Another Missing Plane

Saturday 21st May

Incredibly we have another plane going missing, although this one had definitely crashed into the Mediterranean Sea.  We still haven’t found the Malaysian plane which went missing on a routine flight in South East Asia and may have ended up somewhere in the huge expanses of the Southern Indian Ocean; nobody knows for sure what happened to it because they still haven’t found the black box, and may never do so.  The most likely scenario is some sort of suicide by the pilot, a terrible possibility.  We put our faith into pilots with hardly a thought, especially that they might want to kill us all and themselves in some sort of glorious suicide.  But that is almost exactly what happened to the German plane which crashed into the French Alps last year.  And how do you possibly ensure that that won’t happen, unless we rely completely on computers to fly and land the plane, and somehow I just don’t have enough faith in computers for that yet.

Then there was the plane shot down over the Ukraine, probably, but again almost impossible to prove, by either the Russians or Russian supporting Militia fighting to break away from the Ukraine.  At least flight paths have been re-routed and you are now unlikely to be shot down over a war-zone, but it seems that air travel is facing new threats.

The plane flying from Paris to Cairo may have been brought down by some sort of terrorist action, and the most likely scenario is either a baggage handler or some other person with access to the plane may have planted a bomb on board.   So, how do you guard against that?  All the security measures in the World cannot ever stop a determined individual, and the present Security restrictions are enforced rigorously, but I am sure even here it might be possible to get a small device on board.  Once upon a time it was plane malfunctions we had to worry about, but increasingly now it is crazy individuals who obviously have no qualms about killing hundreds of people.  And still we will all continue to fly and hope that this time it isn’t our plane which goes missing.