It’s been a week since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared over-well, no one is quite sure where. Malaysian officials over the past several days expanded their search area to a mind-boggling 27,000 square miles, on both air and land, spanning both sides of the Malay Peninsula. Even with an international fleet of more than 42 ships and 39 aircraft on the scene, the case of this missing plane “is rapidly becoming one of the great mysteries of all time,” David Gallo, an experienced hunter of plane wreckage with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told us.
This was an avoidable mystery. There are eminently feasible ways to keep track of commercial aircraft, and it’s inexcusable that they are not being used. In fact, they aren’t operating even in the United States.
This country’s air traffic control system still relies largely on decades-old radar networks, which have a variety of limitations.
This isn’t a new lesson. In a feat of undersea exploration, Gallo led a team that recovered the black boxes from a downed Air France jet in 2011-two years after the plane had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on its way from Brazil to France. Now, three years later, the world is again at a loss. There’s simply no reason, given the available technology, that it should be just as possible for an airliner to vanish today over the Pacific as it was for Amelia Earhart nearly 80 years ago.
Editorial, Pages 82 on 03/16/2014