Flight MH370: What can we learn from the latest accident?

On March 7, I flew with my wife and two small sons on a Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, returning from a holiday in Malaysia. The Beijing international schools had taken a week's vacation, and the flight was full of noisy, excited children. My seven-year-old discovered three of his classmates on the flight, and they had to be restrained by the stewards.

But wait, you will say, how can this be? That flight has disappeared without trace, and half the world is still bending its energies to looking for it. None of the passengers have ever been seen again.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that the year of my family's flight was 1996. I mention this only to illustrate the horrors experienced by the passengers and crew during last month's disastrous event. At what point did they realise that something had gone wrong, and when did they realise that they were doomed? And what about the families, waiting at the airport for news, and still waiting, with grief and horror, for news after six weeks? This is where the focus of any compassionate person should lie; it could have been any of us.

A Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) AP-3C Orion aircraft flies past the British naval ship HMS Echo in the southern Indian Ocean as they continue to search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in this handout picture released by the Australian Defence Force April 15, 2014.[Photo/China Daily via agencies]

The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is one of the most gruesome and intriguing mysteries of the century so far. We now believe we know roughly where the plane went down, and may yet be able to discover the "black box" flight recorder; even then we do not know whether that will explain how the plane found itself thousands of miles from its designated flight path, without adequate fuel supplies to reach land and safety.

While there is so much we do not know, all kinds of theories will continue to proliferate, some of them merely sensation-seeking, some politically motivated. It does not help that, just before the disappearance of MH370, new theories emerged about the real causes of the Lockerbie disaster, over 25 years ago.