[garyfirestorm]

We couldn’t find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the ocean. They couldn’t track it in the air nor can they still find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem is not trivial.

[seizethecheese]

A commercial jet is both way smaller and faster moving than an aircraft carrier. I suspect this is like saying: why can’t you see the fly in the photo, the turtle is right there!

[simlevesque]

It can also go over any part of the globe. The aircraft carrier is limited to non-shallow water.

[baq]

There's a nonzero chance military intelligence agencies of multiple countries know exactly where that plane fell, but none can say anything, because that would reveal the true extent of their capabilities.

[abcd_f]

Just like it was with that amateur sub that imploded. It later surfaced the Navy heard the implosion and knew what it was.

[awesome_dude]

Uhhh surfaced?

[dmos62]

Made me smile. Thank you.

[IncreasePosts]

They could just feed the data to some associated outside party with some other plausible explanation. But, there are only a few, maybe two countries, with the ability and desire to have listening stations all over the ocean, and neither one is particularly interested in the Indian ocean.

[loeg]

The Indian Ocean is both larger and has significantly less traffic than the Mediterranean. And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier.

[TeMPOraL]

> And a 777 is about 16x faster than a carrier.

Surely that's missing a 0 or are carriers really that fast?

[marricks]

Aircraft carrier speed... 33 knots or about 35mph[1]

Boeing 777 speed 554mph[2]

So about 16x!

[1] http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-028.php

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777

[ray__]

Honestly pretty crazy, although that must be the max speed. The carrier was going about 10 mph in this case (per Strava).

[jmalicki]

They don't normally go that fast from what I understand. That is their top speed in reserve they can use for evasive maneuvers, they don't want to go faster than their support fleet or deal with the high maintenance running at threshold will cause.

It's like when you drive your car you're not normally redlining it since that will kill the engine if you do it all the time.

[jmalicki]

Commercial airliners are sub mach1. The Charles de Gaulle is reported to go at least 27 knots at top speed.

27*16=432, a 777 goes 510-520 knots.

So maybe more like 18-19x.

For the carriers it is at least as the true top speed is classified.

[loeg]

16x, 20x -- it's about the right order of magnitude.

[kergonath]

Surprisingly, it is much easier to find a big chunk of steel floating on the Mediterranean, knowing where it was a couple of days ago, than a smaller object disintegrated in small pieces under the Indian Ocean. Go figure.

[wat10000]

Nobody was looking for MH370 while it was in the air. After a few hours, it rapidly became a submarine, which is a type of craft that's well known for being hard to find. In addition to that, it took on its new submersible form in one of the most remote areas of the ocean, rather than in a small and very busy sea.

[literalAardvark]

MH370 crashed in the Pacific.

Look at the globe some day from that angle and compare it to the Mediterranean.

[contingencies]

Err, no. The consensus and available evidence including washed up components seems to be that it crashed in the Indian Ocean, that's the (also vast) space between ~Australia and ~Africa, bounded in the north by Indonesia, the Indian subcontinent, and Arabia. It crashed somewhere in the eastern portion, not far from Indonesia and Australia. Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC. The Pacific is the other (eastern) side of Australia, which stretches from the Aussie-Kiwi approach to the South Pole to Alaska, and Vladivostok to Tierra del Fuego.

[kergonath]

> Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC

Some bits ended up on a beach of the Réunion island, closer to Madagascar than Sri Lanka. I am not disagreeing, it’s just that the whole story is fascinating. It’s easy to think "well, it just crashed into the sea so of course some bits would show up on a beach" until you look at the Indian Ocean with a proper projection and figure the scale.

[contingencies]

Floating is a powerful physical configuration! You get currents plus windspeed. If you're in to this sort of thing, I can recommend The Seacraft of Prehistory, We: The Navigators, and Archaeology of the Boat approximately in that order.

[stavros]

Are you making the same point as the person you said "err, no" to, or are you correcting the inconsequential details while not addressing their main point?

[loeg]

No. literalAardvark's main statement, "[It] crashed in the Pacific," was incorrect. contingencies's comment corrected that.

[epsteingpt]

Different times. Now there are thousands of LEO satellites.