Update 5 April 2014-The Irish Times reported on 21 Mar 2014 Bob Ballard’s additional comments while he was in Belfast to speak. The newspaper reports:

Dr Ballard also worked for 30 years with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. It located the Air France Flight 447 plane which crashed in the Atlantic in 2009 with the loss of 228 passengers and crew. “When you have lost something the first question that is asked is where did you lose it? You can’t do anything until you can narrow the search and right now the search area is getting bigger not smaller,” he said.

The possible location appeared to be “changing oceans” from day to day, he added. What was vital was to localise the search area and to do that before the batteries on the craft’s black boxes ran out of power. “They have 30 days from when the plane went down. That’s when the clock started,” he said. Dr Ballard, who delivered a lecture at the Titanic centre yesterday evening, agreed that there were almost elements of the Mary Celeste mystery to the case.

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Bob Ballard, who co-founded Titanic in 1985, was recently asked about finding debris from the missing jetliner. According to turnto10.com he opined:

“If you know anything about the circulation of the current this time of year in that area, it’s counterclockwise. And so it makes sense that the debris would be to the east and south of the impact site,” Ballard said.

The speculation now is that the plane did not crash but was hijacked.

Source: Titanic Discoverer Weighs In On Missing Jetliner(13 Mar 2014, turnto10.com)