With the cost for the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 soaring into the tens of millions, flights looking for the wreckage have been suspended, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Monday. The search, 52 days old now, will continue on the ocean floor, however, and the cost of locating the wreckage will keep rising.
Experts say the chances of finding the wreckage are remote and suggest that authorities involved should expect the search to be more complex than the search for Air France Flight 447, which took off from Rio de Janeiro in 2009 and disappeared en route to Paris. Searchers did not find the aircraft until 2011.
“Air France knows the track that they take. They knew where it was going across, and they knew more or less how far they had gotten on that line. It still took two years to find the recorders,” said Robert Francis, former vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
The two-year search cost approximately 115 million euros, or about $160 million at the time, according to experts. “It is worth noting that sea search operation costs are dependent on fuel prices,” a 2011 report on the search efforts said.
Australia plans on conducting “an intensified underwater search involving different technology, in particular using specialized side scan sonar equipment towed behind ships to scan the seabed for evidence of aircraft wreckage,” Abbott said during a press conference in Canberra. He added that his government would begin arranging to hire private contractors to conduct this next phase of the search.
28/04/14 Karla Zabludovsky/News Week
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Experts say the chances of finding the wreckage are remote and suggest that authorities involved should expect the search to be more complex than the search for Air France Flight 447, which took off from Rio de Janeiro in 2009 and disappeared en route to Paris. Searchers did not find the aircraft until 2011.
“Air France knows the track that they take. They knew where it was going across, and they knew more or less how far they had gotten on that line. It still took two years to find the recorders,” said Robert Francis, former vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
The two-year search cost approximately 115 million euros, or about $160 million at the time, according to experts. “It is worth noting that sea search operation costs are dependent on fuel prices,” a 2011 report on the search efforts said.
Australia plans on conducting “an intensified underwater search involving different technology, in particular using specialized side scan sonar equipment towed behind ships to scan the seabed for evidence of aircraft wreckage,” Abbott said during a press conference in Canberra. He added that his government would begin arranging to hire private contractors to conduct this next phase of the search.
28/04/14 Karla Zabludovsky/News Week
