Good morning and/or good afternoon Bonnyville! It's been a rough and wild couple of weeks for a lot of people in this region following the truly eye opening scenes in Europe, and while those issues obviously remain high on everybody's radar, I'm going to divert your attention to an even more mind boggling incident that is unraveling in Asia at the moment surrounding a certain Malaysian Airlines plane that has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth.
After departing from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at roughly 9:41 a.m. Friday morning, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was expected to arrive in Beijing less than six hours later, but it didn't.
Why the plane carrying 227 passengers, including two Canadians, didn't arrive in Beijing as scheduled is right now a mystery to us all.
Reports emanating from Asia on Sunday evening told us air traffic control lost contact with the airliner roughly an hour after take off. They also told us that they believe the plane had diverted from its original course and was heading back to Malaysia before it vanished. No distress signal or message was sent out by the pilot, which begs the question – what really happened?
In the midst of a crisis, I know checking in with air traffic control may be the furthest thing from anybody's mind, but, and correct me if I'm wrong, I was under the impression that planes were in constant contact with people on the ground, so if something was happening, surely some kind of message would have been passed on.
If, as reports seem to suggest, the plane had turned back, diverting from its original course, why didn't anybody on the ground reach out to the aircraft to find out what was going on. Who knows what happened, or even how long the aircraft had been travelling off course, but in the wake of 9/11, I would have thought that keeping track of planes and ensuring they stay on course would be something of a priority, if only for security reasons.
As of now, there hasn't been any wreckage found, but if we're to believe what we read, work continues around the clock as the necessary authorities search waters to the east of Malaysia in the South China Sea, and in the Straits of Malacca, along Malaysia's west coast for any signs of a downed plane.
There were reports of debris found roughly 50 miles off the coast of the Vietnamese island of Tho Chu, but these have not been confirmed.
Authorities have neither confirmed nor denied foul play, after it was revealed two of the passengers had used stolen passports to get on the plane. In danger of repeating myself, but how on earth this can happen in today's day and age of all-seeing and all-hearing security is beyond me.
To be frank, this whole incident leaves me totally dumbfounded. With planes tracked as heavily as they are, doesn't it seem odd that nobody can give any information on when or where the plane went missing, or even where the remnants of the airliner rest today.
This isn't a TV show, this isn't LOST, and planes don't just disappear without explanation.
We're at least three days on from the initial reports of this plane going missing. I can assure you investigating officers, the plane is not in the air, you know roughly where contact was lost, it's time you do your job and locate this aircraft so that hundreds of grieving families and relatives can have some closure.
