Having over 3500 hours in P-3s (the principal aircraft searching for MH370), my first thought when I viewed the satellite imagery was that it was just whitecaps. I suspect satellite analysts dont frequently search open ocean imagery and could easily mistake whitecaps for something else. More than once a whitecap looked like a fishing boat, raft and even a submarine at first glance until I was able to look at how the shape transformed over a short period of time. Satellite image analysts dont have anything more than a split second snapshot. They are looking from a spot miles up, while we typically searched between 200 and 500 feet over the ocean.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 00:00:25 +0000