8 ms·

> spent well over $100m on the search It sounds huge, but to put a different perspective on this, look at the cost of what was lost: - The Boeing 777-200ER ai

> spent well over $100m on the search It sounds huge, but to put a different perspective on this, look at the cost of what was lost: - The Boeing 777-200ER aircraft is worth US$261.5 million[1]. - The average payout for each of the 9/11 victims, including passengers and crew on the planes, was US$1.8 million[2]. We know that MH370 had 239 passengers and crew, so at the same "cost" that would be 239 x 1.8 = US$430.2 million. So the total value of the MH370 loss is at least US$691.7 million. Looked at this way, the $100 million spent on the search so far doesn't seem that much to bring closure to the families and to solve the mystery for legal, technical, and future flight safety reasons. Suppose you lost something very valuable and sentimental, even if you knew it was destroyed, is it unreasonable to spend 15% of its value ($100M/$691.7M = 15%) to find out what happened to it? (Personally, I do think it's worth spending more to keep the search going.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11th_Victim_Compensation_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11th_Victim_Compensa...

amatix 11y ago
Though AFAIK Australian and Malaysian taxpayers are picking up the search cost? Whereas Malaysia Airline's insurers are picking up the cost of the plane & family/crew compensation...
- ricksplat 11y ago
  I don't know what the story is in Malaysia, but where I live any huge payouts by insurance companies ultimately get borne by the consumer (almost equivalent to taxpayer) in the form of increased premiums and levies. It's not tax for sure, but it is effectively an additional set of charges that many people have to pay.
  - woah 11y ago
    Well that is the purpose of insurance.
    - ricksplat 11y ago
      I didn't say it was unfair - I was saying that everybody ends up paying for it in the end, even if it's not through direct taxation.
      - mikeash 11y ago
        In a case like this, it's not everybody, but airline customers, and in rough proportion to how much they fly. Which is a decent way to distribute the costs.
        ricksplat 11y ago
        > it's not everybody, but airline customers I'm afraid that's just not true. That is certainly the principal, but in reality (in Europe at least) the costs are distributed across the entire consumer-base. The costs are "socialised".
        mikeash 11y ago
        I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that if, for example, airline-related insurance claims increase, the insurance companies will raise their rates for all types of insurance, not just airline-related insurance?
        ricksplat 11y ago
        So costs get socialised in three ways I can think of; firstly the direct increase in insurance charges to those who avail of flight insurance (this is the case which you mentioned) - but it doesn't stop there - this increases the "cost of business" and these costs are passed on. By the time these increased costs reach individuals the effect is negligible but it does affect the broader (Malaysian) economy. The second is through insurance companies increasing charges across the board. Insurance is a marketplace just like any other and in order to stay competitive in one market costs can be spread to another. The final is direct regulatory intervention where the wider customer base is directly charged a percentage (google "insurance levies"). So I opened with "I don't know what the story is in Malaysia but .." because the relative influence of each of these factors is profoundly regional, related to regulatory and government policy . But now that I think of it, even in a libertarian paradise the effect of the second one alone would be fairly significant.
ricksplat 11y ago
As well as that, there are numerous side benefits. As TFA says, we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the floor of the oceans. The amount of knowledge that will be gained for the public domain from this effort will be massive. Take CERN for instance - even if the benefits of verifying the Higgs Boson are beyond you, you can't argue that its providing the incubating environment for technologies such as the World Wide Web, and development of other engineering know-how, is in and of itself a bad thing!
- moftz 11y ago
  Scientific advancement is great and I support it but there's a point where you need to spend money on other endeavors as well. $100M may not seem like much in the big picture but where is this money being diverted from? Cancer research? Poverty relief? Healthcare? Defense? It would be great if we could fund every research proposal out there but we have a lot of pressing, current issues now that may be worth more fixing than doing furthering science more.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That's a fair point, though it would be even better if science wasn't so terribly underfunded as it is. We have a lot of pressing, current issues but we also have a lot of spending that could be put to better use. Like defense, for which in first world countries $100M is basically change money. Or corporate welfare. Or funding political campaigns. Science is literally the last thing you want to use "we have a lot of pressing, current issues now that may be worth more fixing" line against.
  - ricksplat 11y ago
    Science must be done, not just for the sake of academics and the people in labs, but for the sake of those very causes people claim it draws money away from. Cancer research, poverty relief, healthcare and defence [bad example] can all benefit from a good dose of science. Even if not applied to the field itself some very significant advances have come about through serendipitous discoveries when somebody was doing something else. What matters is the scientific method such that the results can be shared and reproduced. Specifically one could imagine some benefits from deep sea exploration in the south pacific could benefit each of these fields, but I'll admit that's spurious. But the point is, for political ends it is being done anyway, and while we're at it we may as well be "doing science" and getting the best out of it.
tim333 11y ago
Also compared with putting satellite trackers on all planes it may be cheaper. Apparently there are about 20,000 commercial jets and I saw one quote if would cost $120k/plane. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/11325824/AirAsia-QZ8501-why-do-we-still-rely-on-black-boxes.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/11325824/AirAsi...) Then again sat phones seem to cost $300 and up on Amazon so you'd think they could make something cheaper than $120k.
- signa11 11y ago
  > ... satellite trackers on all planes ... no need for dedicated equipment, afaik. commercial planes already send ADS-B broadcasts to other planes and ground stations. so if those could be received by satellites, you would have satellite-plane-tracking. as long as every nation agrees on reserving a part of spectrum for that :)
  - zik 11y ago
    ADS-B signals aren't suitable for satellite communications unfortunately. But you can get one of these satellite trackers for $120 so you'd think they could come up with something for less than $120k. http://findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=109&refer=FrontpageBanner http://findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=109&refer=FrontpageBa...
