Hishammuddin Hussein, Malaysian Minister for Education. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
This latest debacle has become just par for the course in terms of the mismanagement of this investigation. It is clear that the Malaysians are idiots and that any attempt on their part to interpret the Inmarsat data for the public is as doomed as their investigation into the disappearance of the Boeing Triple Seven.
The plane is gone without a trace. Not a seat cushion, a plastic cup or a laminated baggage tag, attributable to the missing flight has been retrieved from the multiple search sites in the south Indian Ocean despite assurances from Malaysia and the Australians (who are looking like as big a bunch of losers as the Malaysians right about now) that the "data" was being constantly refined and that there were countless trained pairs of eyes aboard ships, choppers, P3s, New Zealand Air Force planes...the list of resources goes on and on. All of the ELTs apparently failed on this aircraft and there was no infrared satellite event that would have indicated a crash. The supposed experts laughed when the Chinese reported pings from the black boxes but did not doubt the results from their own pinger locater despite the fact that they were not the correct frequency for black box transmissions but were the correct frequency for fishing net locators used by south Indian Ocean fishermen. One might ask why no one in Malaysia or Australia knew about these pingers on these fishing nets...presumably no one in either country knows fuck all about fishing or perhaps they're all too busy being all too important to concern themselves with such mundane matters. In any case the plane is still gone without a trace; the investigation is hopelessly botched, the families are pissed and the Bluefin 21 (the wrong equipment for a search of the deepest parts of the south Indian Ocean) is not available after the end of this week. The Aussies believe the search will be delayed until perhaps August!
What do we know for certain in all this mess? We know that grief in any language looks and sounds the same. We also know that government officials, no matter what country they represent are all a bunch of entitled, condescending, emotionally retarded nut jobs that should not be trusted with the very simplest of tasks (folding laundry in a locked psychiatric ward comes readily to mind). We know that investigations of this scale are perhaps best conducted by impartial, private sector companies less concerned with how things look and more concerned with how things really are. What is not so clear, to my mind at least is why a company like Boeing with its reputation is selling Triple Sevens to Banana Republics incapable of tracking, servicing, flying or maintaining them let alone conducting an investigation when (notice I did not say if) something goes terribly wrong and dozens if not hundreds of souls are lost. Selling a Triple Seven to Malaysia seems to me as irresponsible as giving a BMW to a two year-old and instructing him to "have fun". To date, I do not know of a plane with training wheels but if Boeing makes one, I would recommend they sell it to Malaysia!
More about the big boy toys in my next post.......