Sober assessment of the challenges of finding the airplane:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ssal-task.html

We can speculate all we want on the question of why anyone would deliberately fly the plane into an empty ocean. There remains a strong possibility that it was not done deliberately, that a bungled hijack, fire, or other failure left the crew and passengers dead or incapacitated and the plane ran on its own until the fuel ran out. To me that looks like the "Occam's Razor" explanation, but of course we won't know until the plane is recovered.

This incident could result in the introduction of automated systems that would send alerts or activate independent tracking systems if a pilot s incapacitated. Heavy equipment manufacturers are already introducing systems that monitor operators for signs of fatigue, seems entirely possible to adapt those for aircraft.

I've seen it mentioned that data recorders only record data for the last 60 minutes of flight, and may have erased the relevant sections. Does anyone know why that's the case? Given the state of compact data storage these days it's hard to believe that they can't include enough capacity to record data for an entire flight.