| Unfortunately, finding anything at the surface is not likely to be exceptionally helpful unless they have detailed information about the currents over the past month. What they need to find is the sunk wreckage which will contain the black (orange) box in the tail section. If they do not find the sunk wreckage within perhaps a week while the black box may still be pinging (though it might continue longer, if working at all), it could take many, many years of searching, if they were to even continue, to possibly find the sunk wreckage. The sunk wreckage could be a thousand miles or more away from anything still at the surface. It's unfortunate that it took so long to figure out where the plane went. If they had the most likely trajectory earlier, they could have started from the statistically most likely last point of contact with the engine manufacturer and started a boat from there (or maybe even a little further depending on how much fuel they think it had), with the receiver that can listen to pings from the black box, and then continued on that trajectory out as far as the plane could have been before where the next ping should have occurred if it was still in the air. Then go back and forth along that trajectory each time moving out maybe around 10 miles from the last trajectory. (With two boats, you could have one continue that on one side of the trajectory and another boat on the opposite side.) That would take a very long time though, and would be best accomplished with a lot of those receivers, which I don't think they have. They don't even have one out there yet I don't believe. It would of course be very, very, very challenging to find the black box that way. With the water depth of several miles the boat with the receiver would have to be very close to it to pick it up. If the boat went back and forth again and again, which would take a long time just to make one pass, which might be 500 miles, it could take many dozens of passes if they are even in the right area. (They don't know the exact location of each ping the engine company received, only where along an arc it might have been. Based on I would guess the heading from radar early on and speed they can make guesses on possibly how it traveled.) But they don't have that kind of time at this point, not that it would have been very feasible even if they started that weeks ago. (assuming they black box is even pinging) I think in the end they are going to have to scan tens of thousands of square miles, if not a heck of a lot more than that, to try and detect wreckage on the sea floor. I'm not even sure that is possible, or rather feasible. With the amount of ships, equipment and time needed to do that, that kind of search could cost billions, I have no idea. Sadly, it's looking more and more likely that we will never know how the plane went down. In the future, an international aviation organization should have a way to track all commercial airliners worldwide, independently of other tracking systems. A way in which a transponder could not be turned off. (not that that is necessarily what happened here) Something should be separate from everything else that keeps reporting the location of the plane, among other things as well, on a near constant basis that cannot be turned off. Or if it can be turned off in the case of a malfunction, that a secondary system is then turned on. With the massive price tag of these planes, an additional required system would not be that much more. If only the engine data had GPS data reported too. |