This will sound unrelated at first, but bear with me.....
For the past week or two, I've been questioning the amount of time, money, and resources invested in the recovery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. A little more than a month has passed. Even if the flight data recorder is recovered before the battery dies and it stops pinging, many experts seem to acknowledge that we'll never know for sure exactly what happened, or why. The cockpit recorder records over itself every 2 hours, and it seems likely that the plane went down long after the most crucial cockpit recordings would have been recorded over. So even if the cockpit recorder could be recovered, it would likely prove useless to us. All the evidence seems to point to its having crashed in the open ocean, and there is probably a large debris field on the bottom. In the area where the black box pings have been heard, the ocean floor is 3 miles down. Whatever is down there is going to
stay down there. It is expected to take a year or more, IF EVER, before any human remains begin to wash ashore somewhere, and any such remains will probably no longer be recognizable as human, let alone as originating from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The lives of 227 people have ended. Each one individually is a tragic story, but in macro terms, they represent the tiniest fraction of humanity, and their flight isn't even a blip on the scale of millions upon millions of airline miles flown all over the world in a single year. The fact of the matter is that, despite all the effort and expense, these people have disappeared. "Lost at sea on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370" is the most closure any of their families is ever going to get. That's it. The much
better use of time and effort would be spend on dissecting why the Malaysian government tried so hard to safe face, obfuscating the investigation in the process, so that any such future accident investigations won't be stonewalled into failure, leading to these kinds of absurd and futile searches, from which we will learn very little
According to this article—
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/s ... -1.1749254—the cost of searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is going to total in the hundreds of millions of dollars, with Australia bearing the largest portion of it so far. It is
already on record as the single most expensive search in aviation history, surpassing the
2 year long search for Air France Flight 447 which crashed into the Atlantic ocean in 2009......
and this new search is not over yet. And with Air France Flight 447, the bulk of the aircraft and the first bodies were recovered within a couple of days of the crash. It was the black boxes that were recovered 2 years later. The article intimates that when the dust clears, Australia's view is that the cost should be born internationally, and she will be sending invoices to other nations to defray their own expenses.
Since when did the disappearance of ONE airplane with 227 passengers aboard (or the possible loss of one small sailboat with one family aboard) become this globally important? In a world full of hungry people and diseases without cure, this has become an absolutely absurd use of resources. Statistically, it is more safe to fly from Singapore to Hanoi than it is to drive across the DFW metroplex on any given day. It is nearly impossible, using the remarkable display of "groupthink" in RoyGBiv's video, to improve upon driving safety in DFW, let alone trying to improve on flight safety from Singapore to Hanoi. I love VMI77's quote that you can't have "progressive" without "SS". In a world where it takes a village to raise a child, it apparently takes a planet to put life on hold to find an airplane.
To Charles's original point of learning to mind our own business, should be added a more realistic cost/benefit analysis of sticking our noses where they don't belong.
