A year. Three hundred and sixty-five days of spooling tape, of forensic sifting through wreckage, of waiting for answers that may never come. The latest investigation into that fallen plane is a masterclass in bureaucratic futility.
We have become, as a civilisation, obsessed with the 'closure' narrative. We demand a villain, a malfunction, a neat paragraph in a final report. But what remains when a plane falls from the sky is not an explanation.
It is a void. The Victorian era understood tragedy. They draped themselves in black, erected monuments, and got on with the business of empire.
Today, we demand a committee. We demand compensation. We demand that the universe make sense.
It will not. This investigation is a mirror held up to our own decadence: we have so little control over the chaos of the world that we fetishise the debris. We pick over the fragments of aluminium and carbon fibre as if they were runes.
They are not. They are just broken things. The waiting is the point.
It fills the airwaves. It gives pundits something to say. But the real story is this: when the plane falls, we are reminded that gravity is still the law, and that our technology is a thin veneer over the abyss.
A year of waiting, and what remains? The same question that has haunted every civilisation from Rome to now: what do we do when the gods are silent?
