![]() ![]() In 2005, Helios Airways Flight 522 en route from Cyprus to Athens lost cabin pressure and flew for nearly three hours with unconscious pilots before the engines failed and it crashed. Seven hours! Maybe it wasn’t a crash after all-if it were, it would have been the slowest in history. But in London, scientists for a British company called Inmarsat that provides telecommunications between ships and aircraft realized its database contained records of transmissions between MH370 and one of its satellites for the seven hours after the plane’s main communication system shut down. Of course, nothing turned up in the Andaman Sea, either. The Malaysian government explicitly denied it, but after a week of letting other countries search the South China Sea, the officials admitted that they’d known about the U-turn from day one. Why? Rumors swirled that military radar had seen the plane pull a 180. ![]() For instance, the search started over the South China Sea, naturally enough, but soon after, Malaysia opened up a new search area in the Andaman Sea, 400 miles away. What made MH370 challenging to cover was, first, that the event was unprecedented and technically complex and, second, that the officials were remarkably untrustworthy. Truth flowed one way: from the official source, through the anchor, past the expert, and onward into the great sea of viewerdom. The expert, such as myself, is on hand to add dimension or clarity. I soon realized the germ of every TV-news segment is: “Officials say X.” The validity of the story derives from the authority of the source. This represents my media apotheosis to date. A screen shot that included my face flashed onscreen during a Jon Stewart segment eviscerating CNN’s coverage. Most notable: The segment in which Don Lemon floated the possibility that MH370 had been sucked into a black hole. We’d appear solo, or in pairs, or in larger groups for panel discussions-whatever it took to vary the rhythm of perpetual chatter. The first couple were seven-day, the next few were 14-day, and the last one was a month. We were paid by the week, with the length of our contracts dependent on how long the story seemed likely to play out. Related Stories A Guide to Flight 370 Theories, From Mechanical Failure to Alien AbductionĪs time went by, CNN winnowed its expert pool down to a dozen or so regulars who earned the on-air title “CNN aviation analysts”: airline pilots, ex-government honchos, aviation lawyers, and me. I was spending 18 hours a day doing six minutes of talking. Then a couple of hours later, I’d do it again. The Town Car would show up to take me to the studio, I’d sign in with reception, a guest-greeter would take me to makeup, I’d hang out in the greenroom, the sound guy would rig me with a mike and an earpiece, a producer would lead me onto the set, I’d plug in and sit in the seat, a producer would tell me what camera to look at during the introduction, we’d come back from break, the anchor would read the introduction to the story and then ask me a question or maybe two, I’d answer, then we’d go to break, I would unplug, wipe off my makeup, and take the car 43 blocks back uptown. There was no intro course on how to be a cable-news expert. ![]() Soon, I was on-air up to six times a day as part of its nonstop MH370 coverage. The following morning, I was invited to go on CNN. I’m a private pilot and science writer, and I wrote about the last big mysterious crash, of Air France 447 in 2009. My yearlong detour to Planet MH370 began two days later, when I got an email from an editor at Slate asking if I’d write about the incident. And the crash, if it was a crash, got stranger from there. There had been no bad weather, no distress call, no wreckage, no eyewitness accounts of a fireball in the sky-just a plane that said good-bye to one air-traffic controller and, two minutes later, failed to say hello to the next. The unsettling oddness was there from the first moment, on March 8, when Malaysia Airlines announced that a plane from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, Flight 370, had disappeared over the South China Sea in the middle of the night. ![]()
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