Finding doomed Malaysia jet might take years, U.S. Navy official warns

With the chances of locating Malaysia Airlines Flight 370's black box before its battery runs out continuing to dwindle every day, a U.S Navy official expressed reservations about ever finding the doomed jet. Although the search area has been narrowed down to 200,000 square miles southwest of Perth, Australia, the purported plane debris spotted by various satellites still hasn't materialized.

"Right now, the search area is basically the size of the Indian Ocean, which would take an untenable amount of time to search," said Capt. Mark Matthews at a press briefing Sunday.

He also compared the investigation to the search for Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 but wasn't found until 2011. In that case, he noted, investigators had better "positional information" of where the plane went down, but it still "took over two years conducting side-scan sonar searches with autonomous vehicles to locate the debris. So it can be a very long search effort."

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