Well, no, they haven't but I am confident, in time, the mystery will be solved. I'm even more confident that, in an even shorter period of time, the story will move off the front pages and the tragedy will be largely forgotten ... except of course for the friends and families of the passengers and crew.
Flight 370 disappeared on Saturday 8th March with 239 people aboard. Using annual averages, in the week that followed, 10,500 people around the world have likely died from malaria since then. 4,000 have died from traumatic injuries, and 16,500 from tuberculosis. In America alone, 9,900 people have died of heart disease since Saturday, 600 have died in car accidents, while 250 were likely murdered. Yet virtually none of these stories have made the news anywhere in the world, nor generating anywhere near the attention that Flight 370 has.
Most of us have a flaw when reacting to risk: Threats like plane crashes, which are statistically insignificant but rare, grab our attention and scare us more than those that are deadly serious but common, like heart attacks and car accidents.
The disappearance of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Model 10 Electra in 1937 is still a mystery today. Let's hope the disappearance of Flight 370 will not remain a mystery for that long.
P.S. This is an ad which ran a couple of years ago. How prescient!
