MH370 - When is it enough?

Because the effort and money spent is being completely wasted. I care about safety, and if I thought that the money would result in a material improvement in safety I'd be all for it. The same money could save a lot more lives if used elsewhere.

There is vastly greater sums wasted on bullet-proof limos for tin-pot presidents and their lackeys on continents where 5cents can save a life. The search for MH370 has the potential to improve safety for ALL future flight transport, it also has the potential to be a damp squib of course. There is only one way to find out, keep looking. I'm not going to worry about the cost, the cause does disturb me, but having been "in the industry" that's only natural.

I wasn't actually advocating for more limousines (or even maintenance of the current limousine-per-dictator ratio).

My point is that even finding this plane will have a trivial effect on safety and well-being. The vast majority of aircraft reliability data comes from non-crash failures, and increasingly from simulation. Air travel is already incredibly safe. We are into an area of diminishing reuturns for sure. Add to that the fact that they actually have virtually zero chance of finding this plane, and it is clearly a complete waste of money.

The vast majority of human monetary expenditure is far more trivial.

Simulations results can be derived from real data as well as theoretical modelling. Some simulations are more 'equal' than others! 

"...even finding this plane will have a trivial effect on safety and well-being ..." Thankfully aircrash investigators are made of more tenacious and optimistic stuff.

I'm just as thankful to the engineers who analyse the non-crash failures and design the critical systems with this information as they contribute far more to keeping aircraft safe. True, this wasn't always the case, but now with crashes so rare, actual crash investigations now only form a small part of the on-going reliability push (but tend to get much bigger publicity).

I think you're using a straw-man argument, effectively alleging that my position is that I don't care about safety, or are somehow arguing that crash investigations are worthless. I do care, I just don't care about finding this particular plane. Too hard, too unlikely to succeed, too expensive, too little benefit.

There is a point of throwing good money after bad.  I think with this event we have reached that point.  It does not mean I don't care about air safety, because I most certainly do, as I am sure everyone does.

But eventually you have to stop spending money on something that has essentially zero chance of a return.  Otherwise we'd still be searching for Amelia Earhart.

The odds of finding wreckage or clues are likely just as good via future serendipity than with any organized search effort at this point.  It would be great to find out what happened, it would give CNN a reason to exist...

On another topic. It really annoys me how parochial the press becomes when these disasters occur. It is awlays "9 Britons", "28 Australians" etc; as the press quickly ignores the deaths of those from other countries. As if the nationality of people tragically killed matters in the slightest. Drives me nuts. (BBC reporting now that two of those killed in MH17 killed were football fans - wow - insight.)

This is much more significant....

http://boingboing.net/2014/07/...nes-crash-kills.html

Why? Are the others not worth reporting about because they're not verified "good people"? You can't be a football supporter and brain surgeon for example?

You misunderstand my point. Of course you can be a football supporter and brain surgeon. But the fact that someone is a football supporter is completely insignificant in this context, as is their nationality. These are all people. Why selectively report according to arbitrary and meaningless classifications? 

The fact that a significant proportion of the world's Aids researchers and their colleagues have been killed may be significant in terms of loss of combined knowledge and resources in this important research area. Perhaps even more important than to know that a football team has lost a couple of supporters. Of course, as people, a death is a death and equally tragic.

I think you are on thin ice on this one winky.

In the great scheme of things the reports that Aids workers and their leader were amongst the victims is no more relevant than the reports that two football fans were amongst the victims. The only valid point in your post IMHO is that all of these deaths were equally tragic.

Char has a point that the news reporters try to fire the imagination of their viewers/readers by highlighting similarities between them and the unfortunate victims, eg "football fans, nationality, families. In turn this might ( or might not) cause people to add pressure via their elected representatives to bring pressure to bear on governments and international bodies to seek the truth of what happened, justice for those affected and and knowledge to prevent or minimise the risk of a repeat or similar occurance...............I'm not entirely convinced of the egalitarian nature of newpapers as outline above, i'n just a naive optomist !

Well yes, perhaps, but the motivation is more likely to to be related to selling newspapers or getting mouse-clicks.

I despise tribalism in all its forms, be it nationalism, footy team support or whatever. People do not deserve less respect simply because they are "not like us".

I agree that the news media are more likely self-interested.........

I have absolutely no idea what you are saying here. Mentioning football fans = globalization? Struggling with that.

The good thing about being a football fan is that you can be from any country or religion ( some extremists excluded).  It is a universal thing.  I love hearing stories of our Brisbane supporters socialising with Western Sydney's fanatical fans, all over the love of a game which is of no real consequence, other than maybe bringing those fans together.

I just hope that some good comes of this.  It's "interesting" how this story dominates while Gaza has more casualties.  Reports from the crash scene are rubbing salt in the wounds I guess.  We have a Brisbane family that lost relatives in both MH incidents, that sort if thing brings it home.

Well, no. But whether something affects us or not should not be the primary arbiter of whether we care about it. We should be bigger than that. To only care about that which affects us is selfish.

Err. No.

As the search moves into a new phase, I consider it appropriate to revive this thread.............

