WHAT IS THE ODDS FOR SURVIVING?

There is a saying in the aviation community: you would rather crash into a hill than water.

If a plane has exploded before diving into the sea, the surviving chance would be almost zero, and the fragments of the plane could scatter around in a range over 100 kilometers.

If the plane has lost control before crashing into the sea, which is the usual case, the surviving odds are also very low.

A controlled emergency landing in water is extremely rare for commercial passenger airlines and is highly demanding for the pilots' ability and psychology.

Yin Zhuo, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and a renowned military expert told media that the surviving chance is rare for a plane to land in the sea.

"There are no escape parachutes in civil aviation, and the plane would disintegrate after crashing into the water as a result of the impact force," he said.

"The odds for surviving is not big, but cannot be fully ruled out," he added.

Below are some successful cases of water landing:

On 15 January, 2009, a U.S. Airways Flight 1549 successfully ditched into the Hudson River between the New York City and New Jersey, after reports of multiple bird strikes. All of the 155 passengers and crew aboard escaped and were rescued.

On April 13, 2013, a jet from Indonesian airline Lion Air crashed into the ocean and snapped into two while attempting to land on the Indonesian resort island of Bali. Luckily all the 101 passengers onboard and the seven crews were safe.

WHY SO HARD TO LOCATE AND RESCUE?

The rescue work has continued for hours in the seas between Malaysia and Vietnam where it vanished from screens, but still no confirmed sighting of the wreckage was reported

The main wreckage of AF447 missing in 2009 was not found until two years later.

Wang Xiaopeng, a researcher at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that according to official information, the sea area where the accident was presumed to take place is in the waters of the gulf of Thailand. The typical tropical waters there feature strong wind and high seas with tropical circulation beneath, which adds to the difficulty for the search and rescue.

But Qian Chuanhai, director of the Typhoon and Marine Meteorological Forecast Center of China Meteorological Administration, said the weather and sea conditions in relevant sea areas would be beneficial to the search and rescue work from Saturday to Tuesday.