Boeing 777 missing mystery: How can jet disappear? In the ocean, it's not hard

Amid the confusion, officials involved in the search say the Malaysian jet may have made a U-turn, adding one more level of uncertainty to the effort to find it.

They even suggest that the plane could be hundreds of kilometers from where it was last detected.

Aviation experts say the plane will be found eventually. Since the start of the jet age in 1958, only a handful of jets have gone missing and not been found.

"I'm absolutely confident that we will find this airplane," Capt John M. Cox, who spent 25 years flying for US Airways and is now CEO of Safety Operating Systems, said on Monday.

The modern pace of communications, where GPS features in our cars and smartphones tell us our location at any given moment, has set unreal expectations.