Here is what I don't get. A plane, a HUGE plane, supposedly just disappeared. Near China. So this whole "fly under the radar" is just BS? You just need to turn off your transponder, and you can fly wherever you want?
The range at which Radars can detect planes is a lot shorter than most people seem to believe. Ground based Radars have an effective range of something in the region of 200miles due to the earth's curvature. To get around that you either have to have air based Radars (such as the E2-Hawkeye used by US carrier groups), or more exotic/experimental types of radars which bounce off the ionosphere.
The limitations of radar are part of the reason why Aircraft have transponders - you can pick up an actively broadcasting radio from far greater range, and you're not relying on getting a clean bounce back from the aircraft. They're also the reason why carriers carry multiple E2s - a radar on the top of a mast on a ship simply can't see far enough.
In addition, the critical frequency for the ionosphere is ~10MHz (that is, above that frequency, you can't really bounce a meaningful amount of energy off the ionosphere, most passes through). 10MHz = a wavelength of 30m. So in general, you'll only be able to detect things about 100ft or larger in size (and that's a lower limit-- practical is probably bigger). I'm not at all surprised that you'd need line of sight to track a plane. Knowing that there's something there is easier, but tracking is trickier.
Every countries spend literary billions to develop radars, stealth fighters and ways to disrupts radars. Now, we understand in a closed area watched by several nations and operating by clear weather, they can't effectively localise one big civilian aircraft? For 4 hours? Because just the guy turn off transponder?
I think either we have been seriously mislead of what our technologies capabilities are or one of states of the area in knowing more than it said.
Most of the detection platforms referred to in the "billions to develop" are meant to operate as needed, in time of crisis. They're simply not an "always on" affair, and operating costs for airborne detection platforms are expensive. There simply is no need to operate AWACS 24/7 except where a threat of conflict is involved.
Moving to ground radar, many counties simply don't have total coverage. When a transponder works fine the vast majority of the time, and peacetime is the prevailing norm, there isn't a cost justification for it. The prices involved in covering fast stretches of ocean and remote islands with radar coverage is a hard sell.
>You just need to turn off your transponder, and you can fly wherever you want?
Just from reading comments in the linked piece, it seems that is true for some parts of the world. The malay military didn't have an operational air defence radar system, or they might have had a better idea where it was going. And there are areas around the Bay of Bengal with no radar coverage either, which, if the plane was hijacked, might be where it headed.
Yes. I am astonished that you do not already know that.
On 9-11, the combined maximal efforts of civilian and military aviation were unable to locate four airliners because their transponders were turned off. This occurred near the New York and DC metropolitan areas, some of the most carefully controlled air space in the world.
Without a transponder, an aircraft is just a raw radar return among, potentially, hundreds or thousands of other returns from civilian and military aircraft, weather, birds, balloons etc. Add to that glitches, ghosts and anomalies in busy air space and it is not surprising that a large aircraft without a transponder can hide in plain sight.
There was no real problem locating the four airliners hijacked on 9/11. In fact, one of them (United 175) didn't even turn its transponder off. The other three were adequately tracked with primary radar. The problems with the airliners that day were deciding what to do about them (e.g. intercept them) and then actually doing it (e.g. no procedures were in place to quickly scramble fighters in a case like this).
Primary radar is difficult and inconvenient but it's not nearly as difficult as you make it sound.
This is not true; the difficulty in using raw radar returns to manage and defend the domestic airspace was the primary reason the FAA grounded all civilian aircraft on 9/11--to clean up the scopes.
Andrews scrambled two (unarmed) F-16s to intercept flight 93; they just followed the Potomac north because no one knew where that plane was. Even after the PA crash was confirmed, those fighters spent hours contacting radar returns to check them out and get them to land.
That just shows that primary radar is difficult to use, and that it's hard to track a plane on radar after it's crashed. I'm not disputing that. Perhaps "no real problem" was bad phrasing, what I meant was that they were able to track them and they were not "unable to locate" the planes.
Pretty much no. There is essentially no possibility that this plane flew over, say, Vietnam or China undetected just because it turned its transponder off. There are only a couple of possibilities, in rough descending order of plausibility:
1. The plane exploded or immediately crashed roughly where the last known contact was made. No debris has been found because... well, that's a weird one.
2. The refuted claim that Malaysian military radar tracked it to the Strait of Malacca is actually correct, and it crashed over there somewhere.
3. The plane continued flying but stayed over the open ocean, far enough from land that there was no primary radar coverage, and eventually crashed into the ocean somewhere far away. There isn't a whole lot of room for that in this area, of course.
4. The plane eventually flew over land but the local air defense people were asleep at the switch. It subsequently landed or crashed in that country or in the ocean beyond.
5. The plane eventually flew over land and was tracked by primary radar but this is being covered up, either to hide incompetence, or as part of some crazy plan where the plane was hijacked and stolen by that country.
IMO anything beyond #3 on this list is seriously far-fetched and not a realistic possibility, but I wouldn't rule them out completely at the moment.
Most of the world is not extensively covered by either commercial or military RADAR, even much of the inhabited parts. The world may seem like a small place often but it is rather big.
Just 10 years ago someone has stolen a Boeing 727 from an airport,took off, turned off the transponder and landed somewhere. Even FBI looked for that plane and couldn't find it. So I guess it's very much possible to fly undetected.
