Everybody has a vested interest in finding out what happened to that plane. If it was a mechanical failure, we should know. If it was terrorism, we should know. If a government is covering something up, we should know. I find the idea that a large passenger jet can disappear entirely, with over two hundred people aboard, unacceptable. I'm glad the American government, and other governments, are willing to spend money to find this plane.
They are now reporting that the Bluefin sub has finished mapping 35 square miles of sea floor today. They are uploading that now. They said earlier today that the search area is the size of Chicago that they are looking in.
Skeleton Island? They might find Atlantis. It would be much cheaper if they just put cameras on trained dolphins. Too bad Russia took Ukraine's military dolphins!
nothing at all has been found so far to give any credence to the supposition that they're even looking in the right place... and given all the 'maybe's and 'could be's and ever-changing 'facts' and 'data' that incompetent and ass-covering officials keep spewing, i seriously doubt anything will be... for years... most probably it will never be found, we will never know what happened or why... leaving flight 370 to join flight 19 and its companion flights/ships on the other side of the globe... i'm surprised no one's come up with the idea of a matching 'triangle' that is exactly halfway around the globe from bermuda, as the cause for its disappearance!... or if they have, i haven't heard it mentioned... that's about as logical an explanation as the captain or copilot going to all that trouble to off themselves...
Oh they have a few different triangles around the world like the Bermuda Triangle. http://listverse.com/2013/05/10/10-places-as-mysterious-as-the-bermuda-triangle/
The Bermuda Triangle is a methane vent. Mystery solved. There were no giant methane vents in the south pacific. Mystery continues.
They are having lunch right now with her and Jimmy Hoffa in Atlantis. I'm sorry it seems like I'm joking about the people on the plane, but I'm really joking about this mess of a search group they have trying to find this plane. It's like a group of monkeys trying to hump a football.
I think you underestimate the certainty the signal that was tracked for 90 minutes and picked up a couple times is from the black box. http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/11/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/ After a dozen cry-wolf announcements I realize it is hard to take anything seriously, but this signal was much more definitive than the constant declarations of "debris spotted" and the questionable findings of the Chinese ship with the 'tin can on a stick unrecorded finding of pings'.
That's old. It has died off and they have used the bluefin sub in the exact same area the ping was heard and found absolutely nothing.
When you say "the exact same area" you mean, "in the ocean somewhere" because there's a huge radius for that signal.
Well just basically in the vicinity of where the U.S.S. Shield heard it. So yeah basically what you said, but if they can do 35 square miles per day, they should have seen something and they didn't.
The loss of the signal is consistent with the batteries dying. And it will take weeks to months to search the area narrowed down by the signals.
MH370: Undersea search could cost a quarter billion dollars, official says Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Black box pings go silent, long search may be ahead
@GingerCoffee I heard it was about 1,500 square miles the size of Chicago. I didn't say the total it has search over it's time. I said it can search 35 square miles in a day. The said it takes 2 hours to go down, 16 hours searching, then 2 hours to come up, and 4 hours to charge it's battery and be serviced. Your figure must include all countries involved, because the updated figure that was allotted by the government for the search is $3.6 million. I've been watching CNN and HLN while up late at night for hours.
You might be looking at money spent or budgeted (and I do think that is the US only) and the figure I used is projected. As for the other issue, the search is far from: 'they found nothing' and it's over.
It's worth noting that a lot of the cost is purely theoretical. The SAR planes, for example, would probably have been making training flights if they weren't out searching for wreckage; they'll be flying more hours than they would in normal training, but much of the cost of that operation would have been spent regardless. And I believe a new 777 costs around $300,000,000, so spending a couple of hundred million to find the wreck and determine what caused the loss of this one isn't out of line with the potential return.
Yes, I agree. There comes a time when we have to give up on stuff like this. I feel desperately sorry for relatives of the people on board this plane, who must be anguished at the thought of 'never' knowing what happened to their loved ones. But there also comes a time when spending huge amounts of money chasing a lost cause needs to be re-thought. I would assume if this was the work of a terrorist group, they would have come forward by now to 'claim' this atrocity. If the plane has indeed landed somewhere, it will eventually 'resurface.' If people were being held for ransom, surely the demands would have been made by now. I think it's safe to assume the plane is 'lost,' somewhere at sea, for reasons we probably will never know. And, as mammamaia suggests, until actual hard evidence is found (ie chunks of the plane) it's going to stay lost. If this current search of this particular area is unsuccessful, I think the search needs to be called off. There are many many needs in the world, and a quarter of a billion would be better spent on them.
I agree with you @jannert the money would be better spent elsewhere. But I'm pretty sure they found the actual signal from the plane's black box. Perhaps I have more confidence in technology than you and @mammamaia.
From a purely financial standpoint, the total cost of an incident like this, before a penny is spent on crash investigation, is likely to be on the far side of three quarters of a billion dollars. Preventing another one is worth spending a lot of money.