PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Malaysian Airlines MH370 contact lost
View Single Post
Old 11th Mar 2014, 20:14
  #1890 (permalink)  
Ian W
 
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Florida and wherever my laptop is
Posts: 1,350
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Originally Posted by CogSim
If this is indeed the case, why would you not scramble?
You are tracking an outbound airliner from your own country. It does a turn back toward KL. Civil have not declared an emergency and the aircraft is not squawking emergency.

Why would you scramble an aircraft to shoot it down? You might perhaps scramble an aircraft to intercept - but you will have to justify the scramble if you get it wrong and perhaps it takes an hour or so to scramble an armed fighter. (9/11 showed that it took more than 30 minutes to get armed USAF aircraft airborne). It's only paranoid Europeans that have armed aircraft on QRA.
Ian W is offline