Why are you asking me? I don’t know anything about the field. However, a quick search shows this was one of the most expensive S&Rs of all time, comparable to efforts in rescuing 33 stranded miners in chile, who were victims of an accident rather than their own decisions. My point is only that saying “search and rescue is important” doesn’t really work as well when we’re talking about people who consciously got themselves into an incredibly dangerous and unrescuable situation. I’d fully support sending out normal coast guard searches as we would for a lost boat, for example.

Put differently, if five people took a sailboat out into rough waters and lost contact, would several countries spend tens of millions of dollars looking for the wreckage? If not, then why would we do it for this case?

This is entirely notwithstanding that there’s immediate comparable evidence that the S&R was because the passengers were rich, since the coinciding disaster with the refugee boat near greece didn’t merit even a fraction of that amount of resource expenditure, so it’s pretty hollow to act like this was the normal response.