Mike Seberger, project manager, United States
Your screenshot of a “jet-shaped object” went viral on Tuesday, but was later confirmed to be the image of a boat. Why are you continuing to search for the plane?
Initially I felt really excited because my image so closely resembled the scale and shape of a 777-200, and it was in that excited mindset that I wrote the CNN iReport hoping to get someone to examine it. I even had people claiming to be aerospace engineers email me overlays supporting the photo being a match for the plane. But after cooling down a bit, and thinking it through more logically, it makes more sense for it to be a boat, unless my satellite image was captured while the plane was floating, which seems unlikely given the time-stamp on my image, or submerged in very shallow water, but that also seems unlikely.
People just want to help, are intrigued by the mystery and the technology makes it easy for someone local or across the world to pitch into that effort. Honestly, I’ve only been able to spend a couple of hours in total on Tomnod, because I have other commitments, and most often when I visit, the site is apparently overloaded with traffic, as pages won’t load or function properly. In a way, I view that as a good thing, because that means lots of others are probably in there working to review images, even if I can’t access them.