MH370 search team finds second shipwreck
bbc.com
bbc.com
Here's a link to their search progress page: http://jacc.gov.au/families/operational_reports/
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
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11th_Victim_Compensa...
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".
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.
I don't understand why or how an insurance company would raise rates in one area because of increased costs in a different area. If the costs in the first area haven't gone up, but they still raise rates, then they'll just be undercut by other insurance companies who don't raise rates, and lose business. And if they don't raise rates in the area where costs have gone up, then they'll lose money on it.
When I search for "insurance levies" all I can find are taxes on insurance premiums.
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!
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.
Then again sat phones seem to cost $300 and up on Amazon so you'd think they could make something cheaper than $120k.
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 :)
http://findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=109&refer=FrontpageBa...
ADS-B isn't required for all aircraft but a substantial number of them are already using it. The other aircraft (that will be required to use ADS-B) still have some time before it's mandatory (2017 in Europe and 2020 in the U.S., IIRC).
Wasn't one of the issues with MH370 that some of the transponder equipment had been turned off?
Yep the pilot according to the reports turned off the transponders and other radio equipment in the aircraft. The only thing that remained transmitting once it went silent was the Boeing diagnostic signal from the engines but that was discovered later and wasn't that helpful to begin with.
When you can buy IFE units for $1500 per seat, it should be possible to build and certify such a device for much less than $120k.
http://airfax.com/blog/index.php/2015/04/09/lumexis-ipax-and...
That said, $120k is not an outrageous amount of money in aviation. A 777 costs $8700/hour in fuel and oil alone to operate.
http://www.what2fly.com/manufacturer/operating_cost/Boeing/7...
Compared to a transceiver which is a high power EM radiator hooked up to main power, IFEs are a regulatory and design afterthought made cheap by the expense put into all of the other parts.
I spent some time in RAF repair hangers ~15 years ago, and remember being absolutely blown away by the cost of parts (for a Jaguar GR1B in this case). Torch lightbulb? £10,000. Red LED? £25,000. 50cm of 16swg wire, £5,000. Seat cushion? £90,000.
So a satellite tracker for £100k is an absolute bargain, in aerospace pricing terms.
It boils down to "cover your ass".
The main cause of the crash was speed sensors failures which trigger other actions. I can certainly see why the plane parts are so expensive.
I also scratch built RC plane with my kid. We had a few crashes cause by loss wire connections between RC receiver and the servo.
I was extremely glad it is just RC plane instead of the real plane and appreciate the real engineering / reliability build into the modem aircraft.
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.
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...
Anyone in the air travel industry understand why it is limited to 30 minutes?
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.
Except that if you want it to be a useful back box, it needs to survive Events. Like being blown up in midair. Or roasting in a jet fuel fire for half an hour. Or, random example, sitting at the bottom of the ocean for several years.
That multiplies the engineering challenge, which in turn reduces the amount of storage you can put into the thing.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2630400/MH370-airlin...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/malaysia-airlines-didnt...
Still, if you're flying over a large body of water...
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
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#A...
[3] http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_07/corros...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#C...
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.
As it should be. That's why they're safe and reliable. "Move fast and break things" is a good motto for a fighter jet, but not a good motto for building a fighter jet, much less a civilian airplane.
If they're 20 years behind "state of the art", then there's no technical reason not to have real-time live position feed from the plane. The technology itself is old. I'm willing to buy your argument about costs, especially wrt. satellites, but I still like for someone to explain to me why they can't just use GPS + Iridium. It's work, it's relatively cheap, and a small telemetry reading every minute (just position + attitude + airspeed + altitude) would help tremendously in case of anything - from an accident to kidnapping.
There are many figures citing 5,000 planes in the air over the United States at any given time. But especially for a tracker, you'd want to leave it on all the time the plane is turned on, so many of the planes on the ground would need to be tracked as well.
My guess is that, particularly for the U.S. and Europe, putting planes on the Iridium network would exceed the total capacity of the system all by themselves, even if there were no other Iridium users.
This is not a trivial problem to solve.
I agree it's not a trivial problem to solve, but it looks solvable.
They'll need to integrate with avionics networks that are crazy complex. The code on these avionics must be certified formally, line by line, with proofs. Then the electronics and code have to work in an insane range of conditions, while being bombarded with radiation, and never get anything wrong. These take a lot of time and money to develop.
