Tag Archives: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Plane Disappearance Creates Titanic Parallels?

 MrAurum(Wikimedia Commons)
MrAurum(Wikimedia Commons)

When Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar in 2014, it has sparked a lot of analysis and like Titanic some mythology as well. Today there is some hope that recent finds may lead to exactly what happened to that flight. However speculation of all kinds about what happened has filled social media and even some news reports. Julie Williams, a Titanic historian at Stamford University and a Titanic survivor descendant, told the Christian Science Monitor that a meme compared the missing flight to Gilligan’s Island. She noted that her great-uncle Albert Caldwell could buy Titanic postcards mourning the sinking as soon as he disembarked Carpathia. The desire to solve tragedies like Titanic or the missing airliner often fuels people to devise ways to solve it because it obsesses us. We cannot fathom, says William Nesbitt, a professor of English and chair of the department of humanities at Beacon College, how it can disappear and never reappear.

And that is what happened with Titanic. When it sank, many could not believe it not only went down but would never be seen again. The media of the day played up every angle, even if it was wrong, which added to a lot of confusion about what happened aboard the ship. It would take not only wading through two hearings and lots of detective work by historical writers to ferret out what happened from the myths that were spread. Just like today with social media, false and bad information traveled fast. So the parallels are not that far apart and closer than most want to admit.

Source: Is the MH370 disappearance the Titanic of modern times? (Christian Science Monitor,2 Nov 2016)

Bob Ballard Weighs In On Missing Passenger Jet

Photo:Wikipedia
Photo:Wikipedia

Update 5 April 2014-The Irish Times reported on 21 Mar 2014 Bob Ballard’s additional comments while he was in Belfast to speak. The newspaper reports:

Dr Ballard also worked for 30 years with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. It located the Air France Flight 447 plane which crashed in the Atlantic in 2009 with the loss of 228 passengers and crew. “When you have lost something the first question that is asked is where did you lose it? You can’t do anything until you can narrow the search and right now the search area is getting bigger not smaller,” he said.

The possible location appeared to be “changing oceans” from day to day, he added. What was vital was to localise the search area and to do that before the batteries on the craft’s black boxes ran out of power. “They have 30 days from when the plane went down. That’s when the clock started,” he said. Dr Ballard, who delivered a lecture at the Titanic centre yesterday evening, agreed that there were almost elements of the Mary Celeste mystery to the case.

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Bob Ballard, who co-founded Titanic in 1985, was recently asked about finding debris from the missing jetliner. According to turnto10.com he opined:

“If you know anything about the circulation of the current this time of year in that area, it’s counterclockwise. And so it makes sense that the debris would be to the east and south of the impact site,” Ballard said.

The speculation now is that the plane did not crash but was hijacked.

Source: Titanic Discoverer Weighs In On Missing Jetliner(13 Mar 2014, turnto10.com)