Not all airplane crashes in water have the happy ending of Captain Sullenberger's successful landing in the Hudson River. Downed off the west coast of Australia in water 20,000 or more feet deep,
Malaysia Flight 370 has never been found.
What we know and don't know about the ocean's hadal zone 20,000 to 36,000 feet under water may explain why Flight 370 is still missing. Heavy ships, like the Titanic, constructed to sail the high seas have been found in large identifiable chunks after they sank. An airplane, made to sail through the air, is not a vehicle for: 1) crashing into a wall of water at the accelerating rate of gravity (The one piece of Flight 370 found on Reunion Island off the eastern coast of Africa may have broken off at this level when the plane hit the water.) and 2) withstanding the two million pounds of pressure per square foot exerted in the Indian Ocean troughs at the greatest depth of the hadal zone.
On Earth, a person is under a certain amount of atmospheric pressure. Under 33 feet of water, the same person is under twice as much pressure as on Earth. Every 33 feet more under water exerts another amount of pressure equal to the amount of atmospheric pressure a person feels on land. At 300 feet down, someone would be subjected to 10 times the atmospheric pressure exerted on him or her on Earth.
Vehicles attempting to explore deeper and deeper under water trenches have shuddered and bucked; their windows cracked, they have needed headlanps to see in the dark; and they have landed in blinding plumes of sediment. In 2014, an unmanned dive by Nereux, the best deepwater robotic vehicle designed thus far, broke apart under the hadal zone's crushing pressure at about 33,000 feet below the Earth's surface.
Nothing would seem to prevent the water pressure on airplanes that crash into deep dark water from breaking them into pieces of debris at depths where they would be nearly impossible to locate.
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