Originally Posted by Coagie
YRP, People like you have to have facts spoon fed to you. Won't this make you fall prey to propaganda? I could spend a time finding the reference from a while ago, but if you're wondering, why not look yourself? I poured over thousands of facts about AF447, over the last 5 years, and if I happen to dig it up, I'll let you know. Maybe someone else remembers the French having to review the sonar tapes? It wasn't a secret, but since it was such a big mistake, they didn't exactly shout it from the treetops!
Coagie, there is a big difference between not knowing what signal they were looking for vs reviewing the tapes afterwards to glean more information.
Anything real time is never going to be as thorough as throwing some bright engineers, time, and decent computing power at the problem. Give them some months to try out whatever clever signal processor techniques they can think of (and experiment through trial and error) and just maybe they can find a signal previously masked by noise, distortion, etc.
That is not a screw up, rather it is following up every possibility.
If you are ignorant of communications engineering (which is ultimately what signal detection is), easy to say they screwed it up the first time...