    - ju-st 11y ago
      Apparently ADS-B is suitable? https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/systemops/ato_intl/documents/cross_polar/CPWG16/CPWG16_PPT09_Satellite_Based_ADSB_December2013.pdf https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...
      - sllabres 11y ago
        Yes, i think this is what is planned with Iridium NEXT. -> http://aireon.com/ http://aireon.com/
    - 11y ago
lmm 11y ago
> Suppose you lost something very valuable and sentimental, even if you knew it was destroyed, is it unreasonable to spend 15% of its value ($100M/$691.7M = 15%) to find out what happened to it? Does sentimental value scale with monetary value like that? I don't think it does. If I'd spend $1000 to figure out what happened to a $1 trinket my sister gave me, that doesn't mean I'd spend $10,000 to figure out what happened to a $10 thing.
rwmj 11y ago
Will finding the "black box" solve the mystery? The cockpit voice recorder will only record the last 30 minutes, which is unlikely to be interesting.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  The "blackbox" has couple of recorders in it, the cockpit voice recorder might not be interesting but the flight data recorder which records the data of the entire flight will be.
  - ansible 11y ago
    I think both will be interesting. Very often the voice recorders from plane crashes contain important clues (aside from what the pilots said). You can hear audio alerts from the aircraft, switches being flicked, lightning strikes, all sorts of things. And in this case, we want to know what the heck was going on with the pilots. Did they go crazy, just go unconscious from drinking too much, was there a fire...
- EvanKelly 11y ago
  Surely we have the technology to record the full flight? I do understand pilot privacy, but couldn't we only listen to it in case of an incident? Anyone in the air travel industry understand why it is limited to 30 minutes?
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    It takes time for new technology to be adopted for this. Keep in mind the stakes, the extremely difficult requirements, and the expense of testing a new system. Imagine trying to update the system to use a different technology. Then imagine how amazingly bad it would be if it didn't work as well as the old system. Or if it lost data when it shouldn't have. And so on. It's the classic system rewrite conundrum. You can rewrite a system at fairly low cost, but in order to bring that system up to feature and reliability parity you need to put in an order of magnitude more effort. And in this case you don't really want to deal with "early adopter risk" so you need to dump all that effort (read: money) in ahead of time.
melling 11y ago
Could have all been solved by now for a lot less with an ounce of prevention (about $10): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2630400/MH370-airline-bosses-bought-10-tracking-device-claims-new-book-Nigel-Cawthorne.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2630400/MH370-airlin...
- jon-wood 11y ago
  That may be the case, but without a source other than the Daily Mail and a quick cash in book I'm sceptical that's the whole story.
  - melling 11y ago
    I can't find the exact cost. The Washington Post says that it might have been more. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/malaysia-airlines-didnt-buy-computer-upgrade-that-could-have-given-data-on-missing-flight/2014/03/19/40e2484c-af7c-11e3-a49e-76adc9210f19_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/malaysia-airlines-didnt... Still, if you're flying over a large body of water...
seanmcdirmid 11y ago
Well, just knowing what happened so we can try to ensure that isn't doesn't happen again. Plane crash investigations are typically thorough for this reason.
twistedpair 11y ago
No, and No. The standard payment for plane crash victims is $170,000 per passenger according to the Montreal Convention [1]. No one pays sticker price for the plane, so they didn't play close to $261M. The plane was purchased in 2002 as well (payments started before that), so again, not $261M due to 12 years of inflation. There is also the airframe depreciation. The frame had flown 53,471 hours [2] of a 60,000 [3] hour minimum design life. The plane was not in like new condition, so the replacement cost would be far lower. The airline's insurance company [4] also picks up the tab for most of this. Finally, the scrap value of a crushed airframe at the bottom of the pacific? $0. Sure, closure and being able to say it wasn't MH or Boeing's fault is great, but not worth much more than the $100M already spent. [1] http://time.com/3763541/germanwings-plane-crash-settlement http://time.com/3763541/germanwings-plane-crash-settlement [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#Aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#A... [3] http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_07/corrosn_sb_table01.html http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_07/corros... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#Compensation_for_passengers.27_next-of-kin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#C...
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  This should be an incentive towards spending that fraction of a million to install proper trackers on all planes. Why nobody does it?
  - elmin 11y ago
    Because the regulatory system which keeps planes safe also makes it paralyzingly slow to keep them up to date. If plane tech is always 20 years behind what is possible, it's not shocking they don't have continuous tracking. There are also other historical reasons. It's traditionally the job of the pilots in the plane to keep track of its position, meaning giving them GPS was more valuable than giving position information to the ground. The US is just getting to the point where air traffic control can get GPS from planes, and that is based on ground stations which won't work over the ocean. Which leads to the final issue, the outdated nature of the rocketry industry (and the intrinsic difficulty of getting to space), has made it very expensive to launch the satellites you need for worldwide communication. They exist, but they are much more expensive than any other way of communicating. Which means, if the airlines can piggyback on ground based comms (which they can), there's not much incentive to make that work over the ocean. Until you lose a plane.
mhurron 11y ago
> Suppose you lost something very valuable and sentimental, even if you knew it was destroyed, is it unreasonable to spend 15% of its value ($100M/$691.7M = 15%) to find out what happened to it? (Personally, I do think it's worth spending more to keep the search going.) So let Malaysia Airlines look for it. They're the ones who lost it.
- peteretep 11y ago
  I wonder what MH's naval capabilities are like these days O_o
goatforce5 11y ago
As Australia is geographically isolated from the rest of the world, the area that they're responsible (under maritime laws/treaties) for doing rescues in is extremely large. Questions have been raised in Australia previously about the cost of doing search and rescue missions at sea. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/rescues-to-continue-regardless-of-cost/2008/12/21/1229794246581.html http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/rescues-to-continue-rega... (article from 2008)

