All ends well....
I'm tempted to believe that, despite all "expert" interpretation and background delivered to BEA before recently, in the end the arguments delivered on this forum on a "deep stall scenario" have led to start out the 4th phase from the area close to LKP.
I see no other explanation, other than BEA's staunch belief from the onset that AF447 could not have gone down south of LKP and pretty much all of the area north of LKP had been searched in previous phases, except where the A/C has been found now.
Of course a systemic search would lead to results at soime point, but for once let us applaud BEA, Airbus and AF that they got it right at this point.
That bypasses (and quite rightly so) a number of interested or fascinated people, including myself, who were uptil now convinced that the A/C could not be near LKP.
With the location of the debris field there is now a 100% probability that the FDR and CVR will be retrieved and we'll finally know what happened.
Not only will we have two years after the events conclusive evidence to give those berieved an explanation of the cause, but hopefully also the definite clues of how to mitigate a similar catastrophy in the future.
It has been and it is clear to me that neither Airbus, AF or the french government are ducking their responsabilities.
Dutch