I actually think it’s a very reasonable question. If before the search started someone would have asked you, “How much should we budget for this”, what would you have said? I’m sure nobody would have said “unlimited”.
We put a price on saving lives all the time - and here we’re not even sure what information we will obtain once the wreckage is found.
There’s a price for everything - if someone would have said it will take “$1 Million” to find the plane, I’m sure most people would say it’s a good investment - both to possibly help with future flights and for closure for the families. If someone would have said it would take $1 Billion, far fewer people would agree it was a good way of spending money.
Although the search is being conducted by First World countries, $44M (if that’s the right number) can still do plenty of good within those countries. The BEST case scenario with flight 777 is that the Black Boxes are found, and they point to some situation that can be fixed that would potentially save lives for future flights.
I don’t think anything should change at this point, and in my opinion, it’s politically impossible to slow down the search because there is too much pride on the line from the sponsoring countries, and too much media attention.
The Bluefin-21 is about to be finally deployed, but how long should we let that search go on before we give up? A month? Three? Five? A year?
Hopefully the black boxes will be found relatively soon, but it’s a big ocean, and someone has to have the eventual bravery to say, "we’ve tried everything, but the chances are slim, and we’ve got to move on.
And while it may well be expensive, its also going to be an invaluable learning opportunity.
When the operation is over, there will be a whole bunch of staff that may well save money later, or other operational “things” that are going to aid in future operations.
Not to mention - that whole bunches of the money would have been spent anyway - while still significant, the additional spending may not be as much as what people think -
and frankly - $44 million, in comparison to the defense budgets of the US, China and Australia is doesn’t even rise to the standard of chump change
It’s like asking “How much money should be spent fighting AIDS?”. As if you just gather a pile of money together to throw at the problem, and when that’s run out you just give up.
It’s a reoccurring cost. Even if it actually does end up costing $1 billion, it would be spent as a tiny unnoticeable expense on the budgets of several nations over the next several decades. There’s no reason why the search can’t or shouldn’t be continued until the plane is found.
Apparently there’s only one Bluefin-21 in the world, so they have to download the data before using it again. I wonder what kind of interface takes 4 hours to transfer 16 hours of video.
Let’s put this another way. We can agree that the total budget of the world’s governements is in fact limited, correct? You are saying “this one thing” could go on forever and not really make much of a dent in the bottom line. Which is correct, so far as it goes. But that is a terrible reason to keep spending money on something, and it is the sort of logic that leads us (humans) to collectively waste boatloads (haha!) of money via our governments. And if that logic is carried to it’s conclusion, we never say no to anything, and we find out that what individually seemed like harmless indulgences has in aggregate bankrupted us.
That was because you were playing a DV tape and digitizing it as you went. I do the same thing with my DV cam, but the newer cams with SD cards have the video already in digital form and the transfer is a lot quicker.
This is not correct. DV is a natively digital format. (Digitial Video) The transfer was in real time because:
Standard-Def DV video is barely compressed, with a massive bitrate 25 Mbit/s. (By comparison, my APS-C digital camera records excellent 1080p60 video at a lower bitrate than this.)
The mechanical device in the camera could only play the data off the tape in real time anyways.
The first cameras with SD cards were so much faster to transfer because they applied substantially more compression to Standard Def video, meaning there was less data to transfer. If you copied the full DV video to an SD card, it would have taken just as long to transfer it to a computer.
Anyways this is something of a tangent, I only meant to point out that real-time digital video transfer was the norm not so long ago, and these sort of demanding environment use cases with long lead times on design tend to lag behind the latest technology. Without knowing the size of the data the device is recording, it’s hard to say if 4 hours to transfer 16 hours of data is reasonable or not. With sonar data it’s easy to imagine that they are extremely conservative with how it is compressed, if it is compressed at all.
It looks like the Bluefin itself has a 4 GB flash drive for vehicle data, and the side scanning radar has it’s own storage. From the product sheet, the standard payload is the Klein 5500 455 kHz multibeam side scan sonar.
This guide for the Klein says the information is downloaded via a 100Mbit Ethernet connection.
The Glomar Explorer, Deep Ocean Working Vessel, the Glomar Explorer was built by Howard Hughes for a CIA sponsored mission to recover a Soviet submarine back in the mid 70’s.
I hear she is still floating around somewhere out there and is now leased to a oil company looking for oil leased to the tune of one million dollars a year.
After they find the plane they should consider bringing the whole thing back up, if it is in intact that is, and examine the whole plane with any bodies still left to see how they died.
15,000 feet down is no picnic, but the Glomar Explorer could do it … heck charge CNN and Fox and ABC, CBS, NBC and all the other news agencies for the recovery. They have made millions in advertising already anyway.
I looked at that last night and noticed that it’s depth rating is only 200 metres, well short of the 4,500 metres we’ve been told. Maybe its sonar mapping capability is limited to 4,500 metres of depth.
It also says that multiple BPAUVs have been delivered to the U.S. Navy, contradicting the report that there’s only one in existence.
The quote said “download and analyse.” Doesn’t that suggest they do a quick scan of the data, after it’s been downloaded, to see of there are any promising leads that would change their search pattern?
That would depend on the situation. Those masks don’t mitigate a fire nor can they assess a situation sitting in the cockpit. If and when this is pieced together I suspect it’s going to involve a catastrophic event that exceeded the crew’s ability to deal with it.
So either the plane wandered all over the place under the control of a crazy person who just happened to fly a flight plan that lines up with the closest airport or the there was a serious problem with the plane and the crew turned back (became incapacitated) and the plane flew on until the fuel ran out.
There are of course an infinite number of possibilities but the odds are low that the plane randomly flew a path that lines up with an emergency return to the nearest airport.
And just today, Malaysia wants to upgrade its defence system because of “the necessity to disclose sensitive military radar information in the search for the Boeing 777-200ER aircraft…”
What do you mean they “don’t mitigate a fire”? What they do is give the flight crew time, 15 minutes minimum, to deal with a fire. Are you proposing that after 15 minutes there was still enough smoke in the cockpit to incapacitate the crew but the fire was out?
But here, several days later than your cite, the Malaysian Prime Minister states that primary radar showed it heading west then north west.
