Originally Posted by
glendalegoon
IF anyone has the answers to the following questions, I think it might prove interesting.
1. Was the last RADAR contact a primary radar or secondary radar?
2. The media has reported the plane turning, again, see above question.
3. Does anyone have the winds aloft from cruise altitude to sea level, general is fine enough, not specific , just to understand drift if the plane came down in pieces.
It is extremely unlikely that anyone in ATC was monitoring anything but 'cooperative surveillance' almost certainly secondary radar. This gives a lot of information that can be used to build a labelled display. There is almost no use for primary radar in current ATC. The lesson from United Flight 93 was switch off the secondary radar (stop squawk) in a secondary only area and your aircraft is lost to the ATC system. What that system _might_ do is 'coast' the response along the expected flight plan track, so controllers may not be aware of when the real transponded responses stopped. Because the transponders are actively sending a response the range of SSR can be more than PSR so the aircraft may not even be in PSR contact. FANS ADS-C (contract reports over SATCOM) would be better as the EPP reports give a lot of FMC information but the bean counters keep these reports down to only one every 10 minutes or so.
Air defense notification systems spotting an unplanned aircraft requires the aircraft to appear on the radar _and_ for someone to be awake and observant enough to notice it. As there have been no Vietnamese air attacks on Malaysia (and vice versa) in the last decades alertness may not be at its best in the early hours. Yes the aircraft response may be found by going back over recordings - now will the loss of face be worth admitting it was missed? Looking at the radar coverage map a few posts back there are gaps that could easily be used should someone want to cross back into Malaysia (although _why_ that would be needs to be answered). There may be similar gaps over Vietnam.
Now I know that crews don't like the idea of FOQA data to the cloud or CVR/CVideoR to the cloud. But had that been the case herre there would be relatives of 200+ people who would at least have known what had happened. Also as someone who spends much time as SLF I would like to know if there was a weakness on the aircraft that currently fly thousands of people daily. It is perfectly technically feasible now with high bandwidths available on both INMARSAT and soon on 'Iridium Next' and those links would keep your EFBs up-to-date as well. Not wanting people watching over you does not cut it any more - controllers have continual watch over them with open mic recordings - even overnight staff at gas stations have it. With aircraft flying routes more over wide expanses of ocean is it acceptable that they can go missing and require huge search efforts to be made? Perhaps if the cost of multinational search and rescue was charged to the airlines things might be different.