Plane search vs spending the money combatting world hunger and disease

I'm having a hard time with the hunt for the missing Malaysian plane. So much money, so many resources. The people are dead. they're trying to bring closure to the relatives (or garnering fame and scoring political points).... but at what cost? Even if they did find it, and they ID the corpses through dental records/whatever, then they go through the (expensive) process of removing the bodies and returning them.....they're not going to be in a fit state to be viewed by and be recognizable to their relatives, I'm not sure there's any more closure there than being told now they are dead and will never be found.

Some people die and they're bodies are never found. it sucks donkeys' balls, but nothing is going to change their deadness. this hunt is not heroic, it's stupid and a complete waste of resources. What if we put that manpower into building an orphanage/family shelter and a school with a sustainable farm in a war-torn country in Africa or -say- Downtown Detroit? there's so much good that could be done that would save more lives than are already lost.

/rant **maybe**

Let the flaming begin

No flames from this quarter. Have to agree.

No matter where the plane is, the passengers are dead. The families have to accept this. If the plane is on the bottom of the Indian Ocean, if it is covered with tarp on an unknown landing strip in Kazakhstan ... it doesn't matter. Either way, the passengers are dead. I wish the media, particularly CNN, would do the decent thing and LET GO of this story. It hasn't been a story for more than 3 weeks, it's just been a media masturbation extravagansa. It's obscene.

Clancy wrote a book about crashing an airliner into government buildings in Washington. Nobody believed it would happen. Years later, it did.

ABC broadcast a TV show about crashing an airliner into a deserted island. Nobody believed it would happen. Years later, apparently it did.

Talk about hunger. Those people have been "Lost" on a deserted tropical island for almost a month without food.

It took 121 episodes and six years to learn what happened to them. Deja Vue.

monster;895900 wrote:

I'm having a hard time with the hunt for the missing Malaysian plane.

That's the media playing with the news. You determine the plane went down, everyone's dead, end of story.

The people actually looking for the plane don't give a shit about the passengers, they know they're dead. What they want is the answer to how and why the plane crashed. Boeing and the NTSB take their responsibility to explain every crash as best they can, in order to prevent more crashes, very seriously. What they can determine from the wreckage, over and above black box data, is quite amazing. But it takes wreckage and time, sometimes years.

Other nations are willing to help as best they can, because their citizens fly these same aircraft. I'm pretty sure the people flying on the other 1600 or so 777-200 and 200ERs, are curious too.

xoxoxoBruce;895908 wrote:

What they want is the answer to how and why the plane crashed.

On 13 Sept 2005, a pilot ran out of gas with 10 to 15 gallons remaining in another tank. The NTSB spent a full year investigating this as discussed at
fuel calculations aren't this hard.
It is necessary so as to learn from our mistakes - even one this stupid.

They just want to prove it wasn't their fault whilst appearing compassionate :( But it's a waste of money

I disagree. They are working to save future lives by identifying the cause of this crash. If they don't find it, we will never know why it crashed and won't be able to try to prevent that type of crash in the future.

If they don't find it, then it's a waste of money. But if they do find it, it won't have been be a waste of money.

I kind of agree in principle ....but I just feel it's throwing good money after bad at this point. There are so many people dying right now who could be saved by a large injection of cash/manpower. Maybe they are the people destined to work out what happened and prevent it happening again? And it's not a new plane design, route or captain. If it was a serious problem likely to reoccur it would have occurred before now :/

And think of the experience that it's giving the searchers. They are becoming expert searchers as they run through this drill, and someday they may be looking for actual survivors and that experience might come in handy. Think of it as practice.

This is getting silly now.

mmm. that kinda helps. It's just the whole "we'll search until hell freezes over" thing. I see that the battery from the black box signal will die on Monday. I didn't realize it was still running. But after that, there really is no hurry. And the evidence of signals turned off and change of flight path suggest human involvement. Which is more tricky to prevent without first hand accounts from witnesses. Oh well, it is what it is.

monster;895932 wrote:

They just want to prove it wasn't their fault whilst appearing compassionate :( But it's a waste of money

No it's good business, for Boeing and the US. There's probably $31 Trillion dollars at stake over the next 40 years.

