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KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Aviation experts say the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared over the weekend will be found -- eventually.
It took two years to find the main wreckage of an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. And in 2007, closer to the area where the Malaysian jet disappeared, it took a week for wreckage from an Indonesian jet to be spotted.
Making this search harder is the possibility that the Malaysian jet made a U-turn before it disappeared. Officials involved in the search say the plane could be hundreds of miles from where it was last detected.
One expert says the plane must have been intact for some time after disappearing from radar. John Cox, a former US Airways pilot who heads Safety Operating Systems, says if it had exploded along its flight path, the debris would have been found by now.
Malaysian officials say more than 1,000 people, with at least 34 planes and 40 ships, are searching a radius of 100 nautical miles around the plane's last known location.
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