That Colossal Search

"Objects that have drifted for two weeks will have travelled a long way in that time. If you have currents at four knots, that means four nautical miles per day and a considerable distance in 14 days."
"After  you have identified and examined some debris,  you can piece together how the plane broke up. Was it in the air, was it during a sea landing, or did it hit the ocean surface? From that you can build up a scenario."
Captain of the Hoegh, St.Petersburg, Norwegian cargo vessel

Scanning the seas: A Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion plane passes over the Norwegian car transport ship Hoegh St Petersburg during the search for the missing flight MH370

To speak, however theoretically -- and at the same instance, the most intelligently experienced theorizing -- of an airplane carrying 239 men, women and children disintegrating over a vast ocean with all lives most assuredly lost, is to give no comfort to the distraught families of those who were passengers or crew on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

Who, in their agony, would far prefer to visualize their loved ones patiently awaiting rescue from the landing the plane took under duress on a remote archipelago in a vast oceanic landscape, which rescuers have not yet discerned to be the resting place of that errant airliner. Their relatives will be exhausted, frightened, hungry and miserable, and perhaps some will be in need of emergency medical treatment, but they will be alive.

Concern: Relatives of Chinese passengers aboard missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 watch a TV news program about the missing plane after attending a meeting with Malaysian officials at a hotel in Beijing

Their cherished lives will not at all have been lost. They will recover from their unspeakable ordeal, and so will their relatives, in everlasting gratitude to the real events that took place, not the imagined ones where a terrorist bomb exploded over the ocean concealed in the luggage compartment of the plane, or a deranged pilot planning suicide decided to take along with him company for the afterlife. Their lives would resume, and they would forevermore treasure one another more than ever.

This is their tenuous, passionately-hoped for reality. One that, when the lost plane is finally discovered on an unused runway overgrown by an encroaching jungle, with those on board eking out their existence on whatever food was left in the plane's pantry, anxious for discovery and grateful that they would soon resume their normal lives. The other reality -- the one that rational minds unencumbered by personal grief hark to -- is to identify the detritus floating on the ocean.

Say, for example, one or more of the ships and aircraft dispatched to one of the remotest places of deep oceanic presence on the planet, roughly 2,500 kilometres southwest of Australia to isolate the "credible sighting" of what might be wreckage of the plane. The world is a large place, and its oceans are vast and unknown to a degree complicated by their very isolated distance.

Flight Lieutenant Neville Dawson (centre) monitors instruments aboard the Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion on the second day of an extensive search of the remote reaches of the southern Indian Ocean

But the satellite image that sighted that debris several days earlier is viewed as "the best lead we have" in the search for the plane that so mysteriously disappeared from contact in what has been seen as evasive, secretive steps to make itself invisible. Wild seas, miserable weather, shrinking visibility and an area of search in a stretch of ocean 4,000 metres deep have all contributed to the plane's -- or its remnants' -- invisibility.

A satellite image released by China shows an object in the southern Indian Ocean. 22 March 2014

Are there submersibles conceivably capable of descending to that depth to find the presence of the sunken body of the airliner and its sad passengers? Is the retrieval of a 'black box' that might help investigators discover, or enable them to advance an educated projection of what had occurred between the time the Malaysia Airlines plane took off in its night-flight, and the time since then, even possible?

There will be no relief, in this lifetime, for the family members of the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 from the nightmare their lives have descended into. Two weeks following the disappearance of the plane, there is no reasonable possibility of the fantasized vision of survival.

But the searchers, after expending time, energy, imagination, experience and money in conducting the search among 24 nations taking part, could find closure in any possible discovery of devices that might solve the puzzle of a plane vanishing from a regularly scheduled flight taking with it all those doomed souls.