Airliner Missing

[undercovergeek]

bbc is looking at hijack but how do you disappear from radar - can you switch it off?

[KyzBP]

bbc is looking at hijack but how do you disappear from radar - can you switch it off?

They could switch off the transponder in the plane but the plane itself would still show up on radar.  It would just be an unidentified icon.

[undercovergeek]

thats what i thought - the transponder tells them youre flight 225 from Malaysia but youd still be on radar, my only other thought was theyd go below radar but theyd see you descending surely

[endfire79]

it's still early to kinda speculate stuff.  At this point you might as well think aliens (good one Star you beat me to it ;)

Remember Air France flight 447 in 2009?  Took 2 years to find the black boxes (they do have 'pingers' though).  Although they did manage to find debris within a short time.  That is what is weird about this Malaysian flight. 

I don't think EMP's would have been used - although it might make sense why no signal traffic came out. However, wouldn't that have affected other flights (surely there were others in that heavily congested area)?  Also, it just sounds too crazy - why pick a flight from Malay when you can take out a bigger target?

[JasonPratt]

An EMP disguised as a cell phone or console game might only put out a system-fry strength measured in hundreds of feet. That might be detected at a distance anyway, but I don't know what it would look like other than a lightning strike.

[Gusington]

Isn't Malaysia mostly Muslim?

[MikeGER]

...i speculate:
a hijack that went wrong (to pull another 911 stunt on the way later) ... taken out the pilots (no coms), and hijacker did an emergency dive to sea level to get under the radar horizon (dont want interceptors to check on non-responsive plane on a not authorized route or altitude all to soon)  and then makes a 90° turn of from the flight route .... after an unknown time has past then somewhere there happend something between a very rough ditch and a softer crash (accidental? on purpose? insufficient skill of the piloting terrorist? counterattack of some passengers?) and the plane doesn't disintegrated at all, and sunk to the ocean ground ...not much debris, and all search areas would be totally wrong chosen

interesting link: Blackbox deepwater retrieval scientific approach 
http://www.hydro-international.com/issues/articles/id1130-Deepwater_Black_Box_Retrieval.html

[endfire79]

^ Hadn't thought about a cell phone EMP possibility.  Can't rule it out.

Predominately Muslim. The Bali attacks back in early 2000's were carried out by islamic terrorists IIRC. 

[Staggerwing]

The only thing about finding a debris field on the surface of the ocean is that you can't see the debris unless it is 1) big debris, or 2) you are close enough to see smaller debris. The shear size of the search area may simply mean that the kind of debris you would expect from an airliner auguring in at high speed would be small enough that searchers would need to be close enough to be able to see the floating bits with binos or the Mk 1 Eyeball.

Toonces, if you catch this post can you give us the Naval Aviator's view of how hard it would be to spot something the size of a floating seat cushion or suitcase from SAR altitude?

[Barthheart]

Also if terror bombing gone wrong, plane explodes at 30,000 ft., no radio, instant vanish off radar. Bits of plane falling from that height would be spread over an incredible huge area AND not be very large.
Winds would blow fuel way to almost complete dispersion.

[endfire79]

It looks like a pretty big area to search.  I'll ask one of the SAR guys at work what they think.

[endfire79]

From the news reports, it sounds like there's a theory it might have disintegrated somehow at a very high altitude, making the debris very hard to detect after being scattered.

[skeptical.platypus]

If it disintegrated in mid-air, wouldn't a large amount of debris still make it to the ground from 35k feet?

Of course, it wont float in air. I guess they are saying the reason they do not find a big wreck together is it scatters further from higher up. Wind is stronger the higher up you go.

You know what else doesn't float in air? Very small rocks.  ;D

[skeptical.platypus]

why don't the black boxes stream data live to a satellite, bounce to a ground server, and then saved. Clearly the technology exists -- how different can the data in black boxes be from the data streamed to fly a drone?

the answer is just money :'(   
they will argue: its to seldom a plane get lost including the box, and the blackboxes survive an abuse like no other thing ...so with enuf time spend by the crash-analysis-specialists (years sometimes) all past incidents had been solved to a sufficient level in the past decade(s) ...so we don't want to spend a single cent more.

Also the plane at 30 000 feet is on a radar somehow all the time, those see in realtime if something strange happens. with a good military grade radar (recorded raw data) you should see the flight trajectory of larger debris-pieces or a debris cloud sinking in the atmosphere ... i guess there where just non active in the area at that time, or handshake between military intel and civilian agencies is not so good in those countries along the route   (to much info is learned about the sensitivity of the radars in those places would be given away ...same why the pinger 'is not found' immediately )             

Thanks MikGer, I figured it was something along the lines of money. Good point about civilian & military = intelligence gathering opportunity. I  imagine one of the ancillary benefits in participating in this kind of operation is for militaries to get some operational intelligence on at least methods if not capabilities of other participants.

[endfire79]

Had a chat with a coworker who used to do SAR (search  and rescue)  with the RN.  This is not an easy task.  Imagine trying to find a dark basketball in the ocean.  Add winds and current change effects to your search pattern plans.  If the plane disintegrated at very high altitude, there might hardly been anything left intact when it hit ground or ocean, much less in obvious pieces.  Even with surface radar. 

I know the families are frustrated, throwing bottles and stuff, but I'm sure these search teams are giving their best.