To find missing Malaysian Airline Flight 370, governments have deployed dozens of personnel with high-tech equipment to scour the Indian Ocean. But locating an airliner is not nearly as simple as the public believes. To explain the process, the news media have called on University of Rhode Island engineering professors.

Ocean engineering Professors James Miller and Harold “Bud” Vincent appeared on CNN in April 2014 to speak about the search for the plane and the 239 people aboard. Miller took CNN reporter Rosa Flores out on Narragansett Bay to demonstrate how searchers listen for a “ping” from an airplane’s black boxes. Armed with a hydrophone (an underwater microphone), Miller and the CNN crew attempt to pick up the pings from a nearby device and witness how quickly the signal fades with distance. The search is also complicated by other sounds in the ocean emitted by sea life, the ship itself and even rainfall.

With little luck detecting pings from the black boxes, searchers have turned to underwater vehicles to explore the seabed. However, a recently deployed vehicle, the Bluefin-21, had to return to the surface because the ocean proved too deep. Vincent, a former U.S. Navy diver, told CNN that even if the vehicle reaches the seabed, silt may cover the plane making it all but invisible to sonar and camera imagery.

Watch the Videos

James Miller Shows How Pingers Work

Bud Vincent Discusses the Problem of Silt