BANGKOK — The towering Danish ship Kobenhavn set sail from Argentina one December day, bound for Australia with five dozen souls aboard. Eight days later, as it traversed the South Atlantic, it radioed a nearby ship. All seemed well. ADVERTISING
BANGKOK — The towering Danish ship Kobenhavn set sail from Argentina one December day, bound for Australia with five dozen souls aboard. Eight days later, as it traversed the South Atlantic, it radioed a nearby ship. All seemed well.
That was Dec. 22, 1928. The vessel was never heard from again. There were reports of a “phantom ship” spotted through the haze, but searches of the icy waters turned up nothing. A year passed.
“Never in the history of shipping has a missing vessel been searched for more thoroughly,” Associated Press correspondent Alex Gerfalk wrote then. “Science has exhausted its resources in an attempt to find a plausible explanation for the complete disappearance of the largest sailing vessel in the world.”
And so it goes. For centuries, human beings have clambered aboard vessels and headed for the horizon, unsure if they would return. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes search parties were dispatched to seek survivors, bodies, answers. Sometimes they were not.
Today, the world is a year into the mystifying disappearance of the enormous jetliner that was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 without any sort of resolution. Searches of vast swaths of the Indian Ocean continue, pegged to a cocktail of science and optimism that we hope will provide some answers for those families left behind — and for the rest of us.
And we are a year into what is effectively an elaborate missing-persons case, multiplied by 239. With all that we’ve learned, it remains unique under the sun, enduring in the public consciousness, eating up millions of dollars in search efforts and still generating countless what-if scenarios.
“There is really no precedent to this,” says Geoffrey Thomas, the Australia-based editor-in-chief and managing director of Airlineratings.com.
So aside from the aviation particulars, what makes the tale of this particular Boeing 777-200ER so different from the countless vessels that have vanished throughout history and left behind only questions and confused families? Here are a few possibilities:
We’re conditioned to expect endings
Part of it is the expectations that human beings have about how stories end, fed by a media that thrives on tidy resolutions. That’s relatively new.
“We expect a resolution soon. And a year is not soon,” says Emily Godbey, an associate professor at Iowa State University who studies and writes about how humans respond to disasters.
The technology of transportation
Items from the modern cabinet of wonders, such as GPS and radar and mobile-phone technology and flight-tracker apps that let you follow planes from your pocket, hand us an illusory sense of control — a notion that we have, through gadgetry, rendered the world finite. While human abilities have certainly increased since the days of the Kobenhavn, there are still — and perhaps always will be — places to disappear.
The moral, so far: Even the best tech can’t always make the uncertain and the unknown into something definitive.
No ground zero
Most tragedies happen somewhere: the spot where the towers fell on 9/11, the beaches where the waves came ashore during the Asian tsunami, the sunflower fields where the pieces of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 fell after it was blasted out of the Ukrainian sky last summer.
“This is an event which has been rendered invisible,” says Godbey, the professor. “We are in an age where we expect to see the aftermath. We expect to see the wreckage. We expect to have some sort of visual perceptions of loss. There just is nothing to grab onto.”
Much rides on solving this mystery
When a ship sank at sea, it didn’t automatically imply that other ships were at risk. But when a plane crashes, there is enormous public and economic interest in figuring out what went wrong. Planes, after all, are a pivotal player in everything from business travel to tourism to national pride.
Thus, everyone from Malaysia Airlines to the industry at large to various governments and agencies responsible for air safety is intensely committed to ensuring the disappearance won’t remain an enigma forever.
It’s all complicated, not just the grief. Perhaps the most complex question of all still hangs over everything, sometimes spoken, sometimes silent, always double-edged: How can the people responsible for the search ever decide to end it — and how do they justify continuing indefinitely, given the costs and commitments?
That suggests the long-term challenge of this slow-motion tragedy. Even in an age of possibility that has stitched us together mechanically and virtually, our planet remains a forbidding place — always ready to upend lives, swallow airplanes whole and create enduring mysteries. And humanity’s various outposts, more entangled than ever before, have to figure out, together, how to navigate it all.
A year after its final “Good night, Malaysian three-seven-zero,” that’s precisely what Flight 370 is shouting at us in silence from wherever on Earth it might possibly be, saying the same thing that the Kobenhavn did nine decades ago: It is, most definitively, not a small world after all.
