[breaking] Malaysian Airlines loses contact with Beijing-bound flight, 239 on board

Wish I would have thought to board a Malaysian 777 flight since the crash and took the safety brochure out to post to Reddit.

damn...sometimes I get mad at myself for not seeing the obvious way to 15-minutes of fame.

 

Dat karma... they will probably forget tomorrow!

 

Exactly! It's been a month and Malaysia Airlines has 13 other 777-200's in service.

 

For anyone curious how much this search is costing.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/mi...laysia-airlines-jet-reaches-44-million-n74436

Cost of Hunt for Malaysia Airlines Jet Reaches $44 Million

SYDNEY -- The hunt for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 is on track to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, becoming the most expensive search in aviation history with 26 countries contributing planes, ships, submarines and satellites.

A month into the search for the jet, estimates compiled by Reuters show that at least $44 million has already been spent on the deployment of military ships and aircraft in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea by Australia, China, the United States and Vietnam.

The figure is based on defense force statistics on available hourly costs of various assets, estimates by defence analysts and costs reported by the Pentagon.

The figure for the first month of the search is already about equal to the official $44 million spent in searches lasting several months spread over a two-year time frame for Air France's Flight AF447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.

The $44 million estimate for MH370 does not cover all the defence assets being used by countries including Britain, France, New Zealand and South Korea, nor numerous other costs such as civilian aircraft, accommodation for hundreds of personnel and expenses for intelligence analysts worldwide.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose country is leading the search, and his Malaysian counterpart, Najib Razak, have repeatedly said the cost of the search is not an issue.
- Reuters

 

That's a lot of printing money

 

That's a boatload of money, but I'd imagine the most expensive part of the search is yet to come: using those autonomous underwater vehicles to search and locate the actual wreckage; and then ultimately, the cost to raise the aircraft from the bottom of the ocean.

 

From: http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/the-depth-of-the-problem/931/?tid=sm_fb

LONG IMAGE:

Spoiler

 

They should send the bill to Malaysia, for misdirecting multiple countries' search efforts and screwing up the whole recovery operation.

 

Based on SwoLy-D's posted graphic, then how the hell can they claim to have heard the black box? The image shows the listening device was not in range. Or, am I missing something?

 

I *think* the manufacturer has to give a kind of guaranteed range and guaranteed # of days it will ping. It should always exceed those specs by at least a little bit, and depending on local conditions (??? serene water??? no whales??? LOL IDK), maybe the pings can greatly exceed the manufacturer's specs.

 

CNN is disgusting.

 

Rothschild... That is all.

 

Fun with math and physics. And a crazy result. This story just gets more and more unbelievable.

Why Immersat's analysis may be totally wrong.

Lots more at the link

 

I might be alone on an island here since it's been 7 months since anybody last posted in this thread, but the aviation nerd in me remains fascinated by this story. I continue to read and check headlines on a daily basis.

The one year mark is going to be here before we know it, and it seems that we STILL know next to nothing in terms of actual concrete facts about what happened to this doomed jetliner. We're talking about a $300M aircraft with 239 people on-board that seemingly vanished without a trace. It's absolutely astonishing to think that this could happen with technology as advanced as it is.

Thoughts or theories?

 

Aliens.

 

we over estimate our technological ability to search for something as small as a plane in the Ocean

It's still pretty much like searching for a needle in a haystack

 

I have no good theories but it's likely now that the plane will never be found.

 

I had a dream that I was a passenger and the plane simply dove in the water. Its just nicely tucked in at the bottom of the ocean in tact.

 

That's a nice dream but most likely the plane was shredded on contact with the ocean. Anyone whose belly flopped knows how hard water can be when hitting it at a high rate of speed further the surface of the ocean most of the time isn't very smooth and chop can act like a cheese grater on something as big as a 777. That is one reason why the Miracle on the Hudson was a miracle. In the case of Malaysia this was most likely an uncontrolled descent into open ocean and not a guided descent onto a relatively calm river.

 

Flew into Maui last night and this story was on my mind for sure.