But it was not 'the industry' that paid those extended recovery costs. 'The industry' was getting a free ride on the taxpayers of the location of the crash. In the same way that MH370 searches are being largely funded by Australian taxpayers.
Perhaps if 'the industry' or rather the airline and the manufacturer were billed for the costs of the recovery process, we would see a significant jump in the eagerness to get DFDR/CVR that could be rapidly recovered, as the cost to the Airline would be unsupportable. Attempts to insure against these recovery costs would result in the insurers demanding a better DFDR/CVR location system - or no insurance.
An excellent summation of the problem Ian. Of course, the present arangement has evolved from International treaties that should probably be re-examined in light of present technology.
Hmmmm....Peekay4 refutes Ian's assertion, with the qualifier,
in many cases the operating costs will be charged back to the airlines,
I suppose when the price gets to be
real money, the chargebacks occur. What happens when the uncapped Search and Rescue costs bankrupt the insurer? Do the bankruptcies flow down the chain of re-insurance?
As an interim measure, why don't we instead clone some of this dfdr/cvr data and store it in additional locations on the aircraft in hardened memory modules. Locations like the wing tips and vertical stabilizer tips would be good choices. If imbeded into lightweight cushioning/floatable material, possibly also equiped with a water activated ELT & pinger, we have upped our chances for swiftly locating crash scenes and recovering the data. Design the component to have a high probability of being released under crash loads and the problem will be significantly mitigated, without having to re-negotiate the international agreements.
Meanwhile, lets hope the pingers are still bolted onto the black boxes. It would be very discouraging to recover a solitary pinger with no reward.