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Comment by cantrevealname | Hacker News Reader

> 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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11th_Victim_Compensa...

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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

[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...

This should be an incentive towards spending that fraction of a million to install proper trackers on all planes. Why nobody does it?

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.

> 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.

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.

If the internet is to be believed, the Iridium network has a total capacity of 172,000 simultaneous users (if every satellite worldwide is fully utilized).

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.

Thanks for the actual number. It seems though that 172 000 refers to simultaneous voice users. I was thinking about their data services - planes could send short bursts of location data (couple hundred bytes at most) every minute or three.

I agree it's not a trivial problem to solve, but it looks solvable.

I agree that this seems easily solvable. We use SPOT Trace (http://findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=128) units on offshore tug boats, as do many in the shipping industry. These periodically send their GPS location back via Globalstar. It seems to me that if a passenger jet can be approved to install satellite TV receivers, it could be approved for these.

Luckily, with SpaceX hoping to drive down the cost of launches, we'll see more M2M companies like OrbComm pushing down the price of this tracking. That sad, building the constellations, and certifying the avionics, will take time.

> why they can't just use GPS + Iridium

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.

1. Cost

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111

The value of what was lost is irrelevant, but I think you're too quick to dismiss the value of saying whose fault it was.

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.

> 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.

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 standard payment for plane crash victims is $170,000 per passenger according to the Montreal Convention. http://time.com/3763541/germanwings-plane-crash-settlement

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I agree with your overall point but why is defense a bad example? Defense systems benifit a great deal from advancements in science.

Haha cool, I just thought it was a bad example because defence in particular is notoriously well funded. In fact it's a better example for citing as a source of virtuous secondary benefits (like CERN, SETI or the search for MH370) because though controversial it's given us the internet!

> 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.

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-rega... (article from 2008)

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...

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.

Well that is the purpose of insurance.

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.

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.

> 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".

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?

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.

I'm not talking about individuals buying flight insurance, but airliners insuring their planes. All airline customers indirectly pay for that.

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.

Insurance levies aren't taxes because the state doesn't collect them. But their purpose is to subsidise the insurance industry.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

Technology to record the full flight is, of course, easy. Storage is cheap these days.

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.

> 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.

I wonder what MH's naval capabilities are like these days O_o

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-airlin...

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.

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...

Still, if you're flying over a large body of water...

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/AirAsi...)

Then again sat phones seem to cost $300 and up on Amazon so you'd think they could make something cheaper than $120k.

> ... 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 :)

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=FrontpageBa...

Apparently ADS-B is suitable? https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...

Yes, i think this is what is planned with Iridium NEXT. -> http://aireon.com/

There is a difference between consumer grade hardware and aviation grade hardware. Just the testing to certify that it plays nice with all the other equipment is outrageously expensive, not to factor in hardware design (it has to live through going to altitude and back 10 times a day, for years), maintenance, retraining the crews, etc.

I think everyone has pretty much agreed on 1.09 GHz for ADS-B.

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?

>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.

Only within reach of a ground station within ~350 km, see below

It's expensive to put hardware on planes, even if the hardware is cheap, because of all the regulations the hardware has to fulfill.

The simplest possible device can be an entirely self-contained GPS and sat modem, just needs a power supply.

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...

Even that has to be tested that it won't burn, explode, cause some electrical problem to the power supply, the sat modem will not interfere with all other electronic devices (in some unplanned manner, at least), that it can report to be working or not, that it can be turned off in case somethings goes wrong (leaving the problem that it is less usefull if it can be turned off), and how hard it will be to repair it (if it brakes too often and takes time to fix, it costs a lot to the companies)...

And all of that is equally true of the IFE units, thus the comparison.

No, it's not. The true cost of IFEs is hidden by other subsystems in the airplane that the IFEs run on, including the fully isolated power they use which costs a hell of a lot more than 1500 per passenger. IFEs are not safety critical, unlike all of the systems that keep those in seat units running including the engine generator hook up and the miles of wiring.

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.

Well, quite a few airlines already have satellite trackers on all their planes, even if it is just to provide free internet to all users, even over the ocean.

If it's for aviation, it's incredibly expensive. This is largely down to the monopolistic supply chains that operate - you want a widget for your aircraft, it's gotta come from Lockheed, Boeing, BAE, EADS (Airbus), Northrup, GDC, Raytheon and that's pretty much it - yes, there are other suppliers, but they're the ones that the huge manufacturers pick. Because of the closed nature of the market, and the infinite pockets of their governmental buyers, they can charge whatever they fancy.

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.

How do they justify charging £25,000 for an LED? Is there something special about that LED, or is it literally just that they've got a defense contract, and once the contract is signed nobody is paying any attention?

When you have to keep an enormous amount of paperwork and for that single lead, tracking every single point in the supply chain, things get far more expensive.

This is part of it, yes. The MOD and others have an incredible filing system that hasn't changed in about 40 years. In essence, it comprises generating an absurd amount of hard-copy documentation for everything (buying a new LED for a fast jet, for instance, is probably 80 pages all said and done), filing that documentation (every department and even hangar have their own way of filing documentation), storing that filed documentation, and then 40 years later destroying that filed documentation without anyone having ever looked at it.

It boils down to "cover your ass".

After seeing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRb4zKBIt0I "Mayday Truth of Crash Air France Flight 447"

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.

For the civilian stuff, the root causes of that insane widget cost are the cost of compliance with aviation regulations and the relatively small market.

Or how else could we do it? If the industry is unwilling to pay for them, why couldn't passengers have the tech, in much the same way the people have dashcams to drive on unsafe roads. Of course this presupposes that flying in inherently dangerous, which if it were I guess far fewer people would fly to start with!

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