Haystack Revisited

January 5, 2026

The hunt is on again for Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the Boeing 777 that vanished somewhere in the Indian Ocean more than twelve years ago.

I don’t know where Vegas has the odds, but I wouldn’t expect the plane to be found. There’s just too much ocean, and not enough data telling the searchers where to focus. Whatever advanced technology is at their disposal, they’ll need to get very lucky. They’re looking for an object about two-hundred feet long, thousands of feet down in the dark, somewhere in an immense expanse of ocean.

One thing that might help them is that the jet is likely in one or two large pieces. Its profile should be distinct, even from far above. We know this because there was no debris field. It’s nearly certain that the plane didn’t crash. Rather, it was “landed” on the water, and subsequently sank, more or less intact.

A Boeing 777 in an out-of-control impact would have effectively disintegrated, producing tens of thousands of fragments: aircraft parts, human remains, luggage, and so on. Much of this debris would have sunk, but plenty would not have. Eventually, borne by currents, it would’ve washed up.

But it didn’t. And the small number of pieces that did wash ashore are consistent not with a crash, but with a controlled and deliberate ditching. The flaperon discovered in 2015 on Reunion Island, for example, and the trailing edge flap that washed up on Mauritius. These parts themselves are evidence enough; a thorough post-mortem on them reveals even more. The forensics are complicated, but they’re solid. Use your Google and check out the analysis by former Canadian crash investigator Larry Vance. These pieces tell a story.

Early on, I was open to a number of theories popular at the time: fire, depressurization, and so on. Accidents. I’ve come around since then. My opinion is based on the evidence, both as it exists and, more importantly, doesn’t exist. The absence of the myriad flotsam a full-on crash would have produced is to me the smoking gun. The only plausible explanation for a lack of debris is that the plane was purposely scuttled, presumably by the captain.

Which, to be honest, makes me wonder: why spend all this time and money? What do we learn by locating the wreckage? It all seems pretty clear.

I’ve been saying from the start that we should prepare for the possibility of it not being found. It happens this way sometimes. If it helps you feel better, the air crash annals contain numerous unsolved accidents.

What makes this one different, maybe, is how we’ve come to expect easy and fast solutions to pretty much everything these days, with a fetishized belief that technology can answer any question and fix any problem. Oh sure, radios, transponders, emergency locator transmitters, GPS, real-time position streaming, satellite tracking. But all of that is fallible, one way or another.

Sometimes nature wins. And that’s what this is about, ultimately: nature. The immensity of the ocean versus the comparative speck of a 777. It’s out there somewhere, in the ink-black darkness beneath thousands of feet of seawater. We’ll probably never find it.

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Photos courtesy of Unsplash.