With all the modern tech (gps, sattelites, tracking equipment, radar), how is it even possible for a plane (Boeing 737) to just go missing?

Question

Not to make light of the situation but wouldn’t that Boeing 737 make the best spy plane then?

In: Technology

Answer 1

You don’t realize just how big the earth is and how limited the range of human monitoring equipment is.

First off, GPS satellites don’t actually “connect” to anything. Satellites give off a signal, and GPS devices on the earth use these signals to figure out their own location.

Satelites themselves are extremely expensive to make and launch, and each one serves specific and important purposes, and they aren’t widely used by normal civilian populations, usually only by large corporations and governments as an alternative form of communication that doesn’t rely of ground wires. No satelites track flights, except for maybe spy satelites.

Both tracking equipment and radar have short ranges, they only extend a few kilometers off their antennas. Airplanes can usually connect to antennas when they are flying over populated areas, but once they’re over open ocean, or uninhabited lands (such as forests or deserts or tundras) there are no antenna to connect to. When this happens, the plane gives a signal its about to go out of range, gives its flight plan, and gives an estimate of when it should re-establish contact.

This is what happens to missing planes. they send their flightplans, their estimated re-establish time, and go offline, and never come back on. Ground control waits a certain period after the estimated re-establish time, hoping theres only a delay to the flightplan. Only after an unreasonable amount of time passes are search and rescue teams sent.

The search first searches the given flightpath, looking for signs of a plane crash. If the crash is not found, the area of the search widens. Expert flight analysts run simulations to figure out where the plane could have possibly gone, and those predicted areas are searched too. Remember, the world is vast, 200 million square miles. There’s only so much area humans can cover, and sadly its not enough. Especially if the plane sinks into the depths of the ocean, it will be basically invisible from above the water. This is how airplanes go missing.