Additionally, pilots are required to have a certain number of flight hours per year to maintain their proficiency ratings. Here, we would initially deploy active duty pilots during the search and rescue phase (even to "rescue" a still signaling black box before its battery dies). Later, as the mission transitions to from search & rescue to search & recovery, the ongoing mission would fall to Reserve and National Guard pilots who's crews need proficiency flight time. It's better than having them flying around for no reason other than punching the clock; however, it still has to be done so associated costs wouldn't be redirected elsewhere anyway.

I'd want my parent/spouse/sibling/child/loved one's remains. I can't believe anyone wouldn't. It would not sit well with me that my mother was out there, somewhere.

I said it wouldn't sit well with me. YMMV

I know that many people want that Gravigr. But unless they are footing the bill personally there are other considerations. I want working wings. "Want must be your master" as we were frequently told as kids.

I'm tired of the media hoopla, but I am glad to have read reasonable explanations for the search here. I wouldn't have thought of them, having not really considered this much, beyond the headlines.

Sadly, Monster, if the search stopped this minute no money would be spent in the way you're suggesting. I felt the same about the hunt - still ongoing - for Madeleine McCann. A missing child must be every parent's worst nightmare, and I did feel for them. But the amount of children hurt, abused, deprived who might have been prevented from growing up into runaways/ addicts/ criminals with the money funding the search had its own little tragedy and poignancy. Except that had she not gone missing, that money wouldn't have gone into social care or family support.

The Governments have the bread and the media gives us the circuses.

Sundae;896021 wrote:

I'm tired of the media hoopla, but I am glad to have read reasonable explanations for the search here.

That hoopla was obviously reason for my mockery. We need to know what happened for reasons we needed to know why Three Mile Island and Fukishima failed.

The beeper is a rather irrelevant. Since even with France Airlines, they put the tracing device right over it - and did not hear it. The beeper is so weak that you probably could not hear it 100 feet away in air. It is one obvious and not very reliable solution. And why this story will probably continue over 2 years from now. Like all such disasters, a study to avert future failures takes years.

But we are learning from this, the Challenger and Columbia, Fort Hood, Mission Accomplished, GM's intentional defects, and even Glatt's Washington Metro of why these failures happen. In every case, human failure. We are shocked to discover a Boeing 777 pilot in San Francisco could not land that plane without electronics assistance. And said so before the Captain told him to land it anyway. Same woefully insufficient human abilities are traceable to a plane crash in Rochester NY, the France Air 447, 3 Mile Island, and why we massacred 5000 Americans uselessly in Iraq.

We are required to learn our mistakes. Since that is necessary to the purpose of life. Doing so is why Silicon Valley is so productive and why Wall Street subverts the American economy by refusing to invest in innvation. These all share common factors.

Some is human nature. Some of it is directly traceable to people who fail to be sufficiently trained because management never learned its major purpose. Never learned what meant by providing "attitude and knowledge".

Meanwhile, a front page story every day about Malaysian Air 370 is, "Nothing to report." That is not news for the same reason local gossip at 6 and 11, a Barbara Walters or a Larry King interview, or pictures from the latest car crash is not news. It is not news until it reports facts, numbers, and information we can use to avoid future mistakes.

There's a good conspiracy theory on facebook about the plane being in a hangar on diego garcia. A US military base. Apparently they have been doing top secret testing stuff on the plane...and maybe the contents!

Aliantha;896039 wrote:

There's a good conspiracy theory on facebook about the plane being in a hangar on diego garcia. A US military base.

Wow. The CIA now has hundreds of pure Chinese to experiment on. To refine their torture techniques. To prepare for the next war. And so they can lie about it to Congress. What a scoop!

What did they learn? Attack a Chinaman from above. With narrower eyes, they cannot see you coming.

That was a pretty good post, tw.

Aliantha;896039 wrote:

There's a good conspiracy theory on facebook about the plane being in a hangar on diego garcia. A US military base. Apparently they have been doing top secret testing stuff on the plane...and maybe the contents!

Naw, it was a confidence exercise to ensure we could take out an airplane over water and leave no trace in preparation for when Snowden leaves Russia for South America. :rolleyes:

.

I :lol:d

I think the plane was abducted by aliens. We may never know where they got off to, think Amelia Earhart. They never found her or her plane. Shit Happens.

...and stole it. that's one way to sort the facebook wheat from the chaff