It would be so cool to build one of these things with a collision detection system and a nuclear reactor so that it could crawl the entire ocean. Imagine what it might find. You could potentially become quite wealthy on treasure hunting expeditions alone I would imagine.
You wouldn't need nuclear. It could surface for solar/wave generation as needed. That wouldn't necessarily slow it down because the reduced cost would allow you to have more of them operating simultaneously.
It seems way more fun to have a nuclear submarine.
Either way, though, the advance of technology may mean that it is the last such mystery. As the oceans are watched with ever closer scrutiny, from space and the depths, it is increasingly difficult for anything to get lost in the first place.
Have things changed this much since 2014? What would happen if the exact same scenario happened again (airliner switches off all transponders and veers off course into an ocean) in 2018?
It astounds me that they wouldn't already have used the best equipment on the market? I mean, it's the most prominent underwater search of recent decades, funded by three sovereign states. My gut feeling is that some people in power do not want this plane found.
As a sibling comment alludes, everyone underestimates how astoundingly vast Earth's oceans are. I did too, until I looked out the window on my first daytime flight over the sea. A seemingly endless stretch of unbroken blue. It was probably the next best thing to being in space and made me appreciate just how much water there is! And that's just the surface.
Everyone also grossly underestimates how much it costs per-day to operate a large offshore services vessel in the open ocean, in terms of salaries/benefits, fuel, insurance, cost of the ship as a whole relative to whatever sort of financing paid for it, inmarsat services, food, etc. There's a reason why submarine cable laying and repair is so expensive...
As a sibling comment alludes, everyone underestimates how astoundingly vast Earth's oceans are. I did too, until I looked out the window on my first daytime flight over the sea. A seemingly endless stretch of unbroken blue. It was probably the next best thing to being in space and made me appreciate just how much water there is! And that's just the surface.
Everyone also grossly underestimates how much it costs per-day to operate a large offshore services vessel in the open ocean, in terms of salaries/benefits, fuel, insurance, cost of the ship as a whole relative to whatever sort of financing paid for it, inmarsat services, food, etc. There's a reason why submarine cable laying and repair is so expensive...
From what I can tell, prior to this latest effort, around $200m dollars have already been spent looking for this plane.
Slightly off topic, but here's my favorite conspiracy theory about MH370: It landed Kazakhstan. Interestingly enough, this conspiracy theory was informative on how satellite pings actually work (whether or not you believe the theory is a different matter)
Either way, though, the advance of technology may mean that it is the last such mystery. As the oceans are watched with ever closer scrutiny, from space and the depths, it is increasingly difficult for anything to get lost in the first place. Have things changed this much since 2014? What would happen if the exact same scenario happened again (airliner switches off all transponders and veers off course into an ocean)…
Yeah, you would think this happened in the the last century or something. It was just 3 years ago!
"Every block of sea floor that the HUGINs map will be examined by three sets of human eyes."
They could publish the data and crowdsource the review process. Also perhaps some machine learning techniques could be applied to indentify most interesting segments to review.