A good idea, but it poses a couple of questions:
What military ships were in the Indian Ocean?
How does the military determine whether an aircraft is civilian or enemy military?
I will admit that they should be suspicious of any high speed target not displaying a transponder code, but unless the aircraft is on a course directly toward the ship, I doubt they pay any attention to it.
Do all navies of the world record video of all radar traffic?
I can almost guarantee that Naval ship’s aircraft radar is recorded...(western countries for sure)
The other thought was US ELINT aircraft patrolling along the Chinese borders...they suck up, and save everything for future reference....
A much more expensive, but permanent, technology for acoustic exploration is the installation of a hydrophone array connected to an underwater communications cable. Since the 1960s, the U.S. Navy has operated such a SOund SUrveillance System (SOSUS) for military applications in many areas of the world ocean. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy offered the civilian scientific community “dual use” of SOSUS to evaluate its value in ocean environmental monitoring. Since 1991, NOAA has successfully used these arrays to detect submarine volcanic eruptions in the northeast Pacific and blue whale movements in the same area. The range of the system is such that volcanic tremors from south of Japan have been successfully detected and located using SOSUS arrays deployed off the coasts of Oregon and Washington. Access to SOSUS is restricted, both in the sense that the data are classified and can only be used in a secure facility, and also by the fact that the arrays are deployed only in areas of military need. The cabled nature of SOSUS allows real-time acquisition of the acoustic data, but at a high cost; the total investment in SOSUS is estimated at more than $16 billion.
Sonobuoys come in a variety of configurations. Above are examples of three deployed sonobuoys with floats at the surface and the ceramic hydrophone portions hanging in the water column.
This map shows the location of the submarine cable off the central California coast that is being used for the Sound in the Sea Project. This cable stretches from Pillar Point Air Force Station to an underwater seamount (Pioneer Seamount) and is approximately 100 km long. A passive underwater hydrophone will be installed on the seaward end of the cable. Data on recorded sounds will be sent along the cable to a station on land for processing, then made available over the Internet. Click image for larger view.
In the mid-1990s, NOAA developed portable hydrophones that can be deployed anywhere in the world ocean. This device consists of a single ceramic hydrophone attached to a water-proof “pressure case” that contains all of the batteries, computers, clocks, and other electronics required to maintain the hydrophone for several years. They have been used successfully in marine mammal studies and seismic studies, and have even been used to detect landslides on the south shore of Hawaii from a range of more than 5,000 km. These instruments have the advantage of portability; that is, they can be deployed anywhere in the world ocean, but cannot currently provide the data in real time; one must wait until a ship revisits the deployment site and recovers the instrument. Another advantage is that these instruments are relatively inexpensive compared to a cabled system such as SOSUS.
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/sound01/background/technology/technology.html
Would these pick up a jet crashing into the ocean?