On the night of March 8, 2014, as Malaysia Airlines MH370 lifted off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport for a seven hour flight to Beijing, each crew member and passenger probably believed they were as safe as anyone can be as a guest in gravity’s province: they were flying one of the world’s safest airliners, they were flying a well traveled route, and Malaysia Airlines had a good reputation.
Everyone who flies knows there is some infinitesimally small chance something may go wrong. And everyone who flies knows there is an even smaller chance the plane will not reach its destination safely, if at all. Most don’t dwell on it. It’s one of life’s tradeoffs.
But something happened aboard MH370 near Waypoint IGARI in the Gulf of Thailand that changed everything for that crew and those passengers. We don’t yet know what it was, but we have slowly learned that one of the flight’s service providers fell short of its obligations to those on the plane.
That provider owns the satellite that should have been tracking MH370, and didn’t. The plane wasn’t tracked because: the owner neglected to repair a network that did not know earth has a Southern Hemisphere; neglected to adequately test new data after the loss of Air France Flight 447; failed to realize ground station calls would reset a critically important ping timer; and failed to realize its own data could not be interpreted if it originated from a terminal switching channel other than number 4.
Not surprisingly, that satellite owner now refuses to release the log files that documented what really happened. Something tragic happened to MH370; and now, more than a year later, someone appears to be trying to get away with murder.