Air France search has ties to Coast Guard, Yorktown

"We're essentially trying to find the origin of where that object came from," said Lt. Richard Sansone, a senior instructor at the National Search and Rescue School at the Coast Guard Training Center in Yorktown.

Plotting long-term movements in the shifting ocean is not an exact science, officials say. The program incorporates an error factor, and it spits out a color-coded search grid that includes most-likely and least-likely locations.

"It would be really nice to have all this debris converge back on the point that it happened, but that's impossible," said Jack Frost, who manages the program known as SAROPS, which stands for Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System.

SAROPS is the Coast Guard's comprehensive search planning tool, and it's been in use since 2007. Reverse drift modeling is its newest feature, and Flight 447 represents its first major test.

The reverse drift program has been taught since May at the Yorktown training center.

"Search and rescue is like a classic mystery," Frost said. "You're trying to solve a mystery — what happened and where — and reverse drift will always be useful as one line of evidence."

A key factor in applying the program is knowing when the incident occurred. The less known about when a craft disappeared, the more difficult it can be to estimate its location.

In the case of Flight 447, rescuers had a fairly solid estimate of when it ran into trouble, Frost said.

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