I confidently predict that the wreckage of MH370 will be found sometime in the next 300 years by underseas mining robots. Whether they'll be programmed to not grind it up to extract the metal from the seatbelt buckles is another matter.

By pointing out that it's been three weeks, is the author trying to make a point about how easy this should have been? The AirFrance flight took two years to find.

@2, it is true that the black box for the AirFrance jet took two years to find. But they found floating wreckage and pieces of the plane within 3 days, and had recovered several of the bodies less than a week after it went down. So it took a long time to find the black box, but they had a good idea of where it went down less than a week after it disappeared.

At some point, China is going to get really pissed about this and start smacking Malaysia around. The gross incompetence on display there has to end eventually.

@3 And wasn't the Air France plane found along its normal flight path? MH370 was seriously lost, lost from radar, travelling in an unknown direction for unknown reasons after a series of maneuvers begun before it dropped off radar, which we would have no way of knowing were complete. That, you will admit, does make things harder, doesn't it?

Only with some very high-tech analysis of some very limited data, do we now have a rough idea of which ocean it might be at the bottom of, if not exactly where. So far, the guesses encompass a circle about 1000 miles across. If the latest guess is right, it will still take a miracle to find the black boxes before their locator devices run out of juice.

Even if they find the wreckage and the black boxes, they analysis could still take months. As anyone who watches the TV series Mayday: Air Crash Disaster knows, the final real explanations are sometimes more strange than the speculation beforehand.

@3, the Air France plane went down in a heavily-trafficked part of the Atlantic, not that far from land. This plane probably went down in the unimaginably vast and empty stretches of the Indian Ocean, 1500 miles from anything at all.

The ocean is big. They don't know anything yet. These constant press conferences and so forth are a waste of time. It could indeed be years.

@7 Agreed. With respect to those who lost folks on the plane, I wish the media would stop using this story as clickbait, and not report on it again until the wreck is actually found. Continuing to publish articles detailing theories about why they haven't found the plane yet is lazy journalism.

I wonder if it's time to update black box technology. I wonder if they mounted them on top of airplanes (in a port just inside the skin with a hatch), have them auto-eject after a while of inactivity, make them float, and give them gps and cell service they'd eventually be found. There's still a lot that could happen that would keep them with the plane, but this could help the next time we lose a plane.

The world is relying on Malaysian information for reports of the plane. That's like asking north korea to tell the world what their nuclear capability is. Dumb and dumber.

@9 A couple of issues here:

Much of what you're talking about is already covered by the ELT. Those already have GPS and worldwide monitoring capability. Trust me, it's a big deal when those go off.

You'd also need to consider what it would take to trigger the ejection of such a device, and ensure that ejection would take place regardless of plane orientation. So this means more than one (incidentally, this is why there are doors on both sides of a plane). Even then, the only advantage is when everything else has been turned off, yet somehow this isn't...

And if you make it too sensitive, you'll get too many false alarms and that wastes emergency resources that could be used in a real emergency instead.