I wrote last week about the frustration of border controls and security checks when travelling by air. My gripe was mainly with the under-manning of these processes at many airports at a time when air travel seems to be growing, rather than any suggestion that rigorous safety procedures are not necessary. It must be done; but it could be done better.

The disappearance of the Malaysian aeroplane last week serves to focus our minds, however, on the need for the endless stringent checks that we tend to have to endure these days. Until last Friday, the total disappearance of a plane would have been for me the stuff of action films and lurid fiction, not the real world. However, as I write this, it is five days since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 with 227 passengers on board, simply disappeared off the coast of Vietnam, without trace.

I was astonished to learn that the transponders that identify planes to radar beacons can be turned off by the pilot and that, it appears, is what may have happened as the plane disappeared from the radar screens at around the same time as the last radio message was received from the cockpit. We can only imagine the agony being felt by the waiting hundreds of relatives who still know no more than they did when they were first told that their family member or friend would not be landing in Beijing as planned.

I have travelled on three planes since Friday, on my thirty-six hour return journey from New Zealand and I must say that as a frequent flier and one who usually subscribes to the ‘It’s safer than driving on a motorway’ maxim, I was less sanguine about the process than I have been in the past and I know I paid more attention to the safety demonstration and accompanying video than has been my custom previously. It is also true that I tolerated being comprehensively frisked in Dubai more stoically when the metal edge of my wallet triggered the alarm as I passed through the scanner.

It is in the context of all this effective and comprehensive security that someone may have still managed to cause harm to a plane full of people whose fate is still a mystery to us.

It is hard to imagine an outcome that is not tragic. We can only hope.