The case you present for there being a problem, that needs to be addressed, with airplanes disappearing, would be a good deal stronger if you could present othe

The case you present for there being a problem, that needs to be addressed, with airplanes disappearing, would be a good deal stronger if you could present other recent examples (Amelia Earhart, for example, is hardly relevant) of airliners disappearing and not being found. Currently, for example, the wreckage of the Chilean C130 that was lost en route to Antarctica has not been recovered, but there was little doubt about where it crashed, as was confirmed by the discovery of floating debris. The same can be said for AF447 - in both cases, the problem is not knowing where they crashed, but that they are at the bottom of the ocean. What is puzzling here is why this issue entered this discussion in the first place. Apparently I was mistaken in thinking that you, yourself, are of this opinion (an honest mistake, given the way you have presented it), but if not you, then who? Is there any credible body claiming that this is a problem that needs to be solved, and is pushing for a specific solution to be mandated, but is being opposed by the airline industry on the basis of cost? If all three of the above conditions are being seen in a current dispute, then that would make a much better case for your position than anything you have written so far; on the other hand, if this is merely a hypothetical dispute, then it has no relevance even to the issue of the airlines' power to prevent the adoption of safety measures, let alone the original issue in this thread, which is whether the cost alone rules out the global roll-out of safety measures. I do not dispute that the airlines have often opposed safety measures on the grounds of cost; Ernest Gann complained bitterly about it in 'Fate is the Hunter'. All I did was to point out that cost is not necessarily the deciding issue, using TCAS as an example. The fact that ICAO mandated it does not somehow invalidate it as an example; that is just how these things work. > If a regulatory body feels the risk is common enough, it’ll mandate it. That is the one point that I was making in my original post. > Please don’t expect someone to not push back when you present your case with false assumptions. Indeed.