So, why is the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 taking so long?

[xiphias]

Well, they say that it could have flown for six hours after they lost it.

Six hours from Boston (or, well, New York if you insist) to the east is London, to the west is San Francisco, to the south is Venezuela, and to the north is northern Greenland. They're trying to search an area as large as Venezuela to the Arctic circle and London to San Francisco. That's a pretty big area.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

And, on its likeliest flight path, over open ocean. The really weird part is that no terrorist organization is claiming credit for this. This leaves open the possibility of literal "air piracy," which would imply, if true, that a very dangerous criminal cartel has emerged.

This may be the other shoe dropping from the Great Powers' incredibly pusillanimous response to the re-emergence of maritime piracy. If pirate ports are sacrosanct, why not pirate airports?

[redbird]

Also, they started that search in a relatively small subset of that area, and are searching for an object that, unlike in the Air France crash a few years back, may have been deliberately concealed. For comparison, it took about two years after the Air France to find most of the plane, including its black boxes.

[ron_newman]

I'm liking this theory. Yes, it means everyone is dead, but it doesn't require any fantastical and bizarre malevolence.

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

+1

[robby.livejournal.com]

Some are saying that the plane traveled on one of two well-defined courses. The plane had a transmitter that "pinged" a satellite a number of times throughout the hours long journey, and left investigators with a records of distances from the satellite. The northern course was blanketed with military radar scanners, but no sign of the plane. The southern course took it near Indonesia and west of Australia.