Originally Posted by
boguing
What are the odds of the longest ever suicide/terrorist/unmanned autopilot flight also being solved by the first and novel use of technology that was never designed for the purpose?
"Necessity is the mother of invention."
Not sure if you bothered to read the piece on how INMARSAT applied their knowledge of their own systems to the science of radio waves and satellites to come up with estimates of the aircraft's position at various points in time.
Had other means been successful, they'd not have had to figure this out on the fly. As someone pointed out in that article, they " ... did about a year's worth of research less than two weeks."
That may be a slight overstatement, but it indicates how many man hours they applied to the problem to try and find a solution. During the first two days of the search, a lot of observers in the PPRuNe threads opined that they weren't finding any wreckage due to looking in the wrong place. That "wrong place" was the South China Sea.
Originally Posted by 4Green
Australian Commander 'We are not searching for a needle in a haystack. We are searching for the haystack'.
Indeed. The haystack (or the first bits of straw from the whole haystack) are apparently being blown about by wind and wave.