Countries differ on jet search cost
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FIFTY-FIFTY, a Malaysian official said of how his country and Australia will split the bill for the increasingly massive search for the missing jetliner. Not so fast, Canberra says.
Malaysian and Australian officials discussed cost-sharing this week in the Australian capital, but Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss declined to say yesterday whether the country was even considering an even split of the bill for a search that will take months, if not years, and cost tens of millions of dollars at a minimum.
“I don’t want to give any indication as to where it’s likely to end up,” he said. “We are talking about this with the Malaysians and other countries who’ve got a key interest.”
The government expects to spend 90 million Australian dollars (US$84 million) on the search by July 2015. But the actual cost to Australia will depend on how quickly the plane can be found and how much other countries are willing to contribute.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 veered off course during a Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight on March 8 and is believed to have crashed into the Indian Ocean far off the west Australian coast. The search area has changed several times, but no sign of the aircraft, or the 239 people aboard, has been found.
Countries are continuing to negotiate on how to fund the next phase of the sonar search of almost 56,000 square kilometers of seabed beneath water up to 7km deep.
Countries involved in the search, including Malaysia, Australia, the United States, China, Japan, Britain, South Korea and New Zealand, have carried their own costs to date. But Malaysian government lawmaker Jailani Johari, chairman of Malaysia’s Liaison, Communication and Media Committee, said this week that future costs “will be shared 50-50” between Malaysia and Australia.
The job is much more difficult than another complex and challenging search it is often compared to: the hunt for Air France Flight 447. Though debris from that aircraft was found within days, it took two years to recover the black boxes from the plane, which crashed off the coast of Brazil in 2009, killing 228 people. The French government, the airline and aircraft manufacturer Airbus paid for the vast majority of the underwater search and recovery efforts.
The Australian government has repeatedly said it owes it to families of the passengers and crew aboard Flight 370 to do all it can to solve the mystery of the airliner’s disappearance.
A Chinese survey ship is mapping the ocean floor ahead of a sonar search for wreckage by specialist deep-sea private contractors. That search is expected to begin in August and take eight to 12 months.
Truss said China, the homeland of most of the missing passengers, was continuing to carry its own costs for the survey work. But China was under no legal obligation to help pay the multimillion-dollar bill for the private contractors, he said.
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