plane

Let's talk about the plane.

I get obsessive about plane crashes, and this time the media is feeding my obsession. I spent just about the entirety of last weekend glued to some sort of screen, updating over and over to see if they had found the wreckage and what caused the crash.

I always read the reports on why planes crash, if it isn't manifestly obvious, and somehow this makes me feel better about flying, because mostly the things that cause crashes get fixed and/or are pilot error, and the pilots of the planes I have flown on all seemed competent except those approximately 13 year olds who flew the plane from the Mitten to Cleveland that one time. (Hint: most non-pilot error plane crashes are caused by ice: in the engines, the fuel lines, the pitot tubes, etc.)

The funny thing is that I'm not a nervous flyer. I read about plane crashes, yes, and knowing the why makes me feel safer, but fundamentally I get on planes and either I watch everything from the window or I fall asleep. I don't need to drug myself or drink like some people I know. I think I learned this from my momma, who taught us in our multiple transcontinental flight days (i.e. the 1980s) that planes and flying are interesting and cool. Now I am fascinated by planes and if only I made enough money to pay for lessons I would be flying them.

Anyway.

Considering that I will read obsessively about almost any plane crash (the wikipedia page that lists commercial plane crashes by year was a week long time suck for me when I discovered it), you can imagine that this potential crash has me even more mesmerized. The first thing I do in the morning, after cursing my alarm, is check to see what new information has been revealed.

A day before they released information that the plane may have continued to ping the satellites for an additional four hours, I sent T. an email telling her my predictions for where they would find the plane if it had not disintegrated in midair over the Gulf of Thailand. (Most of my predictions were out of range of the amount of fuel on board, though, it turns out.)

The one comment I have: if that plane landed somewhere - and it may have, given the amount of time it was in the air - there is at least a rebel or quasi-governmental group controlling some large territory who is in on the deal. You cannot land a plane that big on a tiny airstrip in the middle of nowhere.

Oh, I have another comment: people keep talking about tracking the cell phones, and I want to laugh, because guess what? Cell phones don't work everywhere in the world. Remember the satellite phone of South Sudan? Cell phone towers no hay in some parts of the world. And cell phone towers that work with your network no hay in even larger spans of the world. (My cell phone worked in Vietnam but not in Honduras, just as one example.)

In the meantime, in between reading articles about where in the world is MH370, I have been creating myself a job and moving into the K.'s spare bedroom because I am now homeless. Details.