What The Media Is Not Discussing About Missing Indonesia Air Asia Flight QZ8501

Sincere condolences to the airline, the captain, the co-pilot, the crew and all the passengers on board that ill-fated flight.

I am not going to make it routine to comment or blog about missing or crashed airlines but  I am taking up one final issue, omitted in earlier articles, and am using this loss to again highlight the matter.

What I want to look at in this blog are questions which the media are not touching upon because their paymasters (usually large global multinationals) would prefer that they get ignored, on grounds of 'political sensitivity' or 'correctness' .

I almost despair at the lack of discussion about new technologies available for the past 15 years, which give instant pinpointing for all civilian aircraft worldwide.

The late 1970s saw an explosion in military research in the area of over the horizon defense technology systems which were the cornerstone of the genesis for stealth aircraft and star wars research programs.

It was evident that such technologies for pinpoint (real time) accuracy not only existed but aspects were available for military search and rescue.

Indeed directional beacon systems have been in use since even before satellite technology to ensure that, say, in the (remote) event of the crash of a plane carrying a nuclear, chemical, radiological or biological payload, that search and rescue can be quickly triangulated to the cordon-off sectors of the sea until the appropriate extraction vessels arrive at the scene of the incident.   From resources available in the 1970s, I have discussed with twelfth graders how such triangulation can work even in the event of one directional (triangulation) beacon failing using basic trig formulations universally known to students.  I am talking here about technologies available in the 1970s.  Leaps and bounds have been made since that time making satellite pinpoint real-time (accuracy) location of any aircraft worldwide very easy such that, with the availability of GPS (and, where possible, the 'cooperation' of military systems) even if there are some locational problems when and where the disasters occur, usage of techniques – such as inverse parabolic determinants (including hyperbolic paraboloids) – can easily (and quickly) resolve challenging matters.

The purpose of this article, however, is not to promote one or other competing technologies but to highlight their availability to the civilian airline industry, which to date, is simply refusing to incorporate any, on the grounds of costs.

Why then are such technologies not mandatory for all aircraft?

The simple reason is that it pushes up operating costs to the airline industry every time one of its planes takes off  and these costs are currently non-recoverable in the low price of the economy consumer ticket.  If every airline operator was mandatorily obliged to install, then this issue, and Pole position in a race to the bottom cent  (for the low budget operators) for the price of the civilian airline ticket, becomes the same for all carriers.

In all honesty, when I travel by air, should the plane crash and I be killed, this is already factored onto the balance sheet of my carrier.  In actual fact, I have already been 'discounted' as an 'acceptable' loss within certain (defined) parameters.  It was always so from the moment of the maiden flight of my carrier.

There are 'acceptable' ratio levels of 'losses' (insurance fatalities) which are built-in to all carriers.

These are not issues which are 'politically acceptable' to be making known to the general public since there is a natural revulsion at the thought that there are an acceptable (economic or financial) threshold of fatalities for all civilian airlines. It just sounds 'too morbid' for discussion.

In other words, as long as 3 or 4 planes from the same airline do not crash in succession, the likelihood is that the airline will not incur such losses as to make it's continuation, commercially, unviable.   The statistical probability of 2 successive crashes (one after the other, within a relatively short time frame) with the loss of all on board for the same airliner is highly remote and to incur 3 such successive crashes, under such parameters, is, statistically, almost impossible.

[Many decades ago a good friend (now deceased) who was a senior insurance executive revealed to me a number of facts I would never be able to forget.  He had built up a very large portfolio of clients over almost 40 years of diligent employment with one of the largest insurance companies in the world.  The particular company had provided him with an income, an opportunity to progress based on hard work and the ability to provide financially for his large family at a level some people would envy.  Out of respect, I have waited until years after his expiry before committing anything about our chat to the public domain.
I was amazed at my naïvety when, one afternoon at his home, he revealed to me 'the Holy Grail' of his profession - the statistical likelihood of death for each individual profession or work type his company insured for and how each policy was scientifically and mathematically assessed prior to issue for the probability of maturation.  In other words it was estimated that, based on your profession, most people would die - and the diseases or illness from which they were going to expire could also be statistically projected - before the insurance policy matured and the company have to pay out any cash or lump sum.]
 

For such reasons airline operators, their shareholders and the insurance world can confidently (and quietly of course) discount 'losses' within a permitted margin so that neither operating costs nor the airline's future are in any serious jeopardy.

We live in an even more 'politically correct' (hypocritically effeminized) world than 30 or 40 years ago to the extent that it's just not 'socially unacceptable' to be calculating the likelihood of 'losses' and 'adjustments' of human bodies (or indeed, in reality, as the case will be, body parts) based on the balance sheet.

This is what the international media find so difficult to discuss openly and honestly with the general public.  It is this fear of mass revulsion at such 'heartless' thinking (and indeed the remote possibility that the general public, through their representatives, would press for even more costly safeguards to protect Mom, Dad, Grandpa, Grandma and the kids when next traveling) which determine the parameters for the public debate about air safety.

There are remarkably simple devices which would not too heavily increase operating costs but which carriers are simply refusing to install as there is a (satellite) tracking cost into to which they are not prepared to subscribe.

This facility has been available for civilian airliners for at least the past 25 years.

The FAA appears comfortable with the current arrangements and is not motivated to enforce compliance with anything other than the existing (in my opinion arcane and outdated) cost cutter basic safety procedures for all but the most advanced modern civilian aircraft – and only then because of insistence by the insurance underwriters that, in the event of the (foreseeable) future crash (and there will, of course, be fatal crashes) of such sky monsters carrying close to 1000 passengers, the loss assessors and adjusters (and their investors) will damn well want to know why they have had to fork out such a huge loss (losses) for, what was branded as 'state of the art' air transportation.  You will note here that there is no 'concern' about the victims who have (will at some future point in time) perished, but the arguments are all about blame (including pilot error) corporate litigation costs and insurance claims against shareholders, the airline and it's manufacturer.

© Patrick Emek, 2014