Man, I wish we had better tracking devices on those birds.
I mean, it's a huge money sink to divert dozens of ships around the area and manually search for debris to show up, not to mention that in some other cases the significant delay could be bad for potential wounded survivors. Can't we mandate that planes get an "oh shit" mode where they start squeaking their telemetry at full blast to everyone that cares to listen on every spectrum they can send on. I mean, the on board computers likely had more than enough time during the crash to determine that the plane no longer was inside the normal flight envelope. If the airline or flight controller had up to date gps/glonass/Galileo coordinates, heading and velocity data from moments before the impact (and some basic understanding of currents around the area), then wouldn't the wreckage be found already? Even better, if there was some battery driven reporting function for at least a few seconds after the impact? Or maybe even possibly minutes? I know it's not quite as easy as throwing a GPS unit, car battery, airbag crash sensor and some wires inside a picnic basket, but ...
Again, that probably wouldn't help much in this case, but it irks me, slightly, that half a day has passed and nobody has so much as come close to the wreck yet. To be frank, partly because I have an irrational fear of there being a crazy lucky survivor that gets to freeze to death in the cold sea while people are desperately combing the area a few kilometres away.
Also, man, those "content aware" ads for discount airlines. When keyword triggers go wrong.