Pilots and the New Year

(MENAFN- Arab News) WHILE you are preparing your menus for the New Year and choosing your dresses and waiting for fireworks at midnight for most of the world New Year is just another day just another night with nothing changing. The marginalized majority either serves the privileged or simply goes to bed a bit perplexed by all the noise and wondering what there is to celebrate. Between debt a loss of hope poverty and calamity both man-made and from the caprice of Nature there is nothing to make a song and dance about.

From those held hostage to those mourning the loss of loved ones as the stench of cordite fill the air to the children robbed of childhood women made into objects and injustice holding sway what price the disasters of weather and water.

And though joy and sadness and resignation are constant bedfellows and yet separate in that you cannot deny the first for the second and third in this mutually exclusive mental dormitory I was thinking that in all my years as a newsman the one thing I never understood is how soon news per se a evaporates even though the single human story always triumphs over statistics.

The individual victim has a name a persona that hundred posted as statistics will not have. They are faceless a mass that is tough to identify with. Yet so deep are we into the well on instant news that our circuits are loaded and we cannot absorb more. Hence nothing stays long enough to matter.

I was thinking of two pilots. One whose aircraft crashed in hostile territory and is now a captive of the ISIS. Where is he what is his condition will they let him go How easily the news has slipped off the pages and the screen from the initial 'no stones unturned we will get him released' to nothing about him at all.

I am sure the Jordan authorities are doing their best and pushing wherever they can to get some traction for a negotiation. But as a news story the human mind and the media itself have little stamina for joining in the pressure. One can only hope that Lt Maaz Al-Kassasbeh is reunited with his family before the sun goes down on 2014.

And then we have the disappearance of another aircraft and another pilot discovers his modern A 320 flies into unknown peril so drastic that his transponder cannot even send out a Mayday code of 7700 for a crisis and 7500 for a hijacking.

The only thing besides the fear it was shot down is that wind shear was so strong or the plane just broke up in bad weather nothing else makes sense at the moment. Whatever happened it was catastrophic. If the aircraft decompresses even the flight deck crew would not be able to act. While the ghosts of Flt 70 do arise again this seems more likely to be found soon enough.

For the families of the 160 people on board the end of the year has no bunting.