well someone has to notice something too. In this day and age I expect them to be available real time but my ex brother in law used to do similar for the air force and what he could see in a photo is beyond me even after going "its right there". Video about finding V1 in WW2 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23270332 explaining how to find something in photos

That is an awesome story thanks for sharing the link. More people died making the V1/2 than killed in Britain I didn't know that.

There are a massive number of images to review. The South China Sea search area alone is 14,440 square miles.

That is true but if this turns out to be not far off the flight's original path then I am a little surprised still.

Possibly because the Chinese initially didn't want to release the images to give away the full capabilities of their satellites to potential adversaries.

It's safe to say these images have been blurred/degraded from the original sources.

The image was taken on March 9 11:00 AM and relaesed on Marh 12. That's about 48 hours.

Also note that their work is to "found the airplane" not to "release the image".

Because after the pictures were taken they had to search thousands of square miles of ocean to find any tiny speck of anything that looked interesting. It's a very slow and tedious process.