amatix 11y ago

Though AFAIK Australian and Malaysian taxpayers are picking up the search cost? Whereas Malaysia Airline's insurers are picking up the cost of the plane & family/crew compensation...

ricksplat 11y ago
I don't know what the story is in Malaysia, but where I live any huge payouts by insurance companies ultimately get borne by the consumer (almost equivalent to taxpayer) in the form of increased premiums and levies. It's not tax for sure, but it is effectively an additional set of charges that many people have to pay.
- woah 11y ago
  Well that is the purpose of insurance.
  - ricksplat 11y ago
    I didn't say it was unfair - I was saying that everybody ends up paying for it in the end, even if it's not through direct taxation.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      In a case like this, it's not everybody, but airline customers, and in rough proportion to how much they fly. Which is a decent way to distribute the costs.
      - ricksplat 11y ago
        > it's not everybody, but airline customers I'm afraid that's just not true. That is certainly the principal, but in reality (in Europe at least) the costs are distributed across the entire consumer-base. The costs are "socialised".
        mikeash 11y ago
        I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that if, for example, airline-related insurance claims increase, the insurance companies will raise their rates for all types of insurance, not just airline-related insurance?
        ricksplat 11y ago
        So costs get socialised in three ways I can think of; firstly the direct increase in insurance charges to those who avail of flight insurance (this is the case which you mentioned) - but it doesn't stop there - this increases the "cost of business" and these costs are passed on. By the time these increased costs reach individuals the effect is negligible but it does affect the broader (Malaysian) economy. The second is through insurance companies increasing charges across the board. Insurance is a marketplace just like any other and in order to stay competitive in one market costs can be spread to another. The final is direct regulatory intervention where the wider customer base is directly charged a percentage (google "insurance levies"). So I opened with "I don't know what the story is in Malaysia but .." because the relative influence of each of these factors is profoundly regional, related to regulatory and government policy . But now that I think of it, even in a libertarian paradise the effect of the second one alone would be fairly significant.

