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Whenever a plane goes down, experienced aircraft investigators look at the general circumstances and mentally draw up a list of the most likely causes — not to leap to conclusions, but to prioritize lines of inquiry and organize competing hypotheses. As information comes in, it should be possible to eliminate those hypotheses one by one until at last a full understanding of the circumstances remains. The goal is to make sure that the problem will never again bring down an airliner. This philosophy works: Year by year, fewer commercial airliners are lost to accidents.

The downside is that, as likely sources of aircraft accidents are eliminated, what’s left behind are increasingly arcane and bizarre, once-in-a-million combinations of bad luck, incompetence, and malice. And the longer we go without any significant clues regarding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the more likely that its true cause will fall into that category.