The search for the missing flight MH370 could take weeks or even months, fears a sonar expert at the University of Bath.
Dr Philippe Blondel said: "The sad truth is that the plane is most likely to have exploded at impact, or imploded as it sank several kilometres."
Australia has deployed a modified Boeing 737 to act as a flying air traffic controller over the Indian Ocean to prevent a mid-air collision as a large number of aircraft continue the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
Ten planes and nine ships are scouring the ocean for the plane which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board as his flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in China.
Dr Blondel, a Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Bath, has been finding shipwrecks that have been missing for decades using acoustic remove sensing and sonar.
The flight search area has moved from the seas off Vietnam to west of Malaysia and Indonesia and then onto the waters west of Australia.
The search area is now 98,000 square miles and a two-and-a-half hour flight from Perth.
Dr Blondel said: "A typical search, like the ones I have been involved in, would typically start
with a low-frequency system to map large swathes (kilometres wide) with a lower resolution (close to 10 metres).
"This would be followed up by using higher-frequency systems covering smaller ranges (hundreds of metres or less) but with higher accuracies, metric or submetric. The metallic or composite hull of an airliner would show strong acoustic returns, even in rough terrains, and assuming it has not exploded or sunk into gullies, it would be detectable with sonar.
"The sad truth is that the plane is most likely to have exploded at impact, or imploded as it
sank several kilometres. Debris would therefore be scattered over a wide field, depending on
the different currents on the way down and on the sizes of the debris. The debris field, especially with its larger or more reflective components, should still be identifiable."