ricksplat 11y ago

As well as that, there are numerous side benefits. As TFA says, we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the floor of the oceans. The amount of knowledge that will be gained for the public domain from this effort will be massive. Take CERN for instance - even if the benefits of verifying the Higgs Boson are beyond you, you can't argue that its providing the incubating environment for technologies such as the World Wide Web, and development of other engineering know-how, is in and of itself a bad thing!

moftz 11y ago
Scientific advancement is great and I support it but there's a point where you need to spend money on other endeavors as well. $100M may not seem like much in the big picture but where is this money being diverted from? Cancer research? Poverty relief? Healthcare? Defense? It would be great if we could fund every research proposal out there but we have a lot of pressing, current issues now that may be worth more fixing than doing furthering science more.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  That's a fair point, though it would be even better if science wasn't so terribly underfunded as it is. We have a lot of pressing, current issues but we also have a lot of spending that could be put to better use. Like defense, for which in first world countries $100M is basically change money. Or corporate welfare. Or funding political campaigns. Science is literally the last thing you want to use "we have a lot of pressing, current issues now that may be worth more fixing" line against.
- ricksplat 11y ago
  Science must be done, not just for the sake of academics and the people in labs, but for the sake of those very causes people claim it draws money away from. Cancer research, poverty relief, healthcare and defence [bad example] can all benefit from a good dose of science. Even if not applied to the field itself some very significant advances have come about through serendipitous discoveries when somebody was doing something else. What matters is the scientific method such that the results can be shared and reproduced. Specifically one could imagine some benefits from deep sea exploration in the south pacific could benefit each of these fields, but I'll admit that's spurious. But the point is, for political ends it is being done anyway, and while we're at it we may as well be "doing science" and getting the best out of it.

tim333 11y ago

Also compared with putting satellite trackers on all planes it may be cheaper. Apparently there are about 20,000 commercial jets and I saw one quote if would cost $120k/plane. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/11325824/AirAsia-QZ8501-why-do-we-still-rely-on-black-boxes.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/11325824/AirAsi...) Then again sat phones seem to cost $300 and up on Amazon so you'd think they could make something cheaper than $120k.

signa11 11y ago
> ... satellite trackers on all planes ... no need for dedicated equipment, afaik. commercial planes already send ADS-B broadcasts to other planes and ground stations. so if those could be received by satellites, you would have satellite-plane-tracking. as long as every nation agrees on reserving a part of spectrum for that :)
- zik 11y ago
  ADS-B signals aren't suitable for satellite communications unfortunately. But you can get one of these satellite trackers for $120 so you'd think they could come up with something for less than $120k. http://findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=109&refer=FrontpageBanner http://findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=109&refer=FrontpageBa...
  - ju-st 11y ago
    Apparently ADS-B is suitable? https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/systemops/ato_intl/documents/cross_polar/CPWG16/CPWG16_PPT09_Satellite_Based_ADSB_December2013.pdf https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...
    - sllabres 11y ago
      Yes, i think this is what is planned with Iridium NEXT. -> http://aireon.com/ http://aireon.com/
  - 11y ago

lmm 11y ago

> Suppose you lost something very valuable and sentimental, even if you knew it was destroyed, is it unreasonable to spend 15% of its value ($100M/$691.7M = 15%) to find out what happened to it? Does sentimental value scale with monetary value like that? I don't think it does. If I'd spend $1000 to figure out what happened to a $1 trinket my sister gave me, that doesn't mean I'd spend $10,000 to figure out what happened to a $10 thing.

rwmj 11y ago

Will finding the "black box" solve the mystery? The cockpit voice recorder will only record the last 30 minutes, which is unlikely to be interesting.

