mm43, it might be interesting if Pew or somebody did a very extensive poll with a simple question about airliner safety, "Would you pay an extra $10 per ticket to put off the danger of a problem that happens once every 5 years but would not save your life?"
Nothing we can do now without the flight recorders will improve flight safety against AF447 type disasters until we spend noticeable money on every air travel ticket through the next AF447 type disaster. Have we reached the point we're talking about throwing good money after bad? Is continuing the search a wise expenditure of money? Are there other returns that can come from such a continuation beyond simply finding the plane's carcass and perhaps its flight recorders that makes a continued search worthwhile for its advancement of oceanography?
I surely hope there is. There's a part of me that really wants to figure out what happened. So far as I know God does not swat planes out of the air. But at this time that's precisely what this is beginning to look like. Heck, even finding one engine would tell us a lot we do not know at this instant. "Where did the plane meet the water?" It's a puzzle; and, I get my kicks out of solving real life puzzles.
I'm asking about the "worth" of continued searching simply to figure out how much more leverage the public is likely to have on BEA and AirBus to fund the continuation.
{^_^}