How difficult is it to find a commercial plane in the middle of an ocean?
That question has come up many times within the last two weeks as crews painstakingly search for Malaysia Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean. And the answer is quite simple when you put it in perspective of the graph below:
How difficult is it to find #MH370 in the Indian Ocean? This chart shows what crews are up against pic.twitter.com/GnHxSr4ehN
— Lisa Crivelli (@LisaMariePC) March 24, 2014
The southern corridor of the Indian Ocean, where officials now believe the plane went down, ranges in depth from 3,770 feet to 23,000 feet. At its greatest depth, that’s almost equal to the height of Mount Everest (which measures 29,029 feet tall).
In our chart, we compared the tail height of a Boeing 777, which is just 60 feet tall, to the height of some of our globe’s most recognizable structures–and as you can see: finding a plane that is 60 feet in height is quite literally like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Lisa Crivelli