Focus or perspective, pick one. So you've got a big-ass telescope. It's in space, pointed at the ground. It's not exactly a zoom lens - it's pretty much optimized to make the ground look really good from its orbit. How wide it'll go is not exactly public knowledge. However, here's a pretty-well zoomed out shot: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB13/7.jpg How tight it'll go isn't supposed to be public knowledge, but there are leaks. Here's an undegraded (to the best of my knowledge) KH-11 shot of a bomber a little smaller than a 777: You can infer that the imaging target of a KH-11 isn't more than a mile or so wide, depending on what it's pointed at. We could probably do some math and figure it out. Let's go ahead and go with that. Now go back and look at this page. And the hope - and it's quite a hope - is that at some point, recording data for no reason, in the middle of the ocean, a path 1 square wide managed to intersect the flight of an airplane. Do you understand?
That is an excellent link for putting it into perspective. For the record, even after that link and reading way too much about this shit, I am still baffled that a plane can go missing. Once it is missing, I can see how it can be nearly impossible to find. But between satellites, radar, gps, cell phones, etc etc etc etc, I have a hard time imagining how can it simply go 'poof'. I just re-read your above posts and, with numerous other articles on the subject, I am starting to understand why it can go poof. But the concept that it can go poof is still beyond grasp, I guess. The idea that these supposedly omniscient technologies aren't so omniscient its a difficult one. Blame Hollywood or ignorance. It's still a weirdly troubling thing..
We do not do well with abstractions. You've seen planes. They are large. You've been in them, with more strangers than you have friends. You've seen oceans. They are large. You've been in them; they seem to go on forever. Our concept of "large plane" is pretty far off, though. Each wing on a 777 is the size of a tennis court, more or less. You've met people who have those in their back yards. our concept of "large ocean" is truly fucked. If you stand on the shoreline and stare out as far as you can see, how much ocean are you looking at? 1000 square miles? 100? Fourteen square miles. Also according to Wolfram Alpha, about 1/3rd the size of Disney World. So let's say you could see that downed plane. Let's say you're standing on the beach with binoculars looking out. You're trying to find, essentially, a tennis court in a piece of Disney World. It's about 1/1000th of the area you can see. ...that's if the plane crashed in sight of you. The world is a very big place, and we are very small on't. Even when hundreds of us pile into a can, we are still a flyspeck on the Epcot Center.