Winky has suggested that the search for MH370 be abandoned. He has proffered two fundamental reasons, namely cost and the concept that aeroplane design is no longer advanced by analysis of recent crashes.

The cost aspect is to a large extent subjective. I always consider only the differential cost of such activities.. For example, operational costs minus training/standby costs. Some of us consider these differential costs (or even the full operating) costs to be worthwhile whilst others disagree. The reasons for these various views are many and varied, rational and emotional. The higher the probability of success, the greater the consensus that we should continue the search. However, there is often a very real risk of doing nothing when the search appears hopelss. Flight MH370, IMHO, falls into this “do-nothing” risk category.

Winky argues that aeroplane design is no longer influenced (or very little influenced) by post crash analysis. I disagree with this view. The BA 777 that suffered a double-engine failure on approach to Heathrow a few years ago, and landed short of the runway, is an example where post accident investigation has led to improved engine design. Likewise the Boeing 787 battery problems and the Virgin AirBus A380  engine fire are further examples where technology has been advanced with the benefit of post accident/incident analysis.

But not all in-flight disasters are caused by technical failures. Some are caused by crew failures, or a combination of crew and technology failures. In many cases these unpredictable events were only discovered by post accident investigation. Two such (relatively) recent accidents come to mind. The First Air 737 crash at Resolute in August 2011 and the second, the Air France Flight 447 over the Atlantic in June 2009. In both of these cases the flight crew were inadequately trained to recognise and deal with situations that arose following equipment failure.

In the case of Air France Flight 447, it is only because of the persistence of the search team that the Flight Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder were found (some two years after the accident) that we know for certain that the pitot tube malfunctioned, that the crew were unable to recognise a subsequent Unintended Aircraft Situation (a stall in this case), and that the crew were oblivious to the fact that that the Captain/First-Officer control sticks could be moved without the other pilot being aware. In addition to design changes made by Airbus, airline flight crew training has now re-introduced much more practical training in stall recognition and recovery.

As a result of the First Air accident, we are now aware that autopilot failures are not always apparent to the pilots. Also, that crew co-operation remains an issue, especially when the senior pilot is unable to recognise and deal with “confirmation bias”.

The situation regarding MH370 is far from clear. It is a mystery. We don’t know what we might learn from it. IMHO it is far too early to abandon the search. The differential cost might even be offset against by-product research of the South Indian Ocean. No guarantees about anything. But then, that was also the case with Air France Flight 447, from which we learned a lot, despite the cost and the initial sense that the search was hopeless.

I fully appreciate that winky doesn't always share my views.

I acknowledge that useful information continues to be gained from investigations into (now very rare) crashes. But would you agree that information gleaned from "extremely difficult to find" crashes (now extremely rare) like MH370 and Air France 447 consitute a very small part of the combined knowledge on aircraft safety engineering?

http://www.smh.com.au/national...20140830-10aczn.html

Link to article where contractor claims to be confident of success. Anyone like a little wager? They're not going to find this thing.

The problem with "extremely difficult to find" crashes is that until we find them, we simply don't know what caused them. I accept this makes it very difficult to decide how much effort to expend on the search and/or investigation.

In the case of AF447, it wasn't only the pitot tube problem nor the lack of "feel" in the control stick that caused the crash (ie aeroplane design characteristics) but the inadequate actions of the pilots (ie pilot training). The airline industry was previously unaware of this last issue.

Flight MH370 might well reveal inadequacies of which we are completely unaware at present. These inadiquacies might have nothing at all  to do with aircraft safety engineering. eg they might be related to crew training or unlawful activity (for example).

 It seems intriguing that a simple fault like lack of airspeed indication wouldn't be simulated and apppropriate responses trained for. Pitot tubes have suffered from numerous failures in the past. Insects nesting in them and icing being the two causes of which I am aware. There are far more airspeed indicator faults than crashes due to them.

http://www.aviationtoday.com/r...14.html#.VAOacoCtk2E

Seems that there is plenty of information to guide the development of aircraft safety systems, with or without the black box from AF447.

We do train pilots how to recognise and respond to a loss of airspeed indication, both in visual flight and instrument flight conditions. We also train pilots how to recognise and recover from an aerodynamic stall.

However, AF447 showed that in this respect the training of the two pilots at the controls was inadequate and subsequent investigation showed that inadequate stall awareness and recovery training was widespread in the airline industry. As a result, the UK CAA issued blunt guidlines to our airlines and their training organisations on how to rectify this inadequate aspect of their procedures and training.

It would be nice if this sort of problem didn't happen, and to a large extent I think we are getting better at identifying both threats and potential errors to airline operations and introducing processes to manage these risks. But people and "life" isn't perfect. Getting to the bottom of mysterious accidents such as AF 447 and (possibly) MH370 is very illuminating and helpful - at least IMHO.

I think we're in general agreement. All investigations can add value and improve safety. It is just that I feel that this particular search is far more costly than any conceivable benefit. Air travel is already exceedingly safe, and getting safer. It will continue to do so, regardless of the outcome of this particular search and any (highly unlikely) subsequent investigation.

I think so too.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/mh...20140908-10dqlz.html

Search area is 3 times the size of Spain. Mind-boggling.