posted on Feb, 11 2003 @ 02:40 AM
Hehe.
It makes me laught the fact that this guy who wrote that article, knows nothing about aviation, yet he decides to try to look like he does.
An aircraft's transponder is a device which interacts with the ATC's Radars, to provide them with your Altitude, Speed, Heading and Position
information, nothing else.
The transponder has 5 operation modes: OFF, SBY (Standby), ON, ALT, Test. There is an aditional button for Squawk Ident. If the transponder is not on,
it is pretty obvious it won't appear on a Normal ATC Radar, unless the aircraft is flying the radar's minimum altitude. There is a war technique,
most used by Helicopters, it consists of flying Low to avoid being detected by the radar, it works with any aircraft type.
However, I am pretty sure that the aircraft was visible the entire time on the radars, the only stage where it wasn't visible was on the final stages
of the flight, seconds about to crash. For the aircraft to dissapear from the radar, it must fly low enough, and flight 77 didn't that, or else they
would had never reached the crash site as fast as they did.
Cheers, and BTW, Freemason, do you remember me? The guy from the chat the other day