Picture from Daily Telegraph
There is masses of ill-informed speculation about the fate of Malaysian Airlines flight MH3670 which is, at the time of going to pixel, still missing.
Probably the most sensible words I’ve seen written on this story come from former Conservative Party minister, Norman Tebbit who said in the Daily Telegraph:
“In my civil flying days back in the 50s and 60s, the threat of hijacking was much more limited than it is today. We did not expect to face that difficulty. On the other hand, the possibility of catastrophic technical failure was much greater, as the Comet disasters proved.
Modern airliners are extraordinarily technically safe. The sophistication of design, both in terms of the electronics and of the developments in engine technology and structures, have transformed the life of aircraft and their vulnerability to failure. These days it is much less likely that an engine will fail. It is much less likely that an aircraft will accidentally descend into high ground, because it is protected by complex but reliable systems.
What happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH3670 flight we do not yet know. It is unlikely in the extreme that the aircraft suffered some catastrophic failure, as no debris has been found on its intended route. It now seems that it was under control but turned off its route and descended to a lower level. It is possible but very unlikely that one or both of the pilots became unhinged and that they were responsible. It is possible and more likely that one or more passengers – not necessarily those travelling on false passports – forced the pilots at gunpoint to do so and prevented them from making distress calls.
Sooner or later the remains of the aircraft will be found. Then the black boxes, the flight recorded and the cockpit voice recorded will give up their secrets and we shall find out what did happen.”
Mr Tebbit is correct, wild speculation about what has happened to the aircraft may fill the acres of dead space that need to be filled on 24/7 news channels, but it is only speculation. Only when and if the flight recorders are recovered will there be anything like concrete answers to how and why this plane disappeared.
Sometimes you have to wait until the fat lady has finished singing before you get all the answers and life very rarely conforms to the timings demanded of the 24/7 news cycle.
Whatever the outcome, having to depend on finding black boxes in 2014 seems archaic. There have been suggestions that data should be transmitted to the ground continuously so that this would not be necessary. The technology to allow this is becoming cheaper by the day. There has also been the suggestion that video recording in the cockpit should be standard and it is difficult, other than cost, to see any real argument against this.
All of this would be just as potentially useful in the event of pure accident but with the threat of terrorism now so much higher it also seems sensible to make at least some of that data transmission as difficult to turn off by anyone on the plane as possible so that at least the initial signs of something going wrong, and the nature of the problem, would be quickly available on the ground.