It's been a year since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the 239 souls aboard it disappeared without a trace, and if the fates of scores of commercial, private and military planes that have vanished around the globe since 1948 are any indication, the world may never know what became of the jetliner, reports GHN based on Fox News.
Whether in remote areas of the ocean or rugged mountain regions where snow or forests hide wreckage from view, planes have been disappearing for decades, leaving authorities, aviation experts and victims' families with no answers. The biggest ocean search in human history has failed to turn up even a confirmed trace of the plane, which had left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing and is believed to have gone down in a remote part of the Indian Ocean after the pilot inexplicably turned off the communication system and made an unplanned U-turn. The disappearance is the deadliest and most recent in a long line of aviation mysteries that experts say may never be solved.
Aviation Safety Network, which tracks missing planes, documents 85 passenger, cargo, and military transport aircraft that have gone missing without a trace since 1948, along with eight maritime patrol aircraft, five corporate jets and six air taxis. In each case, not a single piece of wreckage, oil slick or body has been found.
"Every flight that has disappeared had its own story," said David Cenciotti, editor of TheAviationist.com, one of world's most-read aviation blogs."Some may have been hijacked and may have landed on a hidden or remote airfield. Others may have simply crashed in bad weather in remote locations, or at sea, after flying several minutes, if not hours off track, hence search-and-rescue teams have looked for them in the wrong place."
In 1948, the first of two British South American Airways Avro Tudor passenger planes disappeared on flights to Bermuda. The other plane was lost a year later and no trace of either aircraft or the 51 people aboard them ever turned up. The strange disappearances helped propel the myth of the Bermuda Triangle, which had captivated the nation just three years earlier when the area claimed five Navy torpedo bombers with a 14-member crew along with an aircraft sent to find them.