The stick insect with pale lips, a jaunty manner, and the sense of still being attached to mummy gave a definitive statement of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. “The plane cannot be located.” It had a name; it had an identity. It was even registered on the screens of Zurich airport. But everything else was, quite literally, up in the air. In this day and age, a multi-million dollar commercial aircraft doing its rounds is bound to turn up on some scene, to urge itself into commercial and tangible existence. Not so for Herr Stick Insect, who seemed determined to excite and concern his inquirers with dedication.
And what of this ephemeral, invisible flight? Instant fears are fired in the imagination: did the plane vanish into a legend, forever trapped in the gurgling fantasies of a deluded culture? Did it suffer a terrible demise at the end of a faulty missile strike?
Humble flight JU 373 of Air Serbia was not going to disappear into the annals of flight martyrdom or conspiratorial mayhem. There was nothing of the jitteriness of Malaysia Airlines here, the tragic doom, the murderous calamity. No rocket was aimed; no mythological creature had made its presence felt. It was simply being incorrigible.
There were, however, initial reasons of concern. It had rerouted to Stuttgart in a manner that seemed erratic, and had not, as it were, told the personnel at Zurich why. This is the Serbian magic; remaining very much an enthusiast of Europe, it…