In a development that has sent shockwaves through the corridors of power and the digestive tracts of gin-swilling hacks everywhere, a commercial aircraft has reportedly performed an unscheduled and deeply unwelcome rendezvous with a tower in the heart of Beijing. Details, as is the wont of the world’s most populous shrug, remain as opaque as a Peking fog. The Chinese authorities, never ones to let a little thing like a catastrophic aviation incident spoil a good story, have clammed up tighter than a virgin oyster on a plate of Samphire.
Sources on the ground whisper of a 'loud bang' and 'many flashing lights,' which in my experience could describe either a plane crash or a particularly ambitious Eurovision entry. The state broadcaster, after a brief moment of what we in the trade call 'journalism,' has reverted to type, beaming out pictures of smiling factory workers and the soothing hum of a society in perfect harmony. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is left to piece together the wreckage from grainy CCTV footage and the frantic, garbled accounts of terrified witnesses.
Was it a tragic accident, a disastrous miscalculation, or something more sinister? The Black Box, that holy grail of air disaster investigation, is presumably being 'examined' by men in white coats who will eventually emerge to announce that the cause was 'spontaneous combustion of a rogue badger' before returning to their mahjong tiles. The Xi Jinping administration, master of the stonewall, has dismissed calls for transparency with the usual platitudes about 'internal procedures' and 'avoiding unnecessary panic.
' Panic, I suspect, is the last thing they want to avoid. A panicked populace is a demanding populace, and demanding questions about why your sky-scrapers are suddenly proving irresistible to inbound airliners is not on today's agenda. So we are left with the debris, the silence, and the gnawing suspicion that the truth, like the plane's flight path, took a rather sharp turn away from anything we might actually want to know.
