Originally Posted by
onetrack
Does anyone else get the distinct impression, that after several days of the most intensive air and sea search effort since AF447, in which virtually nothing of real interest has been found - apart from pallets that could have come from anywhere, plus a few indistinct satellite pics that have failed to produce anything of value - that they're most definitely looking in the wrong area?
Not necessarily. The area they initialy established for search, the original large zone west of Australia, was very large. Even the "smaller" areas since refined are quite large in absolute terms. Add in big seas, weather not always optimal for visual search, wind, and a very deep ocean. Needle in haystack, yet again.
On the basis that it went down somewhere near this searched area, there is still the matter of how the aircraft hit the water. If it remained more or less intact, what would you expect to find? If it hit like a ton of bricks, as AF 447 did, there is still the problem of drift and dispersion. As the first assets arrived with
a time late to datum of a week the "farthest on circle" of whatever bits and pieces are buoyant is still going to be a bugger.