Lessons Gained from MH 370, but What Have We Learned?

The disappearance of Malaysian flight MH 370 on March 8 has left very little in the way of possibilities of what happened to the flight. In general, authorities know little more today than they did in the hours after the flight first was known to be missing. There have been reports of trajectories changing, miscalculations of where the flight could have been heading, and random debris fields in the ocean that have led to no concrete evidence of what happened to the large Boeing 777. Conspiracy theories abound and terrorist links have been attempted, but the bottom line is that the only people who know what happened to the flight seem to have disappeared with the plane. Despite all of this uncertainty and conjecture, there are possible lessons to glean from this tragedy.

Would Better GPS Tracking Have Helped?

The short answer to whether or not better GPS tracking could have helped find the plane is probably a yes. However, the longer answer involves so many what ifs and industry changing implications that it is most likely a moot point. GPS tracking, the same technology that is used to find a stolen car, could almost certainly have helped in this scenario. Why don’t airplanes have GPS tracking to figure out where they are and where they are going? The answer is a quite complicated mess involving costs and safety. The cost of retro-fitting thousands of airplanes to provide the kind of capability required to maintain the tracking of these globe-trotting birds would be a large enough sum that the costs associated would not outweigh the benefits, even the potential saving of human life. Not that life isn’t priceless, but rather that flying would become too cost prohibitive for the average person living in the world today.

Largest Number of Missing Persons for Missing Aircraft since 1948

Year	Flight #	Total Missing
3/8/2014	MH 370	239
3/15/1962	N6921C	107
1/11/1965	TC-48	68
3/22/1957	50-0702	67
6/23/1950	N95425	58
8/1/1948	Lionel de Marnier	52

How It Could Have Helped

Approximately 26 different nations have played a role in trying to find the missing plane. Australia has taken the lead in providing many of the resources in use, while American robot submarines have been used to continue the search underwater. Real time tracking with GPS could conceivably have made the search all the more quicker and probably would have turned up results by this time. The tracking of the plane would have differed little from tracking a car or person with the GPS tracking unit sending signals continuously. Whenever any plane goes down, officials want to find the black box, which is the information center for what is going on with the plane. From that device, officials can determine the cause of the crash and provide clues to what was happening in the moments before the crash. Without finding the black box, officials have little to no idea about what happened. Of course, cost becomes a factor here. Besides the cost of the devices, a GPS tracker that would also work to send information continuously throughout the flight at a cost of $3 per minute. Then there would be the added costs of the personnel required to analyze this information. These costs would add up to make flying something only the wealthy could do.

How Could this be Unsafe?

While the GPS tracking information itself would pose no threats to safety, the general computer interface itself could become open to hackers. This kind of set-up may lead to more dangerous conditions if certain capabilities of airplanes are tampered with by hackers. So security would need to be beefed up, which brings us back to the money issue with this information.

Despite the Costs Involved, Will this Happen?

Economists say, “there is no such thing as a free lunch,” stating the fact that there are costs associated with everything. While there are very definite prohibitive costs involved with using GPS trackers on airplanes, there is good reason to believe that this would eventually replace or at least supplement the old fashioned black box recording of airplane travel. Costs are real, but when you consider the cost for the search for this plane has reached $100 million in international money as of April 24, with America footing an $11.4 million dollar bill for their contribution to the search. This money that has been spent, mostly presumably taxpayer money, could have gone further in updating the information systems of all of the planes, perhaps with money to spare. The question becomes, rather, when do you want to spend your money as an industry?

Officials involved with searching for MH 370 have advocated real time tracking in the future. It would appear to be a safe bet that that might happen, but first costs must come down. The nice thing about technology is that it always seems to become more affordable as each new toy is added to the market. The company that makes an affordable alternative for real time tracking will have a leg up on the competition, which is ultimately better for the consumer and the commuter.

Lessons Gained from MH 370, but What Have We Learned?