Searching the Indian Ocean for a Plane Crash
In the last five days, the search for Malaysian flight 370 has achieved an almost supernatural status. Where did this giant aircraft disappear to?
A 777 is a huge aircraft, 200 feet long, but the Indian ocean has swallowed it up. It is gone.
To better envision the difficulty of finding an aircraft in an ocean, I re-scaled the task. I expected that it would be similar to finding a needle in Disneyland. Not very familar with the size of the Indian Ocean, that turned out to be understating the challenge.
The Indian ocean is 28,400,000 square miles in area. That is 105 times as large as the state of Texas (268,820 square miles). Finding a jet in the Indian Ocean is equivalent to finding a two-foot toy plane in Texas.
If you aren't familiar with how large Texas is, that might seem possible.
To better comprehend the area, I shrunk the problem further. Consider Yosemite National Park in California. It is 1,190 square miles of forest. This is 1/23865th the size of the Indian Ocean. When people get lost in Yosemite, it can be very challenging to find them.
If you shrink a 777 down to 1/ 23,865th of its size, it will be 2.5mm long, the size of a sesame seed. Imagine trying to find a sesame seed in Yosemite.
Next, consider the city of San Francisco. It occupies a mere 232 square miles of area. Shrink the Indian Ocean to this size and the missing jet is ½ mm. Finding the jet in the Indian Ocean is equivalent to finding a grain of salt in San Francisco.
It is also equivalent to finding something the width of a human hair on the island of Manhattan, finding a red blood cell at Burning Man, and finding a particle just 500 nanometers in length at Disneyland.
| Indian Ocean | 28,400,000 square miles | Jet | 200 ft long |
| Texas | 268,820 square miles | Styrofoam Plane | 2 feet long |
| Yosemite Park | 1,190 square miles | Sesame seed | 2.5 mm long |
| San Francisco | 232 square miles | A grain of salt | ½ mm long |
| Manhattan | 34 square miles | the thickness of a hair | 73 micrometers |
| Burning Man | two square miles | a red blood cell | 4 micrometers |
| Disneyland | 160 acres (.25 square miles) | a particle | 500 nanometers |
chris
wtf?
MurmerMurmer
Malaysian Airlines flight 370 co-#soty
along with dis one
Tiresias
iracane
It’s like trying to find a good knish in Peoria!
jhw
It landed in Abu Dhabi days ago.
Tiresias
what if the plane was just a hologram?
iracane
This share sucks, just click through to see the pictures.
kxmas
This share is a work of art.
iracane
MurmerMurmer
kxmas
Do they sell Earl Campbell’s Hot Links in Jersey? Pretty good.
Hmmmm, made with beef tongue.
iracane
No they don’t, but I would eat anything with a li'l beef tongue in it made by a running back.
chris
lol I clicked through and still got the weird women pics! Guess I should’ve shift+refreshed.
njpaNick
Trying to find a plane in the ocean is like trying to find the correct pictures for this share.
