britfrog said "another small matter taht I am not too happy about is the apparent ease in which they found the recorder mostly the size of a coke can in an ocean where they couldnt find something the size of a/c last year."
I am constantly amazed at the inability of some at this forum to display commonsense, and your statement is a classical example. Why? You might well ask.
Well, imagine you were set down on a dry lakebed the size of Lake Eyre in a sandstorm and told there was a crashed model aircraft that had gone missing as it flew over the middle heading north. You're given a pair of scratched goggles and dropped in the middle of the lakebed and told to look for the wreckage, and the battery is the most important thing to find.
After several weeks of criss-crossing the dry lakebed you stumble upon a wing section partially covered in drifting salt, and you start to narrow the search area to a kilometre radius of where you found the wing. Despite the handicap of having to peer through almost opaque goggles, the next day or two other bits are located, scattered over an area of a couple of hundred metres. The next day you find the all-important battery, a few metres from the damaged rear fuselage. Nothing surprising about the fact that you found the battery so soon after finding the wreckage, because now you have a small area in which to concentrate your efforts.
As you walk back to search HQ some pratt whispers that it all seemed so convenient, finding the battery so soon after locating the rest of the wreckage.