Commercial aviation (i.e. in USA) is safer over the last 14 years than ever in history. You are more likely to win the lottery, and then be hit by lightning, than to die on a trip these days. The reason it's safe, is using 20 year old bullet proof technology, which is working just fine, but design.
Sadly, the leading cause of major crashes is now deranged pilots, and war.
SatCom is very expensive. Sure, oil is cheap this quarter, but once it climbs again, airlines will return to their 2% profit margins. Remember, for most of the last 20 years, airlines have struggled to break even. If blackboxes and telemetry must be transmitted via satellite continuously, the bill will be substantial. Remember, Iridium was so expensive the company went under. The cost would be Billions, not a "fraction of a million."
2. Does not prevent MH370
Everything on an airliner must have an emergency shutoff. Fire is the worst threat in the air. Swiss Air 111 crashed due to a fire in the cockpit wiring [1]. The first step if there is smoke in a cockpit is to pull breakers, to isolate the problem. Today the pilots can pull the breakers to the engines, flight computers, and black boxes. If these SatComm trackers were added, they would have been disabled by the same party that disabled all the other communications on MH370. As such, they don't fix the problem of a pilot that doesn't want to be found.
The rational, utilitarian value of the search is the potential to prevent future losses by finding out what happened. That's the main reason why crashes are investigated in the first place: not to point fingers, but to prevent repeats.
It's hard to say what that value is here. This could very well have been a complete one-off. But it could also be worth a lot.
That's a very cold thing to say. This thread is a slightly insensitive, it's akin to mechanically calculating the financial cost of 9/11 (planes, buildings, responders) and then saying "sure, closure [...] is great, but not worth more than the $X already spent". geez.
The source you quoted makes it clear that the $170,000 is a lower bound -- a minimum payment that the families are guaranteed by the convention -- but on average the families get much more, and in fact, the average settlements in the U.S. (estimated $4.5 million) are even higher than the figure I used ($1.8 million).
But OK, the article also has a chart that says payments in Malaysia average $600,000, and since MH370 is a Malaysian flight, then that is what I should have used.
So let Malaysia Airlines look for it. They're the ones who lost it.
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-rega... (article from 2008)
And a link to the data itself: http://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/marine/bathymetry
How many may they have missed?
Irony.
On top of that, we don't have radar tracking over the oceans. Transcievers don't communicate all the time while in flight. There are long periods of time where you are outside any national radar system. Compounded, it's entirely reasonable to lose a plane.
There are 15-20 planes that have never been found since the 1980s.
Probably the massive amount of money involved, and for very little gain. Most of them are going to crash hard and end up in the bottom of the ocean in little bits. Knowing where they crashed isn't going to save anybody, they're dead on impact.
But there's a lot to gain in analyzing the data. E.g. AF447 was a perfectly flyable plane that was lost due to bad piloting.
I don't know if Air France has actually started training and/or screening their pilots to help prevent a similar accident. But that's why we search so diligently; we need to know what went wrong so we can try to fix it.
Even if Radar will give you the exact point of impact with water (which it will never do) there are still so many variables that it might not be that much of a help to begin with over a general grid area.
You'll also need to integrate that system across borders and jurisdiction which isn't easy politically.
It will also not surprise me if many actors want to have certain level of privacy as far as international airspace goes.
But the biggest factor at the end is cost compared to the relative costs of S&R missions if you did had additional tracking data. In the past 25 years only 3 scheduled passenger flights were not found including MH370 there were quite a few other private, chartered, and cargo flights that went missing mostly in tricky areas to search for in the first place like the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean.
It's doubtful that better radar coverage could even help with such cases even if you build a network of over the horizon radars which will scan for aircraft at various altitudes e.g. 2000-30000 ft. This will be very expensive and when you have a small aircraft that crashes onto a mountain side in an area where S&R can't get too or crashes over a 5KM deep ocean they might very well not help that much.
An example would be a floating accelerometer/gyroscope/barometer combination found on almost all phones for instance. If plane crashes, the markers will float and its path can be reverse plotted based on stored sensor data, which we will get when we find one floating around. It doesn't need to have internet connectivity.
The ocean provides huge amounts of dilution.