The Greatest "Mystery" of Flight QZ8501
I haven't blogged in a while, but the baffling events surrounding the crash of Air Asia flight QZ8501 on Dec 28, 2014, has made me want to ask some tough questions that no one else seem to be asking at this point.
As the "search" operation drags into its 11th day, with nothing useful or helpful achieved except the retrieval of a few dozen bodies, it's beginning to look like the great mystery of Flight QZ8501 is not why it crashed, by why this search and salvage operation has been one of the most frustratingly slow, incompetent, disorganized, and mismanaged in the history of aviation.
From the very beginning this operation was a mess of misinformation, speculation, and outright lies. Let us start with the rumor that became rampant that some of the floating bodies found were holding hands. I don't know what's more ridiculous, the fact that someone made up a story that is so physically and logically impossible, or that people actually believed it?
Then we have the Indonesian Minister of Transportation (oh and btw is the one who is about to be sacked for allowing Air Asia to fly an unauthorized route), come out and say that the crash was likely caused by icing. Wow, so either this guy can see the future, or he's smarter than every other aviation expert in the world who still have no idea what happened, because we still have no black boxes, no wreckage, and ZERO evidence at this point of ANYTHING.
Now finally we come to the actual search operation itself...thing started promising at first, with discovery of floating bodies and some debris on the 2nd day...but since then, it's been nothing but an endless stream of excuses and complaints about "bad weather" or some other obstruction that is preventing any progress from being made.
So let's ask the questions that should be asked:
1. Where is the main wreckage and why hasn't it been found? There has been sonar contact with large objects reported for almost a week now, but it's been a week and that's still all we have...a bunch of sonar readings. If the plane did indeed come down in one piece as most people theorize, there should be a big pile of wreckage that is easily found and identified.
2. Why have the divers not been able to find anything? And if they are so ineffective, why have they not already tried alternative methods like a submersible device or just an underwater camera, for fuck sakes? Yeah yeah we know that there are "waves" and mud and blah blah down there, but come on, you already have the sonar locations, how damn hard can it be to just DIVE STRAIGHT DOWN to where the stuff is? Even if you can't see anything, wouldn't you at least bump your head into whatever is down there?
3. What happened to the autopsies? Examining any of the bodies already recovered would reveal valuable clues about how the plane crash, in fact there should already be autopsies completed by now, why has the government not released any information?
4. And at this point you have to start wondering...who's in charge of this whole charade? Why don't they seem to care? They do seem to care about putting up an image of "trying their best", but who's dumb enough to believe them at this point? And most puzzling of all, why would they NOT be trying their hardest and quickest to find the plane? Do they NOT want the plane to be found?...and why?
So here we are on Day 11...still no sign of the wreckage, no sign of the black boxes(which run out of power in less than 3 weeks), and I have zero confidence that things will get any better anytime soon. We'll probably just hear more wild rumors, more complaints, more excuses. In fact I don't know at this point what else they can complain about, maybe angry jellyfish?
And who are the ones suffering the most from this most incompetent of search operations? It's the poor relatives and friends of the victims, of course. As the majority of them still await for news, any news, about their beloved ones and what happened to them.
