The Daily Show returned from its vacation and immediately went after the cable news channels for their appalling coverage of the missing airliner. In the clips below, they mentioned some crazy speculations that even I had not heard about.
(These clips aired on March 24, 2014. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
So far, hasn’t every aircraft disappearance been both temporary and the result of an accident/mechanical failure? So what does Bayesian probability tell us we should assign as a likelihood to the various complicated theories that are not “something went wrong and the plane crashed.”?
@ Marcus Ranum: Not a thing, as far as the media is concerned. If they weren’t lost at “Bayesian”, then “probability” sure as hell sealed the deal.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/forensics/americas_missing/2.html
I post that not to belittle the deaths of the airplane’s passengers, which are devastating to their families, but to exemplify how the media is overplaying this single case simply because it involves an airplane.
The 2300 missing in the US daily alone is nearly ten times that of the number on MH370, yet none of them get this sort of media attention except at the local level (unless they’re white, blonde haired girls, of course).
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/what-happens-on-a-ghost-flight-5-case-studies.html?mid=google&google_editors_picks=true
This is pretty interesting. It’s about other ghost flights, where a plane has gone on flying until it crashed with a cargo of corpses.
I hadn’t realized it has happened so often.
@Marcus,
That was surprising. It looks like depressurization was the culprit in each case.