One of my first memories: I stop crying when the flight attendant gives me a box of toys during a night flight, a faint ray of light illuminates my coffee table, but everything around me is dark, strange smells and sounds, strangers breathing and whispering in the shadows. I’ve traveled on so many planes since then, that knot of emotion and anxiety returns forever, a natural reaction to the feat of flying above the world in a flying object, locked in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers, sharing parched air, a tiny bathroom, bad food, the intimacy of sleep , that indescribable fear every time the jolt or the voice of the pilot or flight attendant interrupts the purring of the plane that puts some to sleep and torments others.

My ghastly imagination explored the possibilities of airplane horror. I scan the passengers, wondering how they would react to the impending disaster. I run through horror scenarios in my head: how would the pilot tell hundreds of human beings that he was going to die, how would I react, could I remain calm and protect my daughters, would I submit to death with dignity or lose my mind? my head and say goodbye to life screaming?

It is true that a pilot rarely succeeds in predicting and announcing a disaster (whether on land, water or air, death has a knack for catching us off guard). As in life, the possibilities are endless in death. There are so many stories that can lead us to death in a plane crash: a mechanical failure, a whim of the weather, a tragic or suicidal (and murderous) pilot error, a missile… In July 2014, during the war in Donbass (started by pro-Russian separatists), a Russian military brigade transported a rocket launcher to Ukrainian territory with which it fired a missile that brought down a passenger plane. There were 298 souls on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (among them 80 children, an Australian writer and a beautiful Malaysian actress). They left Amsterdam with the certainty that they would reach Kuala Lumpur: their bodies ended up scattered in that Ukrainian country that never stops bleeding.

Four months before this crime, another Malaysia Airlines plane also failed to reach its destination. The infamous flight MH370 disappeared (with 239 souls on board) on March 8, 2014. A journalist obsessed with this still-unsolved mystery says: “Planes take off, planes go down, what they don’t do is disappear from the face of the world. Land”. A flight like any other, which could have been you or me, took off from Kuala Lumpur at midnight, but never reached Beijing. Invisible to radar (someone disabled the communication systems), perhaps swallowed by the sea, but according to the new Netflix documentaries, this story smells like a dead rat. It smells like someone with great power is trying to hide something, and nine years after the disappearance, there is still no plausible explanation, only theories, lies, suspiciously withheld information, planted or ignored evidence. The truth. is that thousands of parents and children are still crying in front of empty coffins. (OR)