I feel sorry for the relatives too, but screaming, shouting and throwing bottles at Malaysians will not help. Blaming the Malaysian authorities for not doing enough and not keeping them informed is unjustified in my opinion. All the participating nations are trying to find it, that is obvious and I hope that they will be helped and poor counries reimbursed for all they have done

Yes, I agree, so many countries have sent so much equipment and personnel to the area, and it must be like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks. That ocean is massive, and hostile.

I have some background with radar and think I should spread this bit of information. The Boeing 777 is largely a composite/carbon fiber aircraft. As such it is quite stealthy. The radar microwaves are more absorbed than reflected off the plane's skin. The only time you'd get a good microwave reflection is if the waves are coming at the engine intakes or exhausts. The plane doesn't have to fly at 5,000 ft to avoid radar. To radar techs it looks like a flock of birds. This fact is one reason they put transponders on the jets: to make them stand out on radar. A plane with a functioning transponder might benefit from flying that low and mixing in with the ground clutter returns all radars have to cope with (there are some radars that don't see that clutter - AWACS for example). But a plane with its transponder turned off would be almost invisible at altitudes that indigenous bird groups fly at (geese to about 15,000 ft).
One possible reason for a stealth plane to descend to 4-5,000 ft is for a parachutist to jump out. In the dense atmosphere the plane travels at a slow speed, slow enough to safely exit one of the rear doors. After a few seconds the jumper would be slowed by air resistance to a speed low enough to safely deploy the parachute. This adds Pseudocide as a possible cause of this incident. Check for recent purchases of parachutes by anyone connected to that flight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudocide

Besides the black boxes there is something else I think the search should center on under the sea: the flight deck. The boxes were designed fifty years ago when the data storage available was just magnetic tape. We have had a computer revolution since then and many commands input to that aircraft went through the flight management system (the part of ACARS that stays up and running even when the transmitter is turned off). All the control commands are made through that bit of computer and then it gets copied to the black box. The data describing how whoever input commands should still be existing on that EPROM or flash drive even if it was told to erase. We all know erasures are really just a process of telling the registry that overwrite space is available. The original data should still be in the memory. The integrated circuits are also encapsulated solid state devices and exposure to 4 miles depth in the sea shouldn't deteriorate their integrity. Even if the nose of the plane is a pile of bulkhead and wires, the electronic components should be recoverable by the right submersible. Reading the schedule of keystrokes into that system would tell almost all we'd need to know about what happened.

The French took two years to find their downed aircraft. What I really want to know
is was this due to some mechanical failure. Trying to make unauthorized landings-somewhere in Australia really makes me nervous to say the least.

Checking for recent parachute purchases does seem like a reasonable line of inquiry. Surely all possibilities should be examined.

The whole thing sounds miiiiighty fishy to me

They keep giving us the stats as distanced from Perth. But RAAF Learmonth is a little over 600 miles from the search site. Why have all the air search planes been coming from Perth which is 1,500 miles from the search areas? I'd think all those eyes on the water should have been flying out of Learmonth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learmonth,_Western_Australia
Learmonth is a dual military/civilian airport and should have had the radar capability of seeing all air traffic from Indonesia southward. Where are their scan records? According to the Wikipedia article, the very purpose of building Learmonth was as a defensive early warning/reaction base toward the Indonesians should they decide to attack Australia.

Eddition: I'd like to see a replay of the Inmarsat data by flying a ACARS disabled plane along that route and replicating the data. Or better yet a second plane on an unannounced flight path and ask Inmarsat to tell us where that plane went. Prove the technology being relied on, please.

I see I didn't post it here but I did elsewhere about the idea that the flight-deck center console isn't the only place on that aircraft that has buffer memory. All the cell phones onboard (in the easiest to spot on sonar fuselage) come equipped with memory chips. Erin Burnett reported tonight on her CNN program, Out Front, that some Chicago scientists (oceanographers, marine professors and computer forensics experts got together and put a phone under cold salt water high pressure for a week and then extracted the data that had been put into it before the test began (Text, Photos and Videos!). One of the scientists was surprised at their success and termed the phones on the MH370 as mini-black boxes. He added that many phones do that auto handshake deal and can receive the satellite signals of the GPS system though they can't transmit to them, and therefore, the route - minute by minute - of that airplane can be traced through the phone data! They didn't get into the center console but I believe it has similar treasures to recover as the phones do.
If I recall my Integrated Circuits Manufacturing processes correctly, this is possible because the nature of the memory materials needed them to be encapsulated in Sapphire Glass (just below Diamond in hardness) to insure a permanence of IC integrity under normal conditions. The added benefit of being able to survive at three miles deep is serendipitous. Hope exists that a reason for this tragedy will emerge one day soon.

How does aeroplane mode affect that mehaul?

Sue,
If you mean does it affect chip data recording, from what I read about airplane mode (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane_mode ) is that it is only an operation that effects actual transmission of signals to a cell tower/receiver. All other operations of the device still work, meaning all your keystrokes, software commands, photos and videos would still be stored in the devices buffer/storage memory. Since it is only transmission that is denied to the device, reception of Satellite GPS signals would still be recorded since that is a reception function not a transmit one(if the particular phone has the app for that).
Hopefully the PIM/SIM data identifying the owner can also be recovered so any last messages can be passed on to the owner's family after criminal forensics has had a view of the data on each device.

Update: Erin revisited the story tonight and the forensic computer expert said they could retrieve info from all types of devices except - iPhones and other Apple products because they encrypt the data that is stored in the device. But, he said, with Apple's help that obstacle could be overcome.

It sounds promising then.