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A lot of people, including Amy Davidson in the New Yorker, seem confused about how a great big airliner with a lot of people on it can go missing and why, further, people who fly planes for a living can’t figure out what happened on the aircraft.
This should not be such a big mystery.
The world is a big place. The oceans are very large, larger than the land masses. When an aircraft is out over an ocean, it is not tracked or monitored in the same way it would be over land. It is up to the training and skill of the pilots and the flight engineer to get the plane across the ocean and to its destination. To be sure, there are many electronic aids to help do this (like waypoints programmed into the auto pilot, for example), but the fact is still inescapable that the oceans are large and an aircraft is small. If it goes down without any radio contact and without being tracked by radar at the time, the primary means of finding it would be to establish its last known position and then look at the planned flight path. Flight 370 violates the last rule because it deviated in a strange and unexpected way from its planned path.
As for figuring out what happened, you need information, which is lacking now because, hey, the plane is missing. It takes skilled, intelligent and highly trained people about a year or even longer to determine the cause of aircraft crashes even when all of the information is at their finger tips. Without solid information, the best “expert” in the world is speculating or, at best, extrapolating from minimal (and perhaps incorrect) information. They are guessing, in other words. The guessing of experienced people in the field of aviation should, it is hoped, be better than guessing by ordinary people, but it is still guessing.
It is not unlike when you are driving your car out on the Interstate. You are in charge and, unless someone sees you, no one knows what you are doing. If you crash on a lonely road and no one sees it happening, it takes an careful investigation to try to figure out what happened. Last year, a woman ran off the highway in Maryland and the car wasn’t found for almost a week. She survived, but barely.
Aircraft don’t have systems that send signals back to “headquarters” that tell what they are doing (that’s what the “black boxes”, including the flight data recorder, are for). Radar is generally limited to “line of sight”, meaning it can’t get pings from beyond the horizon. (Australia has some radar that goes beyond this limitation, but most nations do not.) The satellite burst signals do not contain location (GPS) information. With the transponder turned off or out of commission, flight 370 would appear as an unknown, moving blip on a radar screen, something that an air controller, if he saw it, might not follow unless it appeared to conflict with traffic under positive control.
You can surely bet that after this event all of these practices will be reviewed and likely changed. There really is no need for an airliner to “go missing” any more, but this kind of problem has been so rare that, until now, updating procedures wasn’t given high consideration. It will be in the future.
Doug Terry, 3.20.14
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