The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 10 years ago today still rankles the national psyche.
Unlike Flight MH17's murderous outcome a few months later, MH370, with 239 people onboard, rendered no closure, especially for aggrieved relatives, whose pleas for a renewed search was positively met by the government.
The government is negotiating with American marine robotics company Ocean Infinity to resume its search, suspended since 2018.
It makes sense: it is hoped that advances in sonar, robotics and forensic technologies, energised by artificial intelligence, may lead to new search results.
However, one critic called it "futile" because the plane is unsalvageable, its flight recorder useless and it "raises false hopes". In perspective, the critic's fulmination is self-defeating and misses the point.
We must establish what happened — whether it was sabotage or terrorism that brought down MH370 — so that a villain cloaked must be unmasked. As for raising false hopes, tell that to the relatives who persist in seeking the truth from the moment of MH370's disappearance.
Investigative pieces, books and documentaries spun dizzying propositions, but failed to prove how, why and where MH370 disappeared.
Seriously flawed is the conspiracy theory alleging that MH370 pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah shut down MH370's transponder and then depressurised and steered the aircraft towards the southern Indian Ocean for seven hours, with 238 dead bodies in tow, to his supposed demise.
Investigators were stumped. But since they don't know how, why and where MH370 crashed, how on earth could they incriminate Zaharie? Did they find MH370's black box?
Save for the discovery of minor aircraft parts of dubious origins, nothing substantive has been recovered. After the accusations against Zaharie collapsed, others postulating how MH370 crash-landed emerged.
So in this spirit, here's an interstellar take: MH370 was scooped by aliens and its occupants abducted, which is just as valid an assertion as it is ludicrous, but no more absurd than the guesswork damning Zaharie.
For as long as MH370 is missing, no one can say for sure what really happened. MH370 is aviation's mystery for the ages, as enigmatic as the plane and ship disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle.
On the 10th anniversary of its disappearance, MH370 has assumed an aura, even as we weep for the 239 souls, most of all our Malaysian kin.
