Originally Posted by
philipat
Actually not a fact. The wreckage was spotted after TWO days but it took another 3 days to get vessels to the scene
I made this exact mistake. This is not quite accurate; while some sort of debris were located shortly after the accident, their attribution to AF447 was later retracted, and first pieces confidently identified as belonging to AF447 were only found 5 days after the accident.
However, the key difference between AF447 and MH370 is that AF447 went down completely off the radar. People searching for AF447 had a huge area, ~400 nm in diameter, to work with, and there were lots of pieces of unrelated rubble within this area. The initial search for MH370 was based on the assumption that the aircraft (or a large part of it) disintegrated at the moment when all transmissions from both transponders ceased. If this were the case, we would've found some debris, the lesson of AF447 notwithstanding. If MH370 went down in a two-phase event, with the transponder and the ADS-B transmitter shut down a one point and the aircraft disintegrating at some different point, the debris could be almost anywhere.