TWO MYSTERIES BEHIND FLIGHT 370

There is a mystery behind the mystery. A Boeing 777, perhaps one of the most sophisticated machines in the world disappears without a trace. Strange as it may seem, to explain my concern, I put this event in the same category as our nation’s infrastructure. We have the technology, the work force, the money, we have the raw material and the obvious need to fix it, but we do nothing. Let me explain why I think these things are the same.

My daughter listened to the news of the planes disappearance, turned to me and said, Dad, for a mere $100, I have a GPS in my car that tells me exactly where that car is located—any where in the entire world. How right she is! It is not technology that has just been developed. The GPS is nothing new; thirty years ago as a crewmember on a 54-foot long yacht, I had a GPS system that would tell me what direction to steer and sophisticated enough to correct my course for wind drift in a remote location between Belize and Mexico.

The hope of finding the black box fades but so does the hope of finding anything of value on its recordings. Computer memory is so cheap and available that desktop and even handheld computers can store gigabits of data yet the “black box” writes over what has been recorded every two hours rather than everything said from the time the flight crew entered the cockpit. The faults do not stop there.

The batteries in the “black box” manufacturer says they only last 30 days then are exhausted, yet we have the Tesla car that can travel great distances on batteries. They do not contain transmitters that can transmit for thousands of miles; as I understand they transmit 15 miles. I can understand if the boxes are submerged because of the nature of sonar. Even cell phones can be located if they are turned on and at least one of all those passengers would be expected to have his or her phone turned on, which begs the question, “How can it be that this same technology is not installed as an integral part of the plane?” All of these technologies are there. I know that Boeing has the engineering brainpower on their staff, the money they need but still they didn’t foresee the impact of these deficiencies; after all they have manufactured over a thousand triple sevens, not to mention the thousands and thousand of other planes that have been manufactured by all airline companies; if not Boeing how about all the other plane manufacturers.

None of this makes sense. What is the problem? Is it like the Unite States infrastructure? Those in charge know they need it but just do not want to spend the money like tight fisted pothole republicans in Arizona and Utah; this seems ludicrous when you consider the price of a triple seven, a big-bird or “Garuda”. Do we in 2014, have to depend on some rice farmer in a Sumatra village looking up to report an airplane where he has never seen a plane before? Anything seems possible if we look at what is happening in Washington DC where narrow-minded Republican politicians who what to cut taxes prevent infrastructure spending (all Democrats voted for it) or those who are so filled with hate they think they can hurt the President. To think that it cost too much or that they do not have the technology is crazy. To suggest they did not think of it equally ridiculous. There just seems to be no answer to either mystery—one mystery is why the plane disappeared the other mystery is why we can’t find it.  

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