When you compare the search for Malaysia Airlines MH370 to that of Air France Flight AF447 then Montys scenario looks like a walk in the park. The basis for the Air France eventual success was to go back over the previous unsuccessful search attempts and prior information on the crash location area so I suspect that's what they will be doing in the case of Malaysia Airlines MH370 unsuccessful search attempts and what little information they have regarding the crash location area.
We have to remember that the AF447 crash area location was determined on much more information than is available from MH370 so they were able to home in to a much smaller area but even then it still took over 2 years to actually find the wreckage.
"In the case of Air France Flight 447, the underlying distribution was the probability of finding the wreckage at a given location. That depended on a number of factors such as the last GPS location transmitted by the plane, how far the aircraft might have travelled after that and also the location of dead bodies found on the surface once their rate of drift in the water had been taken into account.
All of this is what statisticians call the “prior.” It gives a certain probability distribution for the location of the wreckage.
However, a number of searches that relied on this information had failed to find the wreckage. So the question that Stone and co had to answer was how this evidence should be used to modify the probability distribution.
This is what statisticians call the posterior distribution. To calculate it, Stone and co had to take into account the failure of four different searches after the plane went down. The first was the failure to find debris or bodies for six days after the plane went missing in June 2009; then there was the failure of acoustic searches in July 2009 to detect the pings from underwater locator beacons on the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder; next, another search in August 2009 failed to find anything using side-scanning sonar; and finally, there was another unsuccessful search using side-scanning sonar in April and May 2010."
It may take a considerably longer time to find MH370 to say the least but, if they do eventually succeed then the flight recorder data will certainly be eagerly anticipated for sure.