military how it works
In one of the first pages of this thread the turn off course observed by military radar made me post my concern, that the military might know more than it is willing or allowed to share, as it proved that the defense forces must have made that observation on primary radar. The post is gone, no problem with that.
Two thousand posts later there is imho still little knowledge how air defense should be organized. The overall scheme is similar all over the world, also details and capabilities may vary a lot. I try to describe the overall systemic procedures how air defence works, limited to those points which could be relevant to this thread and in layman terms.
AD forces have to monitor the respective airspace, have to command control the assets available and have to train them to the required standard. For this discussion the assets Radar stations, Surface to air missile systems and aircraft are of relevance to this thread. Those assets are trained to cope with other intruding foreign forces to deny them entry or at least hinder them as long as possible. The training of those forces is an ongoing never ending process, updated and modified as necessary to reach the highest output for the ultimate task, the defence of the homeland.
Radar stations are active 24/7, monitoring the airspace from ground to the maximum altitude they are capable off. The radar systems are able to detect, analyze, track and record flying unstealthy objects with primary radar alone, although secondary radar is either on site or fed into the system from civil ATC stations. Radar sites on different locations and even airborne systems will feed their informations into a data processing system, and filed civil and military flightplans will go into this system as well. All those air datas are used to create an adapted overview for the command and control center, where decisions are made and ground based or airborne assets are allocated.
Aanalyzing all those data is at most an automated process, the individual sitting on a radar set like in approach control for monitoring purposes is the exception. He is there to get active when a radar return is flagged as unknown, as a potential threat or as an aircraft needing assistance. Then his status changes from readiness to active, and he will follow preset procedures using his skills learned in training. He then can manipulate his console to modify the information on his screen to get targets displayed at a special height, sector, with or without transponder, with or without flightplan, known or unknown.
Concerning our discussion here MH370 was on a filed flightplan, the primary radar return correlated with the secondary radar information from own or ATC sources and thus of no interest to the air defense system in a pure monitoring situation like during night, when no own aircraft are airborne and no conflicting situation between civil and military traffic can arise.
How come then, that the turn to a westerly heading reached the public and was denied at that time, but is now accepted as true by the military? When an identified target looses vital parts of the former identification information like planned track and secondary radar ident, the analyzing software will highlight the radar return somehow after a specified elapsed time and some alert will get somebody responsible to look after the developing situation. If primary radar contact with this target was uninterrupted, it will still be designated with the original identity, in our case the controller would still know that it is MH370 now on a different heading and altitude. He does not know the reasons though, except civil ATC would have told him, and he would not actively try to achieve this information except the new flightpath would lead MH370 in an area where conflicting military traffic is present or when approaching a no fly zone for civil aircraft. We also must consider that there is normally some kind of turf war between military and civil air traffic systems and therefore the communication between those parties is reduced to the necessary amount.
If the controller saw a situation developing, he would have informed the next guy up the chain and let him make the necessary decisions.
From the controversal statements we might assume, that the alert was disregarded on the way up the chain of command.
What would have been the options of the AD otherwise?
Use all available means of the radar systems to keep track on MH370, scramble fighters, alert marine forces in the surrounding waters for a lookout. Primary goal of getting fighters airborne in such situation in peacetime is helping in identification and monitoring of the rouge aircraft , thus gaining information and time for further decisions. In peacetime every airforce has some kind of readiness state active for a few aircraft, that might be from 1 hour to 10 minutes elapsed time to being airborne after an scramble order has been received. An aircraft the size of an B777 could not hide from an airborne fighter aircraft even when flying low level over sea or land, and there would be a greater possibility that the world would know about the fate of MH370 by now.
I keep out of the speculation what happened to MH370, but concerning the Air defense i think that the abnormality of Mf370 was observed, that the information was forwarded up the chain, but no action was taken and no communication with civil ATC took place. Now they have a real big problem to explain why.
Last edited by RetiredF4; 12th Mar 2014 at 23:44.