It's been a year since that plane was lost time for a brief update (Mar 8 so 1 Year + 3 Days)
Happy 1 Year anniversary
Full Source:
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 One Year Later: A Reporter’s Notebook
Keith Bradsher has covered the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 since it happened one year ago this week. He has heard many theories about the missing plane, from the plausible to the extraterrestrial, and described some of them for Insider.
Many years ago, a longtime journalist for The New York Times had this advice for cub reporters in the business news section: always pursue the aviation stories, from corporate mergers to labor disputes to plane crashes. Writing and talking and obsessing about airlines and airplanes, he counseled, was the intellectual’s alternative to watching professional football.
While that may be unfair to pro football, the comment underlined a broader point: Aviation attracts an extraordinary number of very bright people who like to obsess about practically every detail. And that has seldom been more true than with the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
With the first anniversary of the crash on Sunday, the disappearance remains a subject of almost obsessive interest to a veritable cottage industry of aviation experts, telecommunications hobbyists, conspiracy theorists and many others. Some of the theories have the advantage of being fairly simple and straightforward, including that a rogue pilot might have diverted the flight. A report released on Sunday by the Malaysian government appeared to question that theory by noting that closed-circuit television footage showed that the comportment of the two pilots before Flight 370 matched their behavior before previous flights.
Other theories include that the plane could have undergone gradual decompression and the pilots might have become severely confused by hypoxia, or that an onboard fire might have damaged electrical equipment and disabled the flight crew and passengers with smoke while allowing the plane to keep flying.
Many of the other theories would require an ability to keep secrets that might prove difficult in an era of ubiquitous smartphone cameras, and are inconsistent with most experts’ understanding of the satellite transmissions from the aircraft. These theories include the possibility of a hijacking to Central Asia, the Mideast or Somalia, or the shooting down of the plane by some country’s military – a small coterie of Flight 370 aficionados continues to send out emails suggesting that the plane might have reached the British and American base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and was then secretly destroyed.
A more recent proposal suggested that Russian agents could have diverted the plane to a Russian space program base in Kazakhstan after taking the remarkable precaution of tampering with the automatic satellite transmissions so as to cover their tracks. Some of the oddest suggestions, which gave the whole subject a circus-like atmosphere that at times seemed disrespectful of the lives lost and the families of the missing, involved alien abduction or that a black hole might have swallowed the plane.
The Times had a very large team covering the aircraft’s disappearance. Tom Fuller flew from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, soon after the plane disappeared. Chris Buckley, Michael Forsythe and I followed him from Hong Kong and were joined by Kirk Semple, who happened to be in Southeast Asia already. A team of reporters and researchers in Beijing, led by Edward Wong, began tracking down the families of missing passengers, two-thirds of whom were Chinese. Two editors, Philip Pan and Herbert Buchsbaum, coordinated the team. Three experienced transportation writers — Matthew Wald in Washington, Jad Mouawad in New York and Nicola Clark in Paris — began looking at what could have gone wrong on the plane, while Michael Schmidt, Eric Schmitt and others began tapping law enforcement sources and others on the possibility of a hijacking. Editors and graphic artists in New York played large roles.
When the earliest hints emerged a year ago that Malaysia Airlines might have lost contact with one of its planes, editors in New York called me in Hong Kong. I immediately called the best-connected executive I knew in Asian aviation and told him about it, and his immediate response was that pilot suicide had to be strongly considered. Online chat forums for pilots had been morbidly full of discussions for weeks beforehand about the possible role of pilot suicide in a crash in Africa and the broader subject of suicide, he pointed out, and pilot suicide had been a recurrent problem in East Asia.
The executive had no personal stake in the outcome of an eventual investigation – aircraft manufacturers tend to prefer pilot suicide theories to the possibility of aircraft defects, but he had never worked for an aircraft manufacturer. As the weeks and months followed, nothing emerged that would disprove the theory. But it has never been possible to prove the theory either, particularly in the absence of a clear, strong motive beyond the captain’s marital difficulties and his possible concern about the difficulties of a political opposition leader in Malaysia.
Unless the plane is found someday, it may be hard ever to know what really happened. And even if the plane is found, the mystery may persist, as the voice recorder will have no more than the last two hours of sounds from the cockpit and evidence from the data recorder may be inconclusive.
http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/03/10/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-one-year-later-a-reporters-notebook/?_r=0