Sunday, 9 August 2026

It IS Possible

 
MH370 is not the world's only missing aircraft; in fact I've also covered the story of Amelia Earhart closely, see background link below. Another one lost was Pan Am Flight 526A. This was a Douglas DC 4, like the one in the illustration, with sixty-four passengers and five crew that took off from San Juan, Puerto Rico en route to New York City on the afternoon of April the 11th 1952. Shortly after takeoff one of its four engines failed. The pilot turned around to do an emergency landing at the airport and straight away another engine shut down. With only two working engines and the danger of this remainder failing too, the pilot, Capt. John Burn, carried out a controlled ditching. (Ironically, Burn had been co-pilot of another plane that had crashed a few years earlier and he had survived.) Unfortunately the sea was rough and the plane quickly broke up and sank. Only seventeen people made it into the life rafts. Although the fate of the aircraft is not a mystery, the location of its remains was, for over seventy-four years. Now it has been found. A team of scientists from the Air-Sea Heritage Foundation in partnership with the Discovery Channel used underwater remotely operated vehicles to explore the seabed in the area until they came across the largest part of the aircraft; its fuselage and attached left wing. The wreckage is corroded and partly buried in sediment, but it is identifiable. Some of its Pan Am livery remains intact. It was at a depth of two thousand feet. Their adventure is covered in an episode of the TV documentary series Expedition Unknown. Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdrvyllxj71o. There are no plans to raise any debris. Even if this were possible, the wreck has become regarded as a grave, like the Titanic. What this shows it that it is possible to find a lost vehicle in the depths of the ocean. Therefore there is no theoretical reason why MH370 cannot also be located. The difference with Pan Am 526A is that it is in comparatively shallow water close to shore and we already had a rough idea of where it might be. At least the margin of error is far smaller than the 7th arc. However, with MH370 there's an even bigger problem; is it even in the Indian Ocean at all? I doubt it. A number of MH37-tologists have postulated that the remains of the plane are in other very different places, such as Kazakhstan, according to Jeff Wise; the Gulf of Thailand, according to Florence De Changy; or the Maldives, according to Ashton Forbes. At the moment I'm leaning more towards Ashton's explanation, but time will tell. Certainly I have not given up at all on the prospect that the lost Malaysian airliner might one day be recovered.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2024/05/mh370-portal.html.

No comments: