Someone asked abut the costs of the search.
The search and investigation into missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is already the most expensive in aviation history, figures released to Fairfax Media suggest.
The snippets of costings provide only a small snapshot but the $US50 million ($54 million) spent on the two-year probe into Air France flight 447 - the previous record - appears to have been easily surpassed after just four weeks.
The biggest expense involves the military and surveillance hardware - ships, satellites, planes and submarines - deployed for the search, first in the South China Sea and the Malacca Straits, and then in the remote reaches of the southern Indian Ocean.
For example, HMAS Success, the Australian navy replenishment vessel that was deployed two weeks ago, costs about $550,000 a day to operate, a Defence spokesperson said.
HMAS Toowoomba was diverted a week ago to join the hunt for MH370 and has direct costs - fuel, supplies, crew wages - of $380,000 per day.
Combined, the two vessels have cost more than $10 million while in the Indian Ocean, although Defence cautioned they were scheduled to be at sea anyway, so the additional expense to taxpayers of being re-routed was ''estimated to be negligible''.
Even so, the outlay can be included in a calculation of the resources devoted to the search for the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.
It is also known that the US Navy has allocated $US3.6 million for the deployment of a pinger locator and underwater drone on the vessel that will search for the plane's black box recorders.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon revealed that - aside from the black box locators - it had spent $US3.3 million on its ships and aircraft during operations to locate MH370.
Vietnam, reportedly, spent more than $US8 million searching for the plane in the South China Sea.
Another major expense is the cost of as many as 12 aircraft which scour the seas for plane debris each day.
Geoffrey Dell, an air crash investigation expert from Central Queensland University, said the the daily cost of the aircraft flying 10-hour sorties each day would easily amount to $1 million a day.
Over four weeks, a conservative estimate of the cost of the airborne search - excluding the US planes - would be $25 million so far.
Known costs for the airborne search total an estimated $53 million. Yet this would be a small fraction of the expenditure so far given 26 nations have been involved in the search. More than 40 navy vessels have been involved. China has deployed seven vessels in the Indian Ocean alone.
Then there is the cost of the intelligence analysts, police and air crash investigators from Malaysia, the US, Britain and France, among others.
''It's a lot of money,'' said Air Chief Marshal (retired) Angus Houston on Friday, revealing he would give an overall estimate of the cost at a later date.