Originally Posted by
The Ancient Geek
All of this talk of tracking and ejectable recorders seems to me to be waste of time and money.
Failure to recover the recorders is extremely rare, MH370 is a one-off event.
Finding the recorders in a few days rather than a few weeks is not going to affect safety or save lives.
The probability of finding survivors following a crash at sea is very low and in such cases we would expect to find EPIRB transmisssions anyway so what exactly would be gained by such changes ?
I agree that failure to recover the recorders is rare, but difficulty finding them is common.
The cost of the search even the relatively short one with Air Asia is mindbendingly huge. Had the weather continued bad for another week, the ULBs would have died and increased the problems for the search.
So we have the typical case of its a rare event but when it happens it is
extremely costly to the level of government spending limits costly in some cases. This cost eventually works its way through to the ticket price or taxes.
Against that we have the relatively cheap fixes for the problem which from an engineering viewpoint are trivial.
It is the classic beancounter bind. It costs their account money and yet the probability of something happening that provides ROI to _
their account_ is very low. So they would be spending something to save someone else money. That won't fly with beancounters.
However, imagine if all the searches for black boxes - even the simple successful ones - had been
just 2 days shorter. The savings to the aviation industry and governments running SAR OPS would be enormous. I think better design of crash and DFDR/CVR locator systems or different ways to recover the data will be an industry mandate possibly within 5 years.