Air France Disappearance

So soon after my meditation in a 28 May post on an airliner crash in icy conditions, I feel sad and somewhat haunted by the report of an Air France airliner that has disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic between Brazil and West Africa, with 226 people aboard.   They came from no less than 32 countries, so that this time pretty much the whole world has the usual jingoistic reasons for being vitally interested in how this could have happened and in finding anything at all in the way of what might have escaped being sent to a place where nothing might ever be found to supply all the answers,  till the next time the ocean is drained.

How weird it is to think that if, some drastic rearrangements in place and time could be made, this would've happened over dry land stretching in all directions farther than any eye -- short of being up in one of the XYZ areas of space -- could see, because Africa and South America used to be all one piece, till, just about at the spot where this plane vanished, a seam developed and opened up, and the two continents gradually drifted apart, at a rate of only two or three centimeters a year if that, yet so huge are the stretches of time that now that gap has opened to many hundreds and even thousands of miles, with enough water having been found meanwhile to fill that space,  to depths that most people would get in a car to negotiate,  if it could be done horizontally.

The frantic searches continue, but so far, after a day or more, unlike most other air crashes == likely all others involving airliners -- not even the smallest speck of paint  has been found, and the many authorities involved are reduced to telling us only that the outlook isn't hopeful, and that it might be weeks and even months before something tangible and definite turns up.

But, as is my thing, I'm taking refuge in an unlikely scenario in which things come out considerably better.  I'm wondering if, instead, the plane couldn't have suddenly come under the control of terrorists who quickly and completely overpowered everyone and piloted the plane not to crash into any oversized buildings but instead to land on one of the many tiny islands that stand in the Atlantic here and there, and which the emperor Napoleon ended up knowing quite a bit about, less than 200 years ago.

Taking into account how such an outcome would, for all its distaste, be infinitely preferable to thoughts of the plane carrying itself and all those people straight down to a watery, horrible death, this shows how even the great bugaboo of terrorism can supply its comforts, though in this case only to merely me.