MH370 - the pundits are getting bored...

With the Bluefin 21 robotic vehicle so far failing to find any sonar trace of the missing 777 in the newly narrowed search area, the media and aviation experts have become noticably less excited about the prospect of a positive result. Not only have their reports been less dramatic in their presentation, they are also becoming fewer in number and increasingly further down the bulletin order.

So how to reintroduce the spark that was evident in the heady days of optimism over seemingly imminent discovery?

The answer apparently is to resurrect some of the more fanciful possibilities that swirled around in the early days of the investigation.

One in particular was that maybe there was no crash - the aircraft was surreptitiously landed on a runway in some obscure location and never crashed at all. No, you're not reading a hoax blog post. Some unnamed authority figure or other is saying that the lack of success evident following the massive search in the Southern Indian Ocean suggests that they have been looking in the wrong place.

So, despite the high probability that the acoustic pings picked up by the Australian vessel Ocean Shield towing a US-run pinger locator (custom made to do nothing other than identify such signals) were indeed from one or more black boxes, there is a move toward writing off the signals as something else entirely. Exactly what, hasn't been identified to any credible degree.

Instead, apperently sane individuals are seriously suggesting the 777 has put down on terra firma and that's why there was never any ELT distress signal picked up by satellite.

That's a breathtaking departure from all the other satellite and radar evidence, and the theorists promoting this alternative turn of events are now choosing to accept the sightings by Malaysian fishermen who were supposedly telling investigators in the first few days of the search that they witnessed a large jet aircraft flying very low and fast with its landing lights on in what they believed to be a landing approach.

Amazing.

So the media dutifully echoes the claims by faceless government sources, reported by unnamed journalists, about alleged eyewitness statements from unidentified fishermen. And that somehow warrants the space on their websites and on-air bulletins.

Can you say "desperate for ratings"? Journalistic standards have evidently gone to hell in a hand-basket (whatever that means - but it probably isn't good). The absence of new information doesn't absolve media organisations from doing a modicum of in-house analysis before jumping onto the conspiracy bandwagon.

Just as a little reminder to those in the media who clearly can't be bothered, the 777 loaded with passengers, baggage and freight weighs more than 200 tonnes and has a landing speed in the vicinity of 160 MPH. To find a runway in sufficiently well-maintained condition, wide enough, long enough and strong enough for such a landing, and one that has no current traffic or personnel around to witness the event is, frankly, impossible.

What the hell is wrong with these people?