Was the Air France Airbus 330 disappearance Ufo related? , page 4

Originally posted by ufosbri
How is it possible that a plane can disappear nowadays with satellites radar.

I'm a bit late to this, but I didn't see anyone clearing this up, so I figure I'll go ahead and answer.

Satellites are very powerful tools that can be focused so much as to read a postage stamp sitting on the sidewalk.

However, doing this requires multiple passes of the satellite and a very specific target. In practice, larger search patterns will only reveal resolution down to a few decimeters - which means that objects smaller than a refrigerator are difficult to locate.

upon impact - aircraft shatter into millions of tiny pieces. Aluminum tends to fracture and rip as opposed to warp, like the heavier iron alloys. The composites behave in a similar fashion.

With a storm to scatter debris and elevated ocean currents to scatter it to the breadth of the ocean - locating wreckage is not as simple as one might think.

As for radar - storms create their own radar reflections and generate their own electromagnetic emissions. Tracking an aircraft in them is extremely problematic and usually requires a military system.

Civilian air control systems are, comparably, rather low-tech and simple. They are not designed to pinpoint the bearing and heading of an aircraft, much less track hundreds of individual contacts (only possible in extremely agile radars used by the military).

Civilian Air Traffic Control is based around transponders - GPS/INS based devices (personally - I take the INS over GPS - GPS is just too inaccurate by comparison) that communicate their position and heading to ATC. The radars used are general search radars used with the intent of providing some kind of warning against/for un-registered aircraft (though many were originally developed for defense purposes 'back in the day').

They simply are not meant to track a plane, and not intended to cover a large amount of airspace.

Im sure a submarine would have picked up any large explosions in the sea.

It was during a storm. That, alone, causes problems.

If a submarine was close - within a few nautical miles - cruising around five knotts (above the thermal barrier), and had an appropriate array streamed, they would certainly have heard something, and would have been able to distinguish it.

However, that scenario is highly improbable. Most of our submarines are on cat&mouse games with the Chinese and likely gathering intel on the North Korean's ports and submarine activity. The U.S. is really about the only country that sends her submarines wherever she wants to - most other countries keep them close to port, or at least near the same continent.

There were the hydrophones set up and used to help give our attack boats a bead on potential USSR hostiles back in the cold war - but just how operational those are is anyone's guess. Furthermore, they are located along the North American coastline.

A plane that size just does not disappear think about all the people that would have phones on them no one phoned home strange sounds like Bermuda triangle stuf.

Phones don't reach that far out to sea. The phones on an aircraft are linked to a satellite, which allows us to communicate while over the ocean. However - land-based towers (that your cell phones use) do not usually reach out any farther than ten miles beyond the coast - and that's a generous estimate.

Your phone is the limiting factor - it has to be able to send a signal to a tower, and you don't want to be holding up a fifty-watt radio transmitter to your brain. It'd be heavy, hot, the battery would be as big as a party-sized cooler, and you would be exposed to unhealthy amounts of non-ionizing radiation.

So, we opt for the low-power variety that can only communicate over a very short distance. To compensate - we construct a lot of towers to act as access points for those wireless devices.

If we had all the technology in the right places - there would be no question about what happened. However - we simply don't have that capability.