Levels of disaster

On one level, the whole sorry saga of Malaysian Flight 370 is faintly ridiculous. The ill-fated airliner flew into oblivion while Malaysian air traffic controllers simply couldn't be bothered to notice that an airliner was flying over their territory, drastically off course. On another level, the loss should be a wakeup call to aviation administrators to collect data from planes in flight in real time, something that is technologically feasible and long overdue.

On a third level, the level at which a 3-year-old kid in New Zealand, a child of one of the plane's passengers, is continually asking his mom, "When will daddy be coming home," it's heartbreaking.

The plane and its passengers are almost certainly lost. It would be good if they could locate the craft, or at least its black box, and then get to the business of honoring the memories of the dead. Hopefully, this will be an alert to responsible authorities to get their heads out of their back sides and start paying attention to airline safety in a world still large enough for an airliner to vanish.

© Michael Huggins, 2014. All rights reserved.