Originally Posted by
RetiredF4
And nothing has been found yet, although the primary search areas have changed multiple times
That's because they're only mapping it at this point. I doubt anyone involved in the search expects anything to be found until they go back with high-res sonar.
New analysis of the data has been used multiple times already. It means that the former analysis has been incomplete, has been wrong, has been what?
Again, the new location is inside the area previously chosen for the next phase of the search. The original ULB search area was also inside that area, and the ship searching for the ULBs was heading there when it heard what turned out to the spurious signals and stopped to investigate.
None of this satellite data was ever designed to be used to locate a missing aircraft. The BTO was thought to be a means of extracting some information to help locate an aircraft in an incident like AF447 where we already knew the approximate area, but not to find one that had vanished without trace. No-one expected to find useful information in the BFO data, because the aircraft was supposed to correct for frequency offsets, so this has all come from reverse-engineering the corrections made.
And all of the detailed position estimates are heavily reliant on knowing where the aircraft turned south. Anything that changes the estimate of that position inevitably changes the final position.
So the odds are good that it won't be found exactly where they're now predicting, because there are so many other variables that can only be estimated. But it's the best place to start, to minimize the amount of time spent searching the area they're now mapping.