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Jumping Frog wrote:

philip964 wrote:Novelist believes airliner shot down by US military as it neared Diego Garcia.

If the plane was approaching a naval base at low altitude, it should have been shot down.

WildBill wrote:

mojo84 wrote:Maybe they did and that is why they are staying quiet. I still wonder if the plane was shot down and the country that did it doesn't want to admit it.

That is a very plausible explanation.

ELB wrote:

Beiruty wrote:I told you, it was stolen!
Now, the 1-billion dollars questions:
Why in the world the US classified satellite network could not track it!
Where is NORAD?

NORAD is near Colorado Springs, Colorado. It provides airspace and maritime warning forthe North American continent -- it is a joint operation of the US and Canada. Malaysia is a wee bit outside its sphere of responsibility.

"National Assets" as our friends in the black world like to call them often have very focused missions -- taking high resolution pictures of specific places, monitoring for nuclear explosions, watching for missile launches and the like. Tracking, or even observing, every airplane in the world is a huge mission, and there may very well be no satellites with the particular capability of tracking or observing all flying aircraft. There may not be a satellite system even for focusing on one specific aircraft and tracking it. (And if we do have such a system, we may not want anyone to know about it or how well it works).

There may be a satellite that happened to be pointed at the Malaysia area, and has some kind of surveillance data that did pick up the aircraft as it moved, but someone is going to have to sort through all that data and find that tiny (relatively speaking) object out of all the other planes in the area (air corridors can be quite crowded, actually), and then... decide if we want to let the world know we have the capability to do this. "Spying" on the rest of the world has gotten some bad press lately.)

SewTexas wrote:
that's what I've been wondering? I can be on the highway and the gps will know which lane I'm in....why did no one know that this PLANE was going the wrong direction???

Oh, someone in that plane knew which lane they were in and which direction they were going. They just werent' telling anyone else (just like your GPS doesn't tell anyone else. At least not yet. If the tax agencies have their way, that will come about sooner or later). There are thousands and thousands of airplanes in the air at anyone time, and there is not the capability (yet) to independently (of the aircraft) to track all of them. Most tracking over open water consists of the pilot telling the air controllers when he leaves a point, where he is, how high he is, and when he is going to get to the next point, either verbally or by IFF transponder, or both. If he stops talking, the aircraft "disappears."

Given the latest reports, I think somebody has himself a new airplane parked someplace...without any passengers on it anymore.

Oldgringo wrote:

Keith B wrote:A little more investigation shows that previous flights over that area track all the way across the water to over Vietnam. Additionally I was able to verify there are ADS-B stations in Vietnam and they picked up the reception of the flight as it came across without interruption. Now, if someone was able to disable all transponders and flight tracking systems, then it is possible it would disappear to flight tracking systems, but would still be visible as a blip on military radar.

Even so, it would have had to land somewhere by now.