It’s actually kind of amazing that despite all the modern technology and air safety stuff, nobody still has any real idea what happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight after more than a week. I wonder if we’ll ever know what happened or if it’s going to turn out to be something like Amelia Earhart’s disappearance where people will still be speculating about it decades from now
Christine 'Tin' Rabe
There are probably some who have the technology and idea of what happened. It's just that their govt is keeping mum about it.
David Ramirez
At this point, the only way they'll find it is if it landed somewhere and some spy-work turns up intelligence from some guy who talked too much at a bar some months from now. If it crashed, they may find it in a couple of years, but most likely, they'll never find it. That satellite link is only one ping per hour, so even if they could locate based on just that single connection that would just give a circle with a radius perhaps as large as the plane's range given an hour. So that's a circle with an 800 km radius. That's like 2 million square kilometers to look for a skinny object only 70 meters long. Even if the wreckage gets spread out across 10,000 square meters, that's like, a target area that is 1/(2*10^8) of the search space. And that's if they could find the center of the circle from the satellite ping… which apparently, they can't. So, not only is it looking for a needle inside a giant field, we don't even know where the field is beyond a few datapoints earlier in the path….
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