Missing Malaysia Airlines plane: how a routine flight became a mystery (First Long Form Article)
The night sky was clear above the clouds, and the last glimmer of a setting half-moon had faded when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, cruising at 10,000 metres over the Gulf of Thailand, approached the border between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace on its usual route to Beijing. What happened next should have been routine for a twice-daily milk run between two of Asia’s most important cities. Air traffic controllers outside Kuala Lumpur usually hand the jet off to their counterparts in Ho Chi Minh City as the flight cruises northeast toward the Chinese capital.
But in those early hours of March 8, pilots flying nearby heard an unusual crescendo of chatter on the radio frequencies used by radar control in Vietnam and Malaysia. Air traffic personnel in both countries were trying and failing to reach the plane.
‘‘Any stations in contact with Malaysian 370, please relay.’’
Vietnamese and Malaysian controllers asked one aircraft after another to radio the jet. Pilots listened as one plane after another tried and heard only static.
‘‘Malaysian 370, this is Malaysian 88.’’
‘‘Malaysian 370, this is Malaysian 52.’’
People who heard the calls, describing them for the first time, said they were calm, even laconic. The pilots trying to reach the airliner had no reason to believe it had suffered anything more than an ordinary radio malfunction. But those initial attempts to find a plane in the skies would soon evolve into an urgent multinational search operation spanning land and sea in two hemispheres. They signalled the start of what has become perhaps the most perplexing case in the history of modern aviation - one that investigators say may take years to solve, or could remain a mystery forever.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/missing-malaysia-airlines-plane-how-a-routine-flight-became-a-mystery-20140324-hvm5p.html#ixzz2wqLI0jxV
A good read. Notably, this weekend passed the two week mark. The has been a marked change in the coverage. On twitter, for example, it has been days since there was any new information. Only occasional mentions of possible debris, none yet confirmed to be from MH370, break up what is now nothing more than strings of ridiculous conspiracy theories. Malaysian Airlines has been paid by their insurers for the lost plane and this article caps the beginning of the end of this tragedy as a news story. It is sad, but it seems that the global interest in the story is slowly starting to fade.
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