Want to know how to blow hundreds of millions of dollars in a game of hide and seek? Take a commercial aeroplane loaded with civilians- and make it disappear. Without a trace. Permanently. In fact in the case of Malaysian Airlines missing Flight MH370 , it is becoming the most expensive search in the history of missing plane searches with 26 countries contributing planes, ships, submarines and satellites to the most extreme example of a search for a missing object to ever grace news headlines in recent history.

The deployment of military ships and aircraft into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea by Australia, China, the United States and Vietnam has already in less than a month cost  $44 million. To show you just how MUCH dollar this is in comparison to other searches of this magnitude , all you need to do is compare this 44 bar figure to the 32 million Euro’s spent on the search for Air France’s Flight AF447, which crashed into the Mid-Atlantic in 2009 . Now the 32 bar spent on that search mission was spread out over the period of several months and stretched over a 2 year period – the Malaysian flight search has been on the go for a single month – you get the picture?

Tony Abott, the PM of Australia has come to the party as being rather the hero, especially in him having repeatedly stated that the cost of the search is ‘not an issue’ – This because thus far, it has been Australia that has borne the brunt of the expense of the larger part of this search. Although their have been the subtlest of hints of Australia having to send out invoices at some point.

“It’s only reasonable that we should bear this cost – it’s an act of international citizenship,” Abbott said last week.

Because 277 of the passengers on the flight were Chinese, it is only appropriate that the other big-spender in this operation is , well, China. They have graciously sent a total of 18 ships, eight helicopters and three fixed-wing aircraft to various search areas during the month-long hunt .

The good news is that the US Navy has been useful because it has something rather nifty called a Towed Pinger Locator which this week picked up signals which may be from the missing plane’s cockpit data recorders – lets hope so, because maybe the balance of the budget for this search can be used on feeding a small African country for the rest of eternity.

[SOURCE] Reuters