Could the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane have gone much faster?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...alaysia-airlines-plane-have-gone-much-faster/
Looking only at the last communication between the plane and the satellite that took place at 8:11 a.m., and apparently ignoring all those other pings and the complex triangulations based on them, Malaysia published a map of two vast search corridors where the plane might have ended up, one to the north and one to the south.
On Tuesday, March 18, three days after the map above was released, Australia announced that together with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, it had narrowed down the search area to just three percent of the southern corridor. The Americans and Australians took the Inmarsat triangulations in other words, data from each of those hourly pings -- along with some assumptions about the plane's speed, and out came a much smaller search area, shown below.