Bally Heck,
Don't know if you've seen the aerial photo of where the aircraft finally stopped (it was posted here on one of the earlier pages). After losing contact with the aircraft ATC could only suppose it had crashed, but where, if they couldn't see anything from the tower themselves (sorry, she)? It could have been miles away, and who was to suppose it had threaded that needle between the wall of trees into the adjacent field? Imagine if that one passenger hadn't sprinted through the mud, over culvert, etc and alerted the fire brigade - how long might it all have taken?
I'm sure you could think of more than a few dozen airports around the world where, under similar circumstances, the accident site wouldn't be found for quite some time. Memory's a bit blurry but it tells me evenn the Staines Trident accident site took some time to locate.
How to make things better? Well one thing that occurs to me is that when ships go down in oceans, their EPIRBs go off and say "I'm here, Help". When aircraft go down, they just disaappear from radar screens at x altitude. I wonder why, with the the technology available right now, an aircraft can't transmit it's position continuously, linked into the radar image. It may disappear from radar but "there it is, in the field just across the runway".