Inmarsat and AAIB appear to have applied some genuine boffin power to this and come up with a previously unused approach to solve this.

The Australian Defence Minister has made a recent announcement - depths in the area are ~3,500 meters / nearly 11,500 feet - over twice as deep as AF447, iirc. Currently at Sea State 7, the HMAS Success has had to reposition 120 km south due to dangerous sea conditions; no search today.


Korea is sending yet another P-3 Orion and an C-130H Hercules. China is sending the Xuě Lóng ("Snow Dragon"), most recently involved in the Antarctic rescue of the Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy. The UK is sending the HMS Echo. The "black box" is powered for 25 - 30 days, so they are working hard to locate the "black box" before it ceases pinging and adds a level of difficulty to the search and recovery operation.

Just to note HMS Echo is a "multi-role hydrographic survey ship".

She seems pretty much ideal to this kind of task.

Possibly a bit on the small side, and she wouldn't have much stowage space for any wreckage found but well equipped and with a well trained crew.

The Chinese ship Snow Dragon sounds better suited to the weather but possibly not so good for the role.

Boeing rules out cyber sabotage connection to missing plane
 

You may not have seen this as this news site isn't as well known as CNN or the like:

http://wtop.com/215/3589889/Boeing-r...alaysian-plane

The news story explorers the possibility of cyber sabotage of on-board computer and network system. It also mentions that the plane was possibly out of service for more than a month prior to resuming service on 7 Mar, though the FAQ on post #1 of this thread mentions service in late February.

Anyone know what kind of maintenance was performed/due for this craft prior to 7 Mar?

Echo is a survey vessel, not a salvage vessel. When it gets to the point of recovering wreckage, the job will be done by vessels equipped with ROVs which can descend to the seabed and attach lifting lines.

Have they actually fished anything from the ocean yet which tells us that the area is confirmed?

Not sure small size is relevant at this point. This ship's primary task is to locate wreckage, not recover it.

Snow Dragon is a designed as an icebreaker, meaning its hull design performs quite poorly in open waters. So it's actually not at all suited for current weather conditions in the search area.

No. Supposedly a couple of days ago, a Chinese aircraft located a couple of large objects amongst a large number of smaller white objects, spread over a square kilometer. If it's true, it sounds promising. Here is a link. Could be rudder, elevators and other smaller buoyant debris such as seat cushions.

Wednesday UTC, AMSA announces sea conditions have improved and 12 aircraft are involved in search missions. (BBC and AMSA Facebook page)

Search area split into East and West; 122 more objects spotted by Airbus satellite.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26731117
(live tab, commentary box on left, scroll down)

The images, taken on 23 March, showed objects up to 23m (75ft) in length, Hishammuddin Hussein said.

Some of the objects identified by the Airbus company appeared bright and were possibly of solid material.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...8664_plane.png
Images, given to the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency by Airbus

lawsuit filed in US
 

Why does airbus have a satellite and what does it use it for?

Airbus Group (formerly EADS - European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company) includes a bunch of different companies. "Airbus Defence and Space" includes the former Astrium, which provides satellites, launch services and satellite services.

So these are ordinary Earth-observing satellites that normally provide images for military or civil use; they've just been paying specific attention to data coming back from the search area lately. This WSJ article explains a bit:

http://stream.wsj.com/story/malaysia...8/SS-2-491978/

Because the Airbus Group has this division: Airbus Defense & Space

A March 25, 2014 AP article (Philly.com) includes an estimate of the precision of Inmarsat's calculations:


To me, this means that even if Inmarsat's calculations and assumptions were 100% correct, the searchers still have a very big search area to cover.