dogma1138 11y ago
The "blackbox" has couple of recorders in it, the cockpit voice recorder might not be interesting but the flight data recorder which records the data of the entire flight will be.
- ansible 11y ago
  I think both will be interesting. Very often the voice recorders from plane crashes contain important clues (aside from what the pilots said). You can hear audio alerts from the aircraft, switches being flicked, lightning strikes, all sorts of things. And in this case, we want to know what the heck was going on with the pilots. Did they go crazy, just go unconscious from drinking too much, was there a fire...
EvanKelly 11y ago
Surely we have the technology to record the full flight? I do understand pilot privacy, but couldn't we only listen to it in case of an incident? Anyone in the air travel industry understand why it is limited to 30 minutes?
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  It takes time for new technology to be adopted for this. Keep in mind the stakes, the extremely difficult requirements, and the expense of testing a new system. Imagine trying to update the system to use a different technology. Then imagine how amazingly bad it would be if it didn't work as well as the old system. Or if it lost data when it shouldn't have. And so on. It's the classic system rewrite conundrum. You can rewrite a system at fairly low cost, but in order to bring that system up to feature and reliability parity you need to put in an order of magnitude more effort. And in this case you don't really want to deal with "early adopter risk" so you need to dump all that effort (read: money) in ahead of time.

melling 11y ago

Could have all been solved by now for a lot less with an ounce of prevention (about $10): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2630400/MH370-airline-bosses-bought-10-tracking-device-claims-new-book-Nigel-Cawthorne.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2630400/MH370-airlin...

jon-wood 11y ago
That may be the case, but without a source other than the Daily Mail and a quick cash in book I'm sceptical that's the whole story.
- melling 11y ago
  I can't find the exact cost. The Washington Post says that it might have been more. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/malaysia-airlines-didnt-buy-computer-upgrade-that-could-have-given-data-on-missing-flight/2014/03/19/40e2484c-af7c-11e3-a49e-76adc9210f19_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/malaysia-airlines-didnt... Still, if you're flying over a large body of water...

seanmcdirmid 11y ago

Well, just knowing what happened so we can try to ensure that isn't doesn't happen again. Plane crash investigations are typically thorough for this reason.

twistedpair 11y ago

No, and No. The standard payment for plane crash victims is $170,000 per passenger according to the Montreal Convention [1]. No one pays sticker price for the plane, so they didn't play close to $261M. The plane was purchased in 2002 as well (payments started before that), so again, not $261M due to 12 years of inflation. There is also the airframe depreciation. The frame had flown 53,471 hours [2] of a 60,000 [3] hour minimum design life. The plane was not in like new condition, so the replacement cost would be far lower. The airline's insurance company [4] also picks up the tab for most of this. Finally, the scrap value of a crushed airframe at the bottom of the pacific? $0. Sure, closure and being able to say it wasn't MH or Boeing's fault is great, but not worth much more than the $100M already spent. [1] http://time.com/3763541/germanwings-plane-crash-settlement http://time.com/3763541/germanwings-plane-crash-settlement [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#Aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#A... [3] http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_07/corrosn_sb_table01.html http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_07/corros... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#Compensation_for_passengers.27_next-of-kin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#C...

TeMPOraL 11y ago
This should be an incentive towards spending that fraction of a million to install proper trackers on all planes. Why nobody does it?
- elmin 11y ago
  Because the regulatory system which keeps planes safe also makes it paralyzingly slow to keep them up to date. If plane tech is always 20 years behind what is possible, it's not shocking they don't have continuous tracking. There are also other historical reasons. It's traditionally the job of the pilots in the plane to keep track of its position, meaning giving them GPS was more valuable than giving position information to the ground. The US is just getting to the point where air traffic control can get GPS from planes, and that is based on ground stations which won't work over the ocean. Which leads to the final issue, the outdated nature of the rocketry industry (and the intrinsic difficulty of getting to space), has made it very expensive to launch the satellites you need for worldwide communication. They exist, but they are much more expensive than any other way of communicating. Which means, if the airlines can piggyback on ground based comms (which they can), there's not much incentive to make that work over the ocean. Until you lose a plane.

mhurron 11y ago

> Suppose you lost something very valuable and sentimental, even if you knew it was destroyed, is it unreasonable to spend 15% of its value ($100M/$691.7M = 15%) to find out what happened to it? (Personally, I do think it's worth spending more to keep the search going.) So let Malaysia Airlines look for it. They're the ones who lost it.

peteretep 11y ago
I wonder what MH's naval capabilities are like these days O_o

goatforce5 11y ago

As Australia is geographically isolated from the rest of the world, the area that they're responsible (under maritime laws/treaties) for doing rescues in is extremely large. Questions have been raised in Australia previously about the cost of doing search and rescue missions at sea. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/rescues-to-continue-regardless-of-cost/2008/12/21/1229794246581.html http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/rescues-to-continue-rega... (article from 2008)