Originally Posted by
underfire
If you had 3 search vessels collaborated, you would get the horizontal location. It is really that intuative.
Yes, they just needed to magic up two more vessels equipped with towed pinger locators. Why didn't they think of that?
This search is really unprecedented. The aviation industry was never told it had to be able to find an aircraft that disappeared over the sea with six hours' fuel left and no active communication, otherwise they would have been ready to do so. We shouldn't be surprised that we're having a hard time finding it, but that there's
any realistic chance of finding it.
If, for example, Inmarsat hadn't logged the time offsets in their handshakes, or hadn't realized they could be used to estimate the location, all we would know is that it flew on for six hours. That would leave us searching a circle a few thousand miles across, with pretty much no chance of ever finding the aircraft if it came down in the sea.