Change the Batteries!

MH370 report: Underwater locator beacon battery had expired

The first comprehensive report into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 revealed Sunday that the battery of the locator beacon for the plane’s data recorder had expired more than a year before the jet vanished on March 8, 2014.

The report came as Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the hunt for the plane would not end even if the scouring of the current search area off Australia’s west coast comes up empty.

Apart from the anomaly of the expired battery, the detailed report devoted pages after pages describing the complete normality of the flight, which disappeared while heading from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, setting off aviation’s biggest mystery.
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The significance of the expired battery in the beacon of the plane’s flight data recorder was not immediately apparent, except indicating that searchers would have had lesser chance of locating the aircraft in the Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed, even if they were in its vicinity. However, the report said the battery in the locator beacon of the cockpit voice recorder was working.
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Even though the beacon’s battery had expired, the instrument itself was functioning properly and would have in theory captured all the flight information.

You're supposed to change the batteries in your smoke detectors when Daylight Savings Time kicks back in. Is it too much to ask for air line to change the batteries in their black boxes on schedule.

FWIW, after one of our long neglected smoke detectors ran out of juice a couple of months ago and started beeping at us, we changed them all. So we let them go last night.