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" Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been missing for more than five days, each filled with more confusing and ludicrous conspiracy theories. To help clear up at least some of it, we called Popular Mechanics Senior Editor Joe Pappalardo get his take. What could&amp;#039;ve happened to this Boeing 777? And why is everyone -- including seemingly trustworthy governments -- jumping the gun in announcing new evidence, even if they might be wrong?  ESQ: So what is taking so long here? If it turns out it was on the flight path, why did this take almost a week to find the plane? JP: It&amp;#039;s a big piece of water. No matter what happened, even if it disintegrated in midair, these things don&amp;#039;t come down gently. Something violent happened and it happened suddenly. Some pieces are weighed down and not everything floats. Eventually gas and air comes to the surface. I think a big part of it is that planes are big \u2014 but they&amp;#039;re not big compared to the ocean.  ESQ: It wasn&amp;#039;t just the Malaysian government looking, right? JP: No, it&amp;#039;s really an international thing. Everyone likes to be the one who finds it. It becomes a bragging rights situation. It&amp;#039;s a type of forward presence, or a power projection. But the Chinese wanted it most of all, and what might explain their claim yesterday of finding potential wreckage via satellite. That&amp;#039;s where the plane was headed and they suffered most of the presumed casualties here. ESQ: If and when they find the wreckage, what&amp;#039;s the next step? JP: The next step is getting as many pieces to the plane as they can. It&amp;#039;s a CSI scene and now we&amp;#039;ve got a cadaver. Black box aside, we&amp;#039;ll know \u2014 if there&amp;#039;s a bomb on board, we&amp;#039;ll know from the actual, physical wreckage. They can build a grid and try to reconstruct the aircraft. It&amp;#039;s a dark art, but all of the companies have it.  If there was an explosion, how did that happen? They&amp;#039;ll find out by diving down, seeing what sank, and dragging it up. If there&amp;#039;s explosive decompression damage, they&amp;#039;ll know The fleshy parts of a body would collect projectiles. It doesn&amp;#039;t help that the longer you&amp;#039;re in the water, the less useful it is, because of all of the creatures in the ocean. And, of course, there are the humanitarian reasons, as well. ESQ: The most popular theory going around right now is that the cabin depressurized due to a faulty flap by the antenna. This allegedly would cause the pilots to lose consciousness from a lack of oxygen. Is this possible? I guess the better question is, is this likely? And what about this would make a plane disappear?  JP: It&amp;#039;s something that happens to smaller aircrafts. It&amp;#039;s something that happened with that PGA golfer Payne Stewart years ago, but that plane was much smaller, and it flew for a long time. The idea that everyone at once lost consciousness with no warning is a little bit strange to me. I&amp;#039;m trying to think of the biggest plane that this has happened to recently. I remember, say, a business jet, but not something bigger than a Cessna. (Ed&amp;#039;s Note: One of our readers, Harry Allen, notes that a 737&amp;#039;s crash in Greece in 2005 is attributed to depressurization.) Plus, this would be a slow and insidious process and there should be warnings on board that alerts everyone before this ever had a chance of happening. Pilots should be able to put masks on and be okay. It depends how slow it would&amp;#039;ve happened. With things like this, if there&amp;#039;s a known risk \u2014 no matter how small \u2014 there&amp;#039;s a good, engineered counter to it. ESQ: What do you think is the most probable thing to have happened at this point? This is a safe space for conjecture and outright guessing, by the way, even if it&amp;#039;s the most left-field idea on Earth. JP: A little while ago, I was thinking a hijack, but now I don&amp;#039;t think that&amp;#039;s the case because I was believing the Malaysian military and their off-the-flightpath nonsense. Now you&amp;#039;ve gotta look at a bomb on board. I&amp;#039;m not thinking it was taken down by a missile or anything like that. But something happened and it was something very, very quick and very, very violent. That leaves a catastrophic mechanical failure, which is bad news for Boeing. Or a catastrophic terrorist event, which is bad news for everybody. Or it&amp;#039;s a bigger event. Now they&amp;#039;ll have to look at some streaming data from the blackbox and sort through what&amp;#039;s there. ESQ: Is this enough impetus to move blackboxes off the airplanes themselves and have the transferring data to somewhere else, so searches like this won&amp;#039;t take almost a week in the future? JP: You&amp;#039;d think after Air France (Flight 447) they would&amp;#039;ve gone that way. But there&amp;#039;s an opportunity now to go into satellite-based air traffic control. The (satellite) launches are getting cheaper. The sats are getting smaller. We wouldn&amp;#039;t be so incumbent on the black boxes anymore for finding that first bit of information. But we&amp;#039;re never going to know what happened until you recover the remains of the airplane. It&amp;#039;s not going to obviate the years of painstaking research with autopsies and finding parts of the plane and pieces of bodies to find out what happened. It&amp;#039;s nice to have all the recordings. It&amp;#039;s nice to have all the metrics on the health of the engine and stuff. You&amp;#039;re never going to get away from having to go and fish this shit out. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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