[melling]

So, if the plane is traveling at 13 km a minutes and you have a 20 minute window, it's going to take a long time to find it.

Doesn't the technology exist to detect low power signals from a much greater distance? The US military must be able to do it?

[teamonkey]

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.

[adanto6840]

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! :-)

http://www.liveatc.net/forums/

http://www.avherald.com/

[Maxious]

You can look at Landsat imagery for some of the search area http://www.geosage.com/Special/Landsat8_Flight370.pdf

[Zancarius]

> Doesn't the technology exist to detect low power signals from a much greater distance?

The pingers are sonar (well, sonic, but detected with sonar), with all the limitations that implies.