One of the comments on that CNN thread was actually useful:
Originally Posted by someone from the thread Mark from CA posted a link to
in 1972, a plane disappeared over Alaska carrying the then-current House Majority Leader, Hale Boggs, and another Congressman. Fifty years later, that plane still has not been found. Alaska covers 663,300 square miles. The total area of the Indian Ocean is in excess of 28 million square miles. There are reports that the total potential search area for the plane is some 2 million
square miles. That's about 3 times the size of the entire state of Alaska. Not so hard for a plane to just "completely disappear" in that large a potential
area when so much of it is remote
Puts the search team's challenge into some perspective.