More clues, more speculation

There are now at least ten theories in circulation about what actually happened to Malaysian Air flight 370.

It isn’t just the media – there are thousands of highly technical posts on professional pilot blogs doing the exact same thing. Pilots have some skin in this game.

And the speculation has two things in common: frustration and impatience.

The unspoken message behind all the frustration and impatience is, how can it be that we don’t have the technology to more accurately track a giant passenger jet?

Now, I know we’re not getting all the information because this involves military radar, and what it can and can’t see, and the last thing a country wants to reveal is that its radar defense is porous enough for a giant aircraft to fly on for hours undetected.

Yet whatever information they’re withholding, even that, evidently, wasn’t enough, because if it was, one of those search teams would have serendipitously “stumbled” onto the evidence long before now, right?

Keep in mind the Washington Post has just revealed that the NSA is now able to record every single phone conversation taking place in an entire foreign country and store them for instant playback if needed.

So wouldn’t it also be possible to do that with airplane transmissions – which are far fewer? We might not want to disclose that we’re doing it, but is it plausible that in fact we’ve chosen not to?

Because even if we’re spooked by all the surveillance going on, I think we find it hard to accept that a plane the size of a 777 can veer off course and just go dark?
What’s more outrageous in a case like this? That we track too much, or too little?

Read more:
Australia checking 2 objects in search for plane