The search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 has made some headway as Malaysian officials identified one of the passengers travelling with a stolen passport. The officials said that their probe was focused on the stolen passports and they were probing the issue from a hijack and sabotage angle. The officials are still trying to identify the second individual. There are various statements and media releases but the fact remains that the plane is not yet traceable and has mysteriously vanished. The lack of any pro-active measures of our government only furthers the belief that we do not have what it takes to be an assertive regional power and grants substance to the suspicion that, additionally, we may be incompetent in the areas of surveillance, search and rescue compared to several other smaller nations in this part of the world. With five Indian people on board of the missing plane, our apathetic attitude is disgusting when one considers how the Government of India recently went hammer and tongs at a superpower merely to protect a certain high-ranking government official from a well-deserved prison sentence. Obviously, the lives of five ordinary Indians and the anxiety of their families does not mean as much for them. What a shame.
A Mumbai couple, Vinod Kolekar and Chetana, along with their son, Swanand, were on board the missing Malaysian Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing to visit their older son, Sanved, who is doing post-doctoral studies in the Chinese capital. Kranti Shirsath, 44, from Pune, one of the five Indians on board, was on her way to meet her husband in North Korea. The Kolekars, residing at Yoginagar in Borivali West, left for Beijing on Friday night after a stopover in Kuala Lumpur. Swanand, 23, had completed his engineering degree and was planning to do M.Tech. Vinod, 59, retired as engineer and is now a consultant. His wife, 55, took voluntary retirement from the laboratory of a major hospital in Mumbai. It is very exciting to see the responses of the Indian authorities on the situation. Why the government of India is playing a rule game in this crucial time? Though we have lost only a few lives from our country, it is very responsible act of the government to inform the public what steps have been taken so far to bring back those victims. The Indian Government should immediately dispatch its team to join the operation that has been going on for the cause of those Indian lives. If it is possible then Indian satellite should be connected in search operation. There is no need to monitor the flights by human intervention continuously. The data produced need to be analysed only in case of problems. This can be done by the Airlines to decentralise the effort.
The fact that no debri has been found so far leads to the guesswork that there is no rubble at all. For all we know, the plane has been hijacked and it’s transponder is switched off and the plane has been taken to an unknown destination. The fate of the passengers are not known and the plane maybe used for some other purpose, probably for crime, and much later we will come to know the fate of the plane and it’s passengers. It could be a scene straight out of science fiction, in an era where mobile phones and Facebook postings of private individuals are accurately tracked and archived; it is too difficult to conceive that designs for knowing movements of aircrafts have not been unified by its manufacturer. Are business interests of aircraft manufacturers more important than lives of passengers of ill-fated flights? US intelligence agencies and Boeing manufacturers definitely owe an explanation to the world’s citizens. This scheme should not cost much if the aircraft manufacturers provided the transmitters connected to the black box which receives all the vital parameters continuously in the planes .We are simply living with the old concept of sealed black box in the modern world where every plane has satellite linked phones.
It’s astonishing to note that even after 48 hours of losing contact with the plane; no agency is able to locate the possible crash site! With so many satellites and spying mechanisms and technology to the fore, isn’t there one method in the world to detect this kind of accident?
God help all the lives that are lost and all families grieving throughout the world.
