Full confession: I was a Doubting Thomas. Based on the assumption (wrong) that the aircraft went down in the "underwater mountainous terrain" area, which luckily is not where it hit the ocean, I figured that search would be fruitless once the first two phases came up empty.
Thankfully, I was very, very wrong.
What a bugger of a search problem.
The determination to find the remains of AF447 has not only been successful, but the team found the proverbial needles in the haystacks -- the recorders that will hopefully tell the tale of how it all went down.
I salute the folks who did the damnably hard work of looking at what wasn't working, trying again, and getting down there to locate, and retrieve, that which will unravel the mystery of why the flight deck crew could not recover from whatever interrupted the flight to Paris.
Here's hoping the recorders will divulge their data ...