Many in the media are calling the disappearance of Malaysia Airline Flight 370 the greatest aviation mystery in history.
Today’s 24-7 media continually overstates, over covers and creates news to keep a story alive and elevate its significance in history.
Vintage media people, of my generation, would think twice before defining its place in history, weighing its mysterious disappearance with that of Amelia Earhart and other events.
An End Stool inquiry of several people, mid-30s and younger, had little recognition of Earhart. These are peers of today’s media that has concentrated on the search, conflicting theories and lack of evidence.
Today it is not acceptable to believe something can simply disappear or has no explanation. It has to be a conspiracy or some other nefarious act.
A plane cannot just drop out of the sky with no trace.
End Stool advisor John Smith, two days into the search for the missing plane, said it “was another victim of the Bermuda Triangle.”
The Bermuda Triangle has no official verification, but is a triangle defined by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico.
It was named years after five US Navy Avenger torpedo bombers disappeared Dec. 5, 1945 killing the 14 people on board. A rescue flight also crashed killing the 13 crew on board. Since then several boats and aircraft have disappeared adding to the legend.
“It just moved to another area,” Smith said.
Smith’s theory is as plausible as those being espoused in the news by aviation and safety experts, to the mechanic inflating tires on the Boeing B-777 that disappeared March 8 with 239 passengers and crew north of Kuala Lumpur.
(The Malaysian government Monday announced, analysis of data indicates the plane went down in a remote corner of the Indian Ocean. Search continues for physical evidence of the plane.)
Earhart disappeared years before I was born, but her legacy was still being written in history. Earhart’s Lockheed Electra disappeared July 2, 1937 trying to be the first woman to fly solo around the world.
Technology has made news coverage visual and more accessible than in Earhart’s 1930s decade. There was no worldwide network of instantaneous news, nor eyes and ears in the sky.
With the U.S. entering WWII in 1942, one unsubstantiated story was Earhart’s plane disappeared during a reconnaissance mission on the Japanese who were invading countries and islands.
There were as many theories about what happened to her plane as in the current air mystery.
One is that the plane went down 100 miles off Howland Island – halfway between Hawaii and Australia – when it ran out of gas, crashed and sank in the Pacific.
Another is Earhart went down on Gardner Island, in the western Pacific, surviving for some time before dying of starvation.
Creators of those theories dispute each other’s scenario. “All kinds of things can happen to an airplane,” one theorist said of Flight 370.
Even disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle?