Virilio suggests that if the thought that goes into the invention of the jet airliner is revolutionary, then the thought which emerges from a plane crash is ‘revelationary’. The accident is not simply the negation of a substance, it is the production of a synchronicity which lies hidden within that substance, the flashing up of an obscure set of coincidences which is experienced with the force of an epiphany. A crash is first suffered as a ‘way of negation’ in which knowledge of the world is stripped away and signs that are expected fail to arrive. At 06:30 on a certain day Flight MH370 does not land in Beijing, at 01:37 it had not transmitted its expected half-hourly ACARS data, at 01:22 it did not appear on Ho Chi Minh City civilian radar and at 01:19 the co-pilot did not use his call sign when he said, “All right, goodnight”. And yet these last words are the starting point for an irradiation of new signs across specialist fields of knowledge from aerospace engineering to X-ray scanner design. For the parallel with negative theology, see http://www.gotquestions.org/apophatic-theology.html