Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Plot Thickens

If I write with a deadline, for example if a vignette is a contest submission or in the most recent case an Exam for the HSP class Romantica, I take the available time and divide it in half. With the first half I write what I intend to write. With the second half I proof read, edit, fine tune, expand and contract, and make it resonate.

By resonate I mean that a writer can write two sentences with exactly the same meaning and one will resonate and the other won't. Some of you reading this know exactly what I'm talking about and others don't. What separates poetry from exposition, chopped up into little pieces, is resonance. It doesn't have to rhyme, though that is one aspect of resonance. What it does have to do is flow smoothly and transmit to the ear a certain lyrical quality. I'm referring to every line in the exposition and the harmony that each sentence lends to the next. If you still don't get it I won't frustrate you any further, trying to express something that defies expression.

Today on Fox news Megan Kelly did about as good a job on the ongoing mystery of the missing South East Asian Airliner as anyone. She got a high US government official (Saxby Chambliss) to to state that somebody shut down the transponders on the airplane. At last we have somebody high up in our government saying it was a hijacking. Well he didn't exactly say it but how could anyone listening not make the connection to terrorism? Two minutes after the Airliner entered the dead space between Malaysia and Vietnam, the Copilot said "Goodnight" and the transponder shut down. Then new coordinates were entered in the computerized navigation system. At that point the aircraft slipped between the cracks and for the next eight hours the engines continued to ping. The pings have led investigators to a northern and southern arc the aircraft could have taken.

If this information is correct what is so hard about measuring each of the arcs based upon the amount of time the engines kept pinging and the fuel carried by the aircraft. The pinging stopped after the fuel ran out or the aircraft landed and the engines were shut off. If the arcs are measured it should narrow down a circle where either the wreckage can be expected (Southern arc) or where the airplane landed or crashed on the Northern Arc.

If this is done the number of possible landing strips can be significantly reduced from the 600 plus that have been estimated. I suspect the number could be reduced to half a dozen. I would also suspect that the location of the aircraft has already been determined and efforts are being made to decide what to do about it.

One of the experts Megan interviewed hit the nail on the head. When asked what he thought happened he said he was leaning towards a scenario where somebody knowledgable got into the cockpit. Since the pilot had a history of being loose with who he let in it makes sense that the hijacker(s) were probably somebody other that the pilot or copilot, which does not rule out that they might have in some way been complicit.