It’s been almost two weeks and we still don’t know what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Seemingly the only thing larger than the search area is the number of theories about the airliner’s fate.
The Boeing 777 carrying 239 people disappeared March 8 above the Gulf of Thailand en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.
Malaysian authorities have not ruled out any possible explanation for what happened to the jet, but have said the evidence so far suggests it was deliberately turned back across Malaysia to the Strait of Malacca, with its communications systems disabled. They are unsure what happened next.
Police are considering the possibility of hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or anyone else on board.
One of the more outlandish theories is that the plane was hijacked by terrorists who are now preparing it for use in a major terrorist attack. I doubt that airliner could show up in anybody’s air space now without attracting more attention than even the most-suicidal terrorist wants.
I also feel safe in saying that the plane is not on the moon as one British tabloid reported on its front page last Sunday.
On Thursday, a freighter was searching rough seas in one of the remotest places on Earth after satellite images detected possible pieces from the missing plane in the southern Indian Ocean.
In what officials called the “best lead” of the nearly two-week-old mystery, a satellite detected two objects floating about 1,000 miles off the coast of Australia and halfway to the islands of the Antarctic.
The hunt has encountered false leads before. Oil slicks that were seen did not contain jet fuel. A yellow object thought to be from the plane turned out to be sea trash. Chinese satellite images showed possible debris, but nothing was found.
But this is the first time that possible objects have been spotted since the search area was expanded into two corridors, one stretching from northern Thailand into Central Asia and the other from the Strait of Malacca to the southern Indian Ocean.
However, even if the debris turns out to be from Flight 370, questions are likely to remain, as Jeff Wise wrote on the website Slate. “Who exactly redirected the flight? How did they do it? What was their motive? Answers could remain elusive for years and indeed may never emerge.”
Investigators’ best hope of finding out what happened is to locate the so-called black box, presuming it can be removed from such rough and remote ocean. In reality, the “box” is two devices — both colored orange — the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
The story has drawn frequent comparisons to the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 in an Atlantic Ocean storm. Debris from that flight was located one day after the crash. But it took two years to find and recover the black box. Then another year went by before the findings were released.
The most-used phrase in American television coverage of Flight 370’s disappearance has to be “We don’t know.” But that hasn’t prevented the cable news networks — particularly CNN — from talking about it around the clock.
Ratings-challenged CNN has been among the biggest beneficiaries of public interest in the story. Since CNN began nearly wall-to-wall coverage, its prime-time ratings have jumped 68 percent over the year’s average, even more among younger viewers that advertisers are keen to reach, the Nielsen company said. Twice last week, Anderson Cooper’s prime-time show more than doubled its typical audience.
Rival Fox News, which got off to a slow start before ramping up its coverage of the plane’s disappearance, topped all cable networks in prime-time ratings last week. Fox even found time to discuss whether CNN is covering it too much.
A few days ago, I went home for lunch and turned on the lovely and talented Brooke Baldwin’s CNN show. (I often watched her show during my medical leave.)
Baldwin began her show by saying, “We’re going to talk about Flight 370 for the next two hours.”
I turned off the television and decided that my time would be better spent taking a nap.
Yes, CNN is talking about Flight 370 too much. But given the ratings, who can blame them?
• Contact Charles Corder at 581-7241 or ccorder@gwcommonwealth.com.
