Is it possible that a giant aircraft can vanish without trace?

The obvious answer would be “Certainly not.”

And yet last Saturday, March 8^th 2014 a Boeing 777 did just that as it flew between Malaysia and Vietnam with 239 passengers of various nationalities on board.

There was no distress call from either of the pilots; no debris strewn across the waters below them or even within a wide range of their flight path. When two passengers were revealed to be travelling on stolen passports it was immediately presumed to be the work of terrorists.  However it seems these were asylum seekers, not terrorists – one a boy of 19 whose mother claims he was planning to start a new life in Germany; a criminal act, yes but not on the level of terrorism, and probably it would have been undiscovered had the flight gone according to plan.

Now officials in several countries are in desperate consultation to uncover the cause of the disaster and find the remains of the plane and its passengers. While heartbroken relatives wait for answers to this unique mystery we can only hope that the crew and passengers on this powerful plane did not have time to comprehend what was happening and so were saved at least some of the distress at the end.