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remember that air France jet that crashed in to the ocean a while ago and how much trouble they had to go through to even just find the thing in spite of having a pretty good idea where it went down ?

Now imagine the same thing without a good idea of where it went down. The ocean is a pretty big place. Maybe some debris will wash up on a shore somewhere, but that might very well be half the world away from the crash site.

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Depending on where the crash is that floating debris may never end up ashore. Instead, it may end up shredded into pieces and floating just under the surface of the water in a mid-ocean gyre along with a crap-ton of other debris from who-knows-where. At that point it's like searching for a needle in a field full of haystacks that have been picked up by a tornado.

I'd say it's like searching in a needle in a needle stack. The amount of unidentifiable junk that ends up in ocean gyres from planes, boats and cars (!) is astounding.

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