The debris found on Reunion Island is from Flight 370
It is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you, an international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion is indeed from MH370,” Prime Minister Najib Razak said at a brief press conference. “We now have physical evidence that … Flight MH370 tragically ended in the Southern Indian Ocean.”
You can be sure that more people will be scouring the beaches of islands between Africa and the suspected crash site, and beyond.
Elsewhere I read that in actuality debris from the plane has been washing ashore on the island for months, they just didn’t recognize it for what it was.
G Joubert:
I’m not sure about that. Other pieces of debris that were taken for examination have not been determined to have been from the plane. Only that one piece so far, the flaperon.
However, they don’t know when the flaperon washed ashore. It could have been there for a while. They are analyzing the barnacles on it to try to determine something about that.
at least we know its not emelia earharts..
So?
So what?
Oh, I guess families will now have “closure”.
Sorry to be hard-hearted about it, but we have some actual very bad stuff happening on the planet, which will render the deaths of Flight 370 utterly trivial in comparison..
Frog:
No, the families do not now have “closure.” They still have no idea what happened to the plane, or where it is, or whether any molecule of their loved ones will ever be recovered.
And no, it’s not either/or. One doesn’t ignore smaller disasters and tragedies because of larger ones, which also are not ignored. Stalin was evil, but he made a good point about human nature when he said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
Is an international aviation mystery not enough for you? And the tragic and sudden and violent deaths of 239 people, most of them in the prime of life? How about the possibility of a deliberate crash, something like the Germanwings crash? What is your threshold for “important enough to pay some attention to”? This certainly meets mine.
It happened one year and seven months ago.
The families of the passengers have no idea what happened? The plane went down is what happened. Where? In the Indian ocean. Why does a GPS point matter?
How much money should be spent? Millions have already been spent on searches, fruitlessly. The flaperon washes ashore more than a year later, and its watery path will be tracked back? And then?
Barnacle DNA analysis of the flaperon? We have oceanographic maps of the distribution of barnacle species? Thank goodness. But I thought barnacle zygotes floated around in currents until they hooked onto something. So I guess barnacle analysis will reduce the re-search area to no more than a thousand square miles or so.
As to recovering “any molecule” of a loved one long deceased….? No molecules of dozens that have died on Everest have been recovered either. It happens. Going on in the MidEast even today. The good thing is that molecules such as H2O recirculate infinitely. I might have today imbibed some water molecules previously resident in Julius Caesar.
Frog:
The families have no idea whether the plane went down accidentally or whether it was an act of terrorism.
They have no idea where it went down, either, except in the most general of senses. Until this plane part was found, many of them believed the plane hadn’t gone down at all in the sense of crashing, but that their loved ones were instead being held hostage somewhere. They didn’t know whether they had suffered much or whether it was quick, or whether (if they thought they were alive somewhere) they were still suffering.
That’s one of the reasons they want to recover some part of the bodies. In addition, people the world over generally want to bury bodies the bodies of their loved ones and give them the respect of some sort of ceremony, marker, and known final resting place.
If you don’t already understand that, there is nothing I can say to make you understand what makes human beings tick.
The fact that some of the people who died on Mt. Everest haven’t been recovered is about as irrelevant as it can be. First of all, they willingly did a very risky thing that carries a fairly high possibility of death. Secondly, for most of them, their families know at least approximately (and sometimes in more detail than that) what happened to them and approximately where their bodies are resting. In addition, the fact that other people’s bodies have never been recovered is not an argument that these people don’t matter. There are plenty of tragedies and sorrows in the world; these are among them.
If you travel to New England, in places on the ocean where there is a lot of commercial fishing, you will see statues that are monuments to fisherman lost at sea. It is considered a great tragedy by the families of those lost. That does not take away from this tragedy.
As far as your objection to the expense of the search, that is something that is being done in part to learn as much as possible about the crash itself, which can give information about that type of plane and its vulnerabilities, or whether it was some sort of purposeful sabotage. That can’t be learned without finding the plane It is being done for the families, but also for commencial and financial and safety reasons.
Personally, I don’t think the plane will ever be found. But this news of the finding of the flaperon is big news for anyone who follows the story, because it at least indicates that the plane went down in the Indian Ocean. Before this, no one was sure.
Neo,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mh370/11777921/MH370-Plane-seat-found-washed-up-on-Reunion-Island-three-months-ago.html
Without data, it’s not feasible to peal this onion.
Also, one of the reasons why people advocated for US Navy to shoot and kill pirates is because of similar things like this.
Out on the sea, there are no reporters nor any easy to come by evidence, of what really happened.