“How long will they continue to search for the plane in the ocean?”
Until someone is forced to shoot the friggin thing out of the sky when it is headed towards their airspace.
I have no idea where it is, but everything they come up with to keep this story alive in the area they are looking, keeps showing a dry hole. Case in point, the new super-duper mapping sub recently updated, goes down to a depth they know is its limits, hits it and then automatically resurfaces?
Bullcrap! Somebody knew the programming parameters before it went down there to do exactly what it did. What kind of idiot does that? None, not even an idiot. Any logical process control person would have had it go to its limits and then loiter at that depth to do its work the best it could and then under a command from the research vessel, surface because everyone wants to go to sleep at the same time, or the research vessel needs to go to port to refuel.
It is such a crazy story. I just feel very bad for the families of the passengers.
I’ve had some experience in underwater searches, albeit more body searches in rivers & lakes. The problem here is that underwater searches have to be thorough. The goal is to be able to say, “we searched this area and it (whatever ‘it’ is) isn’t there.” So you push you equipment to it’s design limits if necessary. In the case of a robotic sub you can go beyond the operational limits without risking human life, so why not?
You do understand that the sub is designed to ‘fly’ a pre-determined distance above the ocean floor? This means if the ocean floor falls away abruptly that the sub ‘dives’. If the sub goes beyond a pre-programmed depth where seals can fail, it’s programmed to drop ballast and return to the surface.
It’s very possible that this aircraft will never be found. The ocean floor is over 3 miles down. And if that aircraft hit the water hard, as I think it did, it’s nothing more than a couple of engines and some razor blade size pieces of aluminum spread out like confetti over miles of the deep-sea floor. Not even a decent sonar target without the Black Box pingers.