I guess it's time I weighed in on this thing. I'm going to start with "I have no idea where it is and am not going to speculate." I do, however, have a few issues with how it's being handled. First of all, Malaysia's PM needs to be slapped into consciousness and maybe he can be of some help in all of this. Second, I'm going to get into why I don't accept that an airliner can just disappear. You may disagree with me now, but read on.
I'm certainly not a high tech computer whiz, but I know something of today's technology. I know we have the ability to sense when a car goes into a ditch. OnStar will immediately ask how you are and dispatch an ambulance. I don't know if this is cell towers or satellite, but it doesn't matter. It's probably satellite, and check them out...
That's just the close ones. They go out quite a ways. I don't have an I-Phone but I know if it's lost or stolen, it can be tracked and located at least up to the point at which it was reprogrammed. I saw someone arrogantly attempt to insult someone on a news board the other day, someone who said "Nothing, especially an airliner, should be unfindable". I tend to agree. Anyone who says "Ok, lose your I-Phone in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and see how easy it is to find", I say take a look at what scientific research is doing and you should have been making this a part of your business since it was invented. I think we're already implanting our children with GPS locators, and I bet if they were somewhere in the Indian Ocean, they'd be found. Just like anything else, large or small.
A year or so ago I saw this article on a particular great white shark, Mary Lee. I added the app to my android. It tracks this shark's (and a lot of other sharks) every movement. It's a tag about six inches long that gets stuck by the dorsal fin. Just for the heck of it I've been following this shark. Any reason why EVERY jet on the planet can't have a little transponder like this thing we stick into the backs of sharks? REALLY?!
Click on any image to get the full size. I really don't think that anything should be unfindable on this planet considering how many satellites are out there watching what's going on. I think the only way any "wreckage" from this plane will be visible if it crashed into the ocean. There's a chance the pilot landed it softly, and the plane sunk in pretty much one piece. In that case, we'll never know, at least not in this lifetime. Some day we'll map the entire ocean floor and find it, but that's a long time off. Either that or it flew into enemy hands, seen by northern radar, but they'll never tell us. Do this a few times and watch how it affects worldwide plane travel.
All these things considered, I come back to the fact that if we can track Cadillacs, I-Phones and sharks, then why not passenger jets?
