Originally Posted by
wes_wall
if the airplane goes missing, or radio contact is lost, then why no aircraft painting occurred immediately upon loss of communications. Seems that if ATC is unable to contact the airplane via radio, then their tracking becomes key in where the airplane might be. Since they had confirmed transponder contact, then loss, some passive contact would have still been possible. I would think that any thing being painted at or around this time would be of extreme interest.
In this case the flight did not go missing for Malaysian ATC - they had handed the flight off to Vietnamese ATC. The Vietnamese did look on primary radar once they determined it was missing from their ATC radar; they saw what could only have been MH370 headed west, back towards the Malaysian landmass - and they reported this to Malaysian authorities (we don't know exactly when or how but they have said that they did do so.)
Interestingly enough, the Malaysian military much later acknowledged tracking a flight on primary radar at about that time and on about that course until it went out of their range somewhere in the Malacca Strait at 2:40 am local time.
A week or ten days later the Thai government piped up and said that their military had also tracked (apparently) this same flight at that time.
The interesting part is that on March 8th, in the first reports of a plane missing, the Malaysian government issued a statement that the last sighting of MH370 was at 2:40 am on the 9th. We know this for a fact!
So we know that the Malaysian government was aware of MH370's filght path out of the South China Sea from the very beginning of this event.
Now, why did the Malaysian government let 8 nations search the South China Sea looking for an airliner they knew wasn't there for the next week??
Can anybody answer that question?