Southwest is not considered a Major US Carrier, that's why I didn't include them. Alaska and Hawaiian didn't declare bankruptcy either. They don't fly internationally and their biggest airplane is a 737. But that's also why they didn't go bankrupt.

After 9-11 and the global recession, a lot of International customers stopped flying. That crushed all the big International carriers who were operating wide body airplanes around the globe, half empty. That's why they all filed for bankruptcy and that's why the big 6 merged to become the big 3.

If the airplane went down in the Indian Ocean, while everyone was looking in the wrong ocean, for a week, well, any debris field is going to be widely scattered by now, so they'd have to do sonar drags all over the entire Indian Ocean to find it. If it went in fast and hard, it may have broken up and there may be some floating debris washing up on downwind shores some day soon, then we'll know for sure.

But it took searchers two years to locate the Air France jet, and they knew where to look, heck they had a piece of the tail floating on the surface. Unless this jet shows up again as a flying bomb, I doubt they will ever find it, but they'll blame the pilots. It's the easiest way to solve their security and mx problems.