Search and rescue equipment used for Air France 447:
“A search began immediately, using air, naval, and underwater operations, including autonomous underwater vehicles.”
It took five days to find the first bits of debris and two years to find the actual wreckage.
Absolutely no comparison in terms of the uncertainty area for the aearch.
Thanks Buckeye. It's a lot harder to do in real life than in the movies or on the Discovery Channel.
I watch hurricanes form out of tiny swirls all over the ocean every year. Local land radar confirms formation. The explosion would be visible from common weather sats. If it just splashed into the ocean, no explosion and smoke, that probably wouldn’t be picked up.
And that’s just public domain realtime sat imagery. The sats who see what brand of cigs a Russian is smoking on his picnic table.... it *is* known what happened, just classified at this point as the reality could probably provoke war, or at least retribution.
If islamists blew it up to terrorize the Chinese, the Chinese know it and are about re-patriate some in-country islamists. From about 30K feet.