Why the big silence on missing flight?

While technology today can track a truck on a highway every second along its way, it seems bizarre that a widebody jet can just vanish, with neither signal nor trace of wreckage.  [Special coverage]

After almost a week, there is some evidence to indicate that flight MH370 may have flown westward for a few hours after it disappeared from radar scenes. Signals automatically and instantaneously transmitted via satellite back to ground control took a week to reach the public.

Why is the silence on the missing flight being kept so long?

In an age when many are fed up with the scandal of technologically superior companies randomly collecting client information through designated "back doors" to utilize big data for business or national security concerns, has Boeing not yet developed an all-weather real-time monitoring network for its global assets, for whatever purpose?

A product of human civilization the size of a jumbo jet should not simply vanish so easily.

With no deep throats from the industry or military, people pinned their hopes on naval vessels. Chinese and Vietnamese vessels, for example, combed the sea area again and again, while some already knew for sure that search and rescue missions would be in vain.

A week has passed, with officials largely silent.

More unauthorized deep throats are encouraged to leak information which authorities remain silent on, for whatever reasons.

Without ruling out the possibility of terrorism, and with live signals detailing the unusual flight pattern of MH370, Western governments are conspicuously tight-lipped on terrorism speculations, quite different from their reactions to Pan Am Flight 103 which crashed on Lockerbie, Great Britain, in 1988.

Fear and desperation among families and friends of passengers are growing amid an absence of information. The international search and rescue mission, if still worthwhile after the whole week, has been marred by confusion, early mistakes and lack of information.

The fear has deepened. Three unidentified sources reportedly updated the world that military radar data suggested the plane was deliberately flown hundreds of miles to the west, a huge deviation from the scheduled Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route, along corridors normally employed for flights to the Middle East and Europe.

The week of searching in waters east of Malaysia may have been for nothing.

Mounting evidence points to the theory that, including the possibilities of pilot error or terrorist activity, the loss of MH370 with 239 people on board is a man-made event rather than the result of a mechanical breakdown.

If sabotage is not ruled out, withholding information from the public can be dangerous, even lethal.

Silence, sometimes, can kill.

Waiting in desperation, a cancer patient in China died without knowing the whereabouts of his child on board, alive or dead.

More people are waiting, hopefully or hopelessly.

All lives are equal. Prayers for the innocent passengers aboard MH370 are now prayers for a miracle. We can only hope for that miracle to come before the families and friends tire of waiting.