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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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Which leads to the final issue, the outdated nature of the rocketry industry (and the intrinsic difficulty of getting to space), has made it very expensive to launch the satellites you need for worldwide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