I tried one of those yoga videos after walking yesterday afternoon and it might be working. I don’t know if I was doing the poses properly, but there is definitely something to this thing. I slept like a champ, and that is something very positive.

I awoke to a sense of déjà vu- another Malaysian jet- this one from AirAsia, a company with a decent safety record- is missing with 162 souls on board. The air search has been called off due to darkness and violent weather conditions. By the time I heard about it, the time to fuel depletion had been exceeded. One way or another, the aircraft should be down somewhere.

Reports were sparse- like the last missing jet, there was a routine communication with Air Traffic Control, requesting permission to deviate from the filed flight plan and avoid weather. The request to ascend to flight Level 39 was granted and that was it.

Important differences with MH370: this was not a Boeing 777, but rather an Airbus A320-200. I think it is sad commentary on the state of the bedraggled world that my first thought was whether this was another case of religious fanaticism.

Based on the 2009 loss of another Airbus jet (an A330) in the South Atlantic, I suspect it might have been something similar. The crew attempted to fly over some thunderstorms, ice crystals forming in the pitot tubes made the autopilot trip offline and the airspeed to be mis-read by the cockpit crew, which caused a cascade of errors that lead to the crash and loss of all 228 people on board.

Up to that time, no commercial aircraft had disappeared more thoroughly, without a Mayday call or a witness or even a trace on radar. Experts claimed the A330 “was considered to be among the safest” of the passenger aircraft. The very real concern was that the airplane was in fact over-engineered, literally “a self-flying aircraft,” which became a parable akin to Icarus falling from the sky.

It took literally a year to recover the black boxes and the sad story of pilot error was finally unraveled. I don’t know which is scarier- terrorists or flight crew who don’t know how to fly these marvelous machines.

Anyway, time will tell what happened to this missing jet, and I expect daylight in the Java Sea will bring some resolution, if not the answers to what actually happened.

So that brings us around to the strange things that have happened this year. It is time to wrap up bedraggled 2014 and its many mysteries. An assertive Russia, a determined Iran, the bloodthirsty antic of ISIS, missing jets and jets shot down, tumbling gas prices, crazy elections, all the rest of it.

I am not quite sure how to even begin to start with that, so I didn’t. Instead, I looked at the Christmas cards I received and which decorated the dining room table.

I copied down the names of the thoughtful people who sent them, and read the letters from the friends who included one with their cards. The kids are now growing or grown, the trips and memories accumulated through the year were a treat to review. I figure people know more about Vic than anyone needs to know, so that would have been complete overkill on my part to attempt to do a Holiday letter.

Instead, I wrote an email to respond to each of the cards, a sort of hybrid digital response to the analogue greetings. I got one response almost immediately from Seattle. Left Coast Guy said “The analog card tradition is fading fast–you are on the leading edge of that.”

I considered that as I sat bemused at the keyboard. Things change so fast these days. My smart phone now can double as a TV remote control. Our personal information is routinely captured by hackers- twice this year for me alone- and I am getting the feeling that the machines and our ability to truly understand them is getting away from us.

I hope that wasn’t the case with the latest missing Airbus. At least in this case we may actually be able to find out. In the meantime, I don’t know where to choose my flights on the Boeing jets that can apparently fly themselves into the uttermost reaches of the sea, or the Airbus jets that pilots may not know how to fly.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303Missing