Hishammuddin, Malaysia's public face of the search efforts, has repeatedly said that little is likely to be established about the mysterious flight until the plane is found.
But in the Indian Ocean, where Australia and Indonesia have taken the lead in the hunt, some of the depths that searchers are dealing with are significant.
The Bay of Bengal, for example, which lies between Myanmar and India, has depths of between about 4,000 and 7,000 meters (13,000 feet and 23,000 feet), according to McCallum.
Wreckage and bodies of passengers from Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, were found at depths of around 12,000 feet by unmanned submarines.
It took four searches over the course of nearly two years to locate the bulk of the wreckage and the majority of the bodies of the 228 people on board Flight 447. It took even longer to establish the cause of the disaster.
Right now, authorities don't even know for sure if the missing Malaysian plane crashed or landed -- or where.
CNN has talked to more than half a dozen U.S. military and intelligence officials who emphasize that while no one knows what happened to the plane, it is more logical to conclude it crashed into the Indian Ocean.
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