the flight data recorder will have the whole flight info, it records for 20+ hours, that will reveal a lot

Also the last 2 hours will tell a lot anyway (silence indicated nobody in control, a "goodbye" indicating suicide, or a final message from the pilot)

I think this falls under (especially in Malaysia and China) money is no object

Well as I suggested earlier in the thread, you should have got in touch with the Malaysian authorities. You could have saved them and dozens of other nations millions of dollars by just showing them your marker-on-a-map. Tbh I'd be really interested to hear how you solved this mystery that millions of dollars and world-class military technology couldn't.

Yeah, pretty sure it'd be political suicide for any individual or nation to know the approximate location of the black box but not actually make efforts to retrieve it.

I'd still put recovery of the black box as unlikely. The Air France recovery effort took years and tens of millions of dollars.

The longer this goes without finding the wreckage (the actual wreckage, not just debris floating on the surface of the ocean) the less people will care and the less willing they'll be to spend the money they'd need to spend to recover it.

It will be retrieved. A lot was learned about how to conduct operations like this from Air France too, they'll be more efficient this time around.

He did make 2 valid predictions (at a time when tons of articles/blogs were coming up with a huge variety of theories) that are now more likely

Well to help you out I probably should have expanded on my theory. I didn't choose that marker particularly as it was already on a picture but it was still around about where I thought the plane would end up. I chose to use that picture with the marker as I believe that the captain committed suicide based on IIRC his political beliefs which had taken a significant hit in the days leading up to this flight and the middle of nowhere in the Indian Ocean to make it seem like his life and those that went with him had little effect on oppresive political power.

Like what?

Doesn't the black box produce a signal for 30 days? They have 2 weeks to find it.

gotta give bundy his props, he appears to have nailed the exact ocean

The problem is that because of the depth they have to be almost right on top of it to hear it. And finding possible floating debris doesn't really pin down where it is.

But maybe I'd change my "unlikely to be found" to be "50/50 either way".

it's not even confirmed the floating debris is part of the plane. he might have nailed the exact ocean where the missing shipment of tickle me elmos fell off the container ship.

there have been instances where they spent tens of millions of dollars and several years to recover black boxes for cases that were publicised far less than this one. they can do some pretty cool stuff with machinery and underwater cameras these days. if they find wreckage they will recover the black boxes.

Air France 447 was publicized almost as much. I remember front page articles talking about how there were only X days left until the black box stopped transmitting its location.

Yes. If they find the planes wreckage they will be able to recover the black box. The problem is finding the actual wreckage. Again, the Air France flight is probably our best comparison where we knew the general area, found some debris, and still weren't able to locate the actual wreckage until years later.

Edit: And also the fact that debris from AF 447 was found so much earlier probably means that the overall search area was much smaller. Debris at this point has had weeks to drift.

And again, we don't actually know if we've found debris at this point.

I heard the depth of the Indian Ocean compared to the depth of the Atlantic Ocean could pose a problem in recovering stuff.

I heard that too, although when I actually looked it seems like the depth of the Indian Ocean is roughly equivalent to that of where they found AF 447.

there's a really good article about the search for air france wreckage here

the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are the go-to guys. they were the people who found the titanic (12k feet deep).

air france was a good example of how they don't need to rely on the pingers anymore. the media love to publicise the pinger angle because it gives a slow motion story some urgency, but if they find wreckage they will be able to find the black boxes. it will just cost a ton of money.

I just skimmed it, but I'm pretty familiar with the investigation. I just don't remember (or see in that article) any big leaps in techniques for finding the black box/wreckage.

I remember one search (don't know if it was the successful one or not) that was based on a probability analysis of previous flights taking into weather. But that's not really relevant here.

And yes, I'm with you that if they find the wreckage they'll get the black box. But the problem is actually finding the wreckage.

Edit: To be clear, I'm using wreckage to mean the remains of the plane at the bottom of the sea. Things like engines, black box, and big pieces of the hull that don't break into a million pieces and float away.

from the time they were brought in to search it took Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution a grand total of 1 week to find the AF447 wreckage. they then found the FDR on the first dive, and the CVR a week later. obviously it takes time to perform bayesian analysis and narrow down the most likely areas to search but this stuff seems like mostly a matter of sucking it up and spending the $$$ to bring in the right people.

Bundy - how much you gonna charge to find the black box?

the black boxes from this flight were recovered from 16,000 ft in 1988(!) after the pinging had ended. was also performed by a private company.

Seabeast, it still seems like there are a few leaps to go from comparing the bringing in of WHO in the AF situation (already data from extensive searches, lots of debris found early, pilots that weren't trying to evade detection, etc.) to this one.

This might be a stupid question, but can the search carry on after dark?

It's sending out ultrasonic pings. A ship like the Kidd should be able to triangulate the position within a few hundred meters if it has a general search area.

Strangest thing -- at around 7:30 (EDT) this morning, WINS (in NY) reported that ABC said that those two images were (a) a freighter and (b) a group of dolphins. I guess that was a mistake? Not sure where they got that from. Nobody else has said that and it's not on the ABC site.