Washington: Finding Malaysian Airlines’ doomed Boeing 777 – lost somewhere at sea in the remote reaches of the Indian Ocean after someone in the cockpit “deliberately” changed its Beijing-bound course – could take years and cost a fortune.
“We’ve been searching for many, many days and so far have not found anything connected with MH370,” Angus Houston, the retired former chief of Australia’s air force who is now heading the multinational search effort, said Tuesday.
And Mr. Houston raised the grim reality that without any surface debris to point – even vaguely – to an impact site, searching the seabed will require some very big and expensive decisions.
“If we don’t find wreckage on the surface we are potentially going to have to, in consultation with other stakeholders, review what we do next,” he said. Ultimately that issue is whether the government in Kuala Lumpur is willing to pay for a long, expensive commercial search of the seabed. Currently each contributing nation is paying for the mostly-military surface search by aircraft and ships.
Malaysia, the nation of registry for Flight 370, which apparently was lost in international waters, must, under international law, bear the cost of finding, recovering and investigating the cause of the disaster. That could run into tens – or hundreds – of millions of dollars, with no guarantees of success. As Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott put it, the vast search area is “as close to nowhere as it’s possible to be.”
Time is rapidly running out on what remains the best chance to locate the wreckage of the Boeing 777. Each of its two so-called “black boxes” – actually bright orange flight data and cockpit voice recorders – has locator beacons attached, which emit a special-frequency ping that can be heard by hydrophones. But their range is only a few kilometres and – more importantly – the battery-powered beacons only last for roughly 30 days. The jet crashed on March 8 and the beacons will die soon.
The batteries often last a few days, perhaps as much as two weeks, longer than design life but weaken over time.
01/04/14 Paul Koring/The Globe and Mail
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“We’ve been searching for many, many days and so far have not found anything connected with MH370,” Angus Houston, the retired former chief of Australia’s air force who is now heading the multinational search effort, said Tuesday.
And Mr. Houston raised the grim reality that without any surface debris to point – even vaguely – to an impact site, searching the seabed will require some very big and expensive decisions.
“If we don’t find wreckage on the surface we are potentially going to have to, in consultation with other stakeholders, review what we do next,” he said. Ultimately that issue is whether the government in Kuala Lumpur is willing to pay for a long, expensive commercial search of the seabed. Currently each contributing nation is paying for the mostly-military surface search by aircraft and ships.
Malaysia, the nation of registry for Flight 370, which apparently was lost in international waters, must, under international law, bear the cost of finding, recovering and investigating the cause of the disaster. That could run into tens – or hundreds – of millions of dollars, with no guarantees of success. As Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott put it, the vast search area is “as close to nowhere as it’s possible to be.”
Time is rapidly running out on what remains the best chance to locate the wreckage of the Boeing 777. Each of its two so-called “black boxes” – actually bright orange flight data and cockpit voice recorders – has locator beacons attached, which emit a special-frequency ping that can be heard by hydrophones. But their range is only a few kilometres and – more importantly – the battery-powered beacons only last for roughly 30 days. The jet crashed on March 8 and the beacons will die soon.
The batteries often last a few days, perhaps as much as two weeks, longer than design life but weaken over time.
01/04/14 Paul Koring/The Globe and Mail
