Dick Smith urges 10 cent levy on airline tickets to pay for new MH370 search
Dick Smith has said a tiny levy on every single airline ticket could fund a new search for lost flight MH370 and finally bring an end to the world’s biggest aviation mystery.
Crime in Focus
Don't miss out on the headlines from Crime in Focus. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The cost to find MH370 would be as low as 10 cents for every passenger every time they fly, and that’s a price worth paying, aviator and adventurer Dick Smith said as he backed calls for a renewed search for the missing aircraft.
Governments in Australia, Malaysia and China have already paid more than $200 million to look for the lost Malaysia Airlines flight but Smith said he believed the public would accept a small tax of just 10 cents for peace of mind.
“There are four billion passengers that fly every year, you’d only have to put 10 cents on an air ticket to get $400 million a year to do the search and that’s what we should be doing,” he told Sky News yesterday.
“If there’s ever an example of a government putting profits in front of safety, it’s the way they’ve stopped searching for that airline. We should keep searching for it.”
WATCH THE SKY DOCUMENTARY
Part One: Blunders begin with flight’s final goodbye
Part Two: 15 seconds that sealed MH370’s fate
Part Three: Families face agony of the unknown
Smith said when in 2009 Air France flight AF447 was lost having crashed somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, money was found for a search and two years later the black box recorders were retrieved.
The finding provided not only vital clues as to why it crashed but forever changed flight training manuals on handling the aircraft in a certain circumstance.
“That’s why we should spend the money and find that plane, it’s incredibly important,” he said.
“Everyone who flies, the minute we get in the air, we’re a bit worried. Even I’m a pilot and I’m worried ‘is this flight going to be successful?’ It’s a strange place.
“You’re in this little metal tube that’s pressurised on the edge of space so you want to know what every single accident there is, you want people to be able to inspect the hull, find out what went wrong and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
He said 10 cents was not much to pay and he believed no passenger would say no.
“Ten cents would give $400 million dollars to actually get the search going again and I believe with that amount of money you’d find the aircraft.”
Originally published as Dick Smith urges 10 cent levy on airline tickets to pay for new MH370 search