones.
Damn those smartphones! Now that's got me going again.
A widebody jumbo passenger jet takes off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, en-route to Beijing, China, at 12:41 a.m. local time Saturday. Less than an hour later the Boeing 777-200ER disappears, POOF! No radio distress call, nothing ... at least nothing that we're being told (there I go again).
That's an interesting region: Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, China. It's not exactly a sleepy backwater. I would think military air-defense radars from several countries would have that airliner lit up like a Christmas tree. So what the heck happened? As of now we're getting a lot of shoulder-shrugs.
I'm sure we'll eventually get a logical explanation of what happened to that flight, with evidence to back it up. They'll probably find the wreckage about 30 seconds after I post this blog.
If not, though, those movie rights will remain a hot property.
John Keller | Editor
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
