About that plane though
My friends in Australia want me to visit them again. They are Americans and have been living "down under" for about 8 years. I spent most of those years avoiding the topic of visiting because I was afraid of crossing that huge expanse of water.
For a while, I maintained that I would fly east to get to Australia. I'm very comfortable flying to Europe. And I could always take a train through the continent since it's mostly land and then continue to Australia flying over as little water as possible. It would probably take several weeks and countless connections, but it was a fun travel fantasy to keep.
Last year, when my friends got married in New Zealand, I sucked it up (along with a handful of tranquilizers) and got on a 14-hour flight from San Francisco to New Zealand. Besides being sedated to the point of finding the map screen entertaining for the first two hours of flight, it helped that I had about a dozen friends on the plane as well. I joked that if we wound up on the Lost Island, at least I would have great company.
Malaysian Airlines flight 370 went missing less than two weeks after I returned home from visiting Australia and New Zealand. When I heard the news, it turned my stomach. Obviously not in the way it would have had I known someone on board, but in the way of having just been there, having just been in the same position as those people nervously boarding a long flight over open ocean.
The aviation news from 2014 reads more like season of Lost than a series of real events in modern times equipped with high-tech surveillance equipment. A few years ago before flying to Hong Kong, a friend suggested that I read White Knuckles, a book published in the 1980's after a series of plane crashes to quell a growing fear of flying in the public. When addressing the specific fear of feeling "lost" in the air, Layne Ridley explains that there is a grid system in the air much like our system of streets on the ground. Pilots know exactly where they are and where they're supposed to be at any given point in time.
If that if that was the case in the 1980's, I can only imagine the system is much tighter now. And yet, an entire plane filled with passengers can just go missing...
Leading up to my trip, I made a lot of jokes about ending up on the Lost island because it seemed hilarious and absurd, the kind of thing that could only happen in televised fiction. I would have loved to visit my friends again in Australia. Truth be told, my flights were pretty easy with an empty seat beside me and an iPad full of movies. But until they find that plane from March and explain what happened to this plane here in December, Southeast Asia is the new Bermuda Triangle in my book.
