Children once thought their parents on MH370 might come back

The New York Magazine has published a succinct article as to why the wing part of a Boeing 777 washed up on La Réunion in the west Indian Ocean late in July continues to defy positive identification as having come from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

It is based in part on another report in a less famous miracle of surviving quality journalism, the small circulation  La Dépêche in Toulouse, which is where the action is when it comes to the military laboratory where the so called flaperon from the wide body jet was sent for examination by the public prosecutor’s office in Paris.

French nationals resident in Paris were among the 239 people on board the jet on 7 March 2014 when it disappeared on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, and in French law their presumed deaths are subject to a criminal investigation.

However, the blunt summary for the lack of positive identification of the part is that to some extent Malaysia Airlines had stopped chronicling with exhaustive accuracy the history of every component of its 777 fleet, which includes not just date of manufacture or source (an important issue in these times of fake or bogus aircraft parts) but installation, maintenance, any removals, repairs and even use as a replacement for previous identical or near identical parts.

Removing the costly and obviously unnecessary burden of such tiresome compliance with the regulations (where they exist) or even good housekeeping is quite popular according to some sources among airlines run by ignorant bean counters, although one hesitates to suggest that this might possibly have been the case with Malaysia Airlines.

If Malaysia Airlines couldn’t be bothered making more than cursory calls to the satellite phone in the cockpit of  the missing jet on the night it disappeared, or even contacting the multitude of ships that were under possible paths it could have taken while in Malaysian waters why would such matters of parts numbers or inventory management even cross its collective mind?

It was after all, just a 777 with 239 people on board. Back to bed, yawn!

This hideous farce and the indications of a lack of disclosure and candor and above all care for the lives of its those on the Malaysia Airlines 777 by the airline’s management and Malaysian authorities sits badly with the spectacle of the country’s embattled PM Najib Razak deliberately misleading the media about what experts had found in relation to the flaperon on the morning that the Paris deputy prosecutor gave a press conference concerning the testing of the component.

There is no conceivable excuse for the Prime Minister of Malaysia to publicly get things wrong in such a manner. Doesn’t the man have any respect for diligence and accuracy in his public statements? Which raises the similar carelessness with the truth of his transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, in his insisting that parts of windows and other components had been recovered from La Réunion when they hadn’t.

We are not being told the truth by Kuala Lumpur. What is the truth? What did Malaysia know on the night and morning of the disappearance of MH370?  Why didn’t Malaysia Airlines keep full records of the history of the parts of the 777 involved in this mystery?

As the NY Mag notes, maddening implausibility is something that persists in every twist and turn of the MH370 mystery.