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To me, the most interesting thing about all of this is that civilian airports don't really have radar. You can disappear from an ATC screen just by turning off
by LatteLazy 4y ago
To me, the most interesting thing about all of this is that civilian airports don't really have radar. You can disappear from an ATC screen just by turning off a transponder. If they'd had radar we would at least of known which way the plane went. A curious controller could have asked "unidentified object at height X, region Y" who they were and why they were in controlled airspace without a transponder on.
The article even implies the controllers themselves did not know this:
>Initially, no one noticed the sudden disappearance of the airplane. After handing the flight over to Ho Chi Minh control, the Malaysian controller looked away from his screen, and when he looked back, the plane was gone. He assumed that it had flown out of radar range and returned to his duties without a second thought.
But there was no radar range limit. There was only a transponder range limit (or more likely an edge of the screen).
>In Vietnam, controllers expected the plane to contact them, but it did not, and they couldn’t find it on radar either. Controllers in Ho Chi Minh City began trying to raise the plane on radio without success. For 18 minutes, they sent out a series of increasingly desperate calls: would MH370 please respond? Could any planes in the area contact MH370? The only answer was silence.
So even when they were actively looking for it, it was invisible to their "radar". True radar would have told them there was a plane-sized metal object in their airspace even if it refused radio contact and had no transponder...
It turns out you can make an entire plane full of people completely invisible by throwing 1 switch. Who knew?
- EMM_386 4y agoCivilian airports don't all have radar, but approach and departure facilities (known as TRACONs) do, as do enroute centers.
- fosk 4y agoRadar is not exactly “new” technology, to your point I wonder why airports are not equipped with one. Shouldn’t break the bank. Plus don’t militaries have radar anyways for air defense? How is it possible that no radar from multiple countries picked up a silent Boeing 777 flying to nowhere?
- lukewrites 4y agoI think it's most likely that governments with radar in the area don't want to admit they have it.
- wkat4242 4y agoI doubt that. Radar is extremely easy to detect. Anyone who wants to know about it will know it's there.
- error503 4y agoMost large airports will definitely have primary radar covering the terminal control area, but the range of these is typically only some 60nm. Primary radar requires relatively a lot of power, and has other issues (e.g. target correlation) that make it of limited use for ATC purposes during enroute flight. If such radars exist, for military purposes for example, ATC may not have access to them as it's not really essential for their work. There are also large coverage gaps over oceans and in remote areas where nobody cares to monitor. These radars would only have a range of a couple hundred nm maximum, so they would not see deep into the Indian Ocean either. So called 'over the horizon' radars also exist, but require truly massive amounts of power, not to mention capital to build, and also have very low spatial resolution. Apparently Australia's $1.8bn system was aimed in the wrong direction at the time of MH370's disappearance, or it might have had some low precision data to contribute.
- histriosum 4y agoThere are many answers to your question, but the one that relates most strongly to why there is no radar coverage in the middle of the ocean is that the earth is curved and radar is line of sight.
- outworlder 4y ago> Radar is not exactly “new” technology, to your point I wonder why airports are not equipped with one. Shouldn’t break the bank. But it does break the bank. Radar may not be new tech, but it is still expensive to operate. Even the US is removing radars. To be fair, the US has thousands of airports (and even more small airfields), but it has a huge area to cover. Also, the military angle is covered in the article.