The huge challenge facing efforts to locate the wreckage of flight MH370 is not just about the conditions in some of the planet’s most inhospitable oceans. It is about narrowing down the area of the search, which at present encompasses 469,407 square nautical miles of ocean, or almost 622,000 square miles or 1.6m square km – an area just slightly smaller than Alaska.
“We’re not searching for a needle in a haystack. We’re still trying to define where the haystack is,” Mark Binskin, vice chief of the Australian Defence Forces, told reporters at Pearce, the air force base near Perth that is the base for the international aircrews and their aircraft.
The size of the search area has come down in recent days, helped by the new analysis of satellite data and various as yet unidentified debris spotted in the southern Indian Ocean.