The planes are traveling 8 or 9 miles a minute. If it goes down mostly intact (i.e. not a lot of debris), there's a lot of ocean that you'll need to search. Personally, I'd feel better if the plane simply pinged its location every few seconds to a satellite so rescue teams know immediately where to look. Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it?
The black box pinger isn't really designed to locate a crash site, IIRC, it's to locate the black box within a crash site that could cover several square kilometers.
I'm more surprised that there isn't a single (imagery-related) satellite that would, over the last 24 hours or so, have taken imagery (or been able to be re-assigned to do so) of the area(s) of interest.
If for nothing else than to rule out some areas / possible outcomes... But yeah, very far out of my realm of expertise, though I do hope to finish my PPL fairly soon & am an avid AVHerald & LiveATC follower! :-)
