[SystemSafety] MH370

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

> On 10 Mar 2014, at 22:17, Matthew Squair <mattsquair at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Absolutely, nothing is perfect. But would I prefer an alternate to months of trawling the abyssal plain with a side scanning sonar? You betcha. Especially if it's a very, very cheap alternative. 

In the last twenty years, there are just two cases of lost-at-sea I can think of in which evidence from the hull was *not* required in addition to FDR data to determine cause. There are five cases in which in-air disintegration or burning, which are not identifiable from FDR data, initiated the hull loss, and there is one further case in which physical evidence was required to show there was no anomaly (that it was, in effect, murder/suicide). Two against six isn't a persuasive ratio.

I can go through the records to make this definitive rather than "I can think of", if necessary.

The result of a cost-benefit analysis, even for the past, let alone for conceivable future cases, is not at all evident to me. 

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, University of Bielefeld and Causalis Limited