Disappearing act

When Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared with 239 passengers on board one week ago today, it wasn’t like losing your car keys. We’re talking about a wingspan of 199 ft. 11 in., a total length of 209 ft. 1 in., and a maximum height of 60 ft. 9 in., composed almost entirely of metal. To put things in perspective, the average African elephant has a body length of 29 ft., and a height of 13 ft. That’s like saying a chunk of metal 7 elephants long and 5 elephants high just vanished.

The plane was last detected in the early morning of March 8, a little over an hour after it departed from Kuala Lumpur. It was heading northeast over the Gulf of Thailand bound for Beijing. Then, suddenly and without warning, the plane vanished. The plot thickened when it was discovered that at least two of the 239 passengers were travelling under stolen passports. Immediately, concerns of foul play and terrorism sprang to mind, adding fuel to the fire of the raging mystery. Fears were somewhat assuaged as Malaysian police and Interpol identified the identity thieves as having no known terrorist ties. It is now believed that they were merely seeking to migrate to Germany. Nevertheless, how did the two manage to slip past security in the first place? The passports they were using had been reported stolen over one year prior to their use. Was there no red flag that cropped up? Indeed, didn’t the fact that the two used Austrian and Italian documents arouse suspicion at first glance?

A major lead is supposed to have been tracked by a Chinese satellite in “suspected floating objects” found in the South China Sea about 140 miles from the flight’s last radar contact. One expert said that the debris is “where it’s supposed to be.” On the other hand, another expert said that the size of the pieces “don’t conform to anything that’s on the plane.” But whether this clue will lead to much needed closure or will amount to another frustrating red herring (as of this writing, the latter seems to be the case), the question the world wants answered is: How can eight countries, using more than 24 vessels and nine aircraft over a week of searching, fail to locate a jumbo jet in shallow waters?

The problem is that they may have been looking in the wrong place. Technical experts use sonar and hydrography to retrace an aircraft’s final movements before an accident, yet even then it’s difficult work, often likened to finding a needle in a haystack. The task shifts from difficult to impossible, however, when they’re searching in the wrong place.

Parallels have been drawn to the last large commercial flight disappearance — the 2009 loss of Air France flight 447. Travelling over the Atlantic from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, flight 447 hit a heavy thunderstorm and vanished suddenly. Wreckage from the plane, which plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, was discovered floating 600 miles from land several days later but the hows and whys of the mystery weren’t answered until after two years when divers retrieved the jet’s black boxes from the ocean floor. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take as long for the tortured families of those missing aboard flight MH370 to receive accurate information and hopefully, much needed closure.

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Have you heard about crowdfunding? It is defined as “the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their money, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.” Here’s how it works. Suppose I’m a musician. I have a demo cd but I don’t have the money to rent a studio and produce a full length album. I don’t want to go to a record company because they’ll take a huge chunk of my profits and intellectual property rights so I go to one of the many sites available and open an account. I compute how much it will cost to get my cd out onto the market. I then create a short video introducing myself and my music. I upload some of my demo songs for people to listen to. I appeal to the public to donate money to my cause and monitor the site from day to day to check on progress. Suppose I want to raise P200,000. I ask people to “pledge” a minimum of P50. But what’s in it for those who contribute? Typically, the higher the pledge, the better the “rewards.” So maybe for P150 you get a digital copy of my cd; at P300 you get a physical copy of my cd; at P1000 you get a special mention in the booklet insert of the cd plus all the rewards available to previous tiers…. And so on.

For any skeptics who doubt that such massive scale funding is possible, here are some statistics taken from a popular crowdfunding website called “Kickstarter”: In 2013, 3 million people pledged $480 million to Kickstarter projects. That’s $1,315,520 pledged a day or $913 a minute. The 3 million people came from 214 countries and territories and all seven continents (yes, even Antarctica). 19,911 projects were successfully funded. Such projects included a human-powered helicopter, a photo exhibit on the Berlin Wall (literally on the wall), and an independent movie theater was kept from going out of business.  More recently, 30,000 people donated an average of $64 to fund a movie adaptation of the popular TV show Veronica Mars.

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Today in history: â€œBeware the ides of March” was the prophecy allegedly given by a seer to Julius Caesar. Immortalized in a Shakespearian play, Caesar was on his way to the Senate on March 15 when he saw the seer and jokingly commented “The ides of March have come (meaning to say that the prophecy had not been fulfilled), to which the seer replied “Aye, Caesar, but not gone.” He was assassinated in 44 BC. This was a turning point in Roman history, marking the transition from an authoritarian empire to a democratic republic.

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 â€œPeace is the way, not the destination.”                                                                                             â€“ Shannon L. Alder

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