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Comment by SeoxyS | Hacker News Reader

I find it hard to understand how we can be justified spending so much money and effort trying to find the wreck. What is there to gain? The only benefits I see are:

- Giving family members (maybe a few thousand people) closure.

- Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result.

Given the very slim chance of them even finding the plane and learning anything useful out of it… I don't see how the search justifies a 9-figure price tag. (I don't mean to be insensitive)

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> Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result.

Well Wikipedia says a Boeing 777-200ER costs $261.5 million[1]. That's about double the cost for the search. If it's possible to prevent even one future mishap as a result of learning anything the cost is justified.

Besides closure is important for the families and friends of the passengers. Especially with crazy articles saying the plane could have landed in Kazakhstan[2]. Imagine the suffering people must be going through thinking their loved ones are 95% dead but 5% possibly maybe caught up in a crazy conspiracy. Even if it's 1% or 0.001% likely it could be enough to keep one awake at night.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777 [2] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370...

I don't care about the cost of the tin can. It's worth far more than that to find out why the accident happened, and if it was an equipment failure, do something to the rest of the tin cans so that it doesn't happen again.

When you add the lost money from lawsuits, lost value, etc... I'm sure it's much, MUCH more.

If they can find the wreck, they have a decent chance of debugging the cause, and implementing corrections to prevent it from happening again. Depending on the cause, that can be worth a lot.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

And when it happens a second time, you will be asking why we never bothered to find out what happened the first time.

Honestly, $130m is not a lot of money to an industry such as that. I'll bet the majority of it was covered by insurance anyways.

The insured always winds up paying the cost of the claims, and then some, eventually. The premiums are based on the expected claims.

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