Chronus
I find it surprising that the US Navy has not tasked an aircraft carrier to assist. The avialbility of such vessels would greatly assist by substantially increasing time over the search area conducted by carrier based aircraft.
Not effective application of that asset.
I am not at all surprised that the US has NOT assigned a CV/CVN to this effort. Further that point, with the large degree of uncertainty involved in any localization effort, there is no reason to steam a national asset of that particular capability out into the middle of nowhere.
None.
awblain
The visual search for items three weeks after the crash seems to be a waste of time, and even if anything is found, it will be less helpful after all the drifting it's done in terms of locating the data recorders than the Inmarsat data.
Not a waste of time. As you and others have noted, all of this stuff is related to probabilities, not certainties. It is called "search" for a reason. People DON'T know where it is, and the probability areas based on such information as is available are large, not small. Put a different way, the areas of uncertainty are large. Is one searching in a circle/oval with a radius of about 20 nm, 200 nm, or 2000 nm?
The drift can be calculated to provide some pretty good best estimates of a vary good localization area. There have been a lot of posts that show the various ocean research buoys that are tracked to learn of current and drift in oceans all over the world.