i hope our CIA is gathering intelligence on who has the capabilities to do this.
Malaysia Flight Missing
- Thread starter NoSlowGT
- Start date
i hope our CIA is gathering intelligence on who has the capabilities to do this.
First nuclear attack on the us?
an even more morbid thought, the terrorists could fill the plane back up with all the people as a message to the US.
I mostly have stayed out of this thing, but in truth you wouldn't need a nuclear device. A plane of that size, full of fuel with conventional explosives would do an incredible amount of damage in a populated area.
That plane would be shot down as soon as it became a threat
xXGadfly09Xx
Banned
really? "Christianpost"?
so a bunch of idiots who believe that a "GAWD" exists are talking about ANYTHING to do with science?
Maybe if they go diving down that deep they'll find godzilla.
The plane purposely crashed into Godzilla to save the world.
This whole thing Malaysia flight was set up to promote the new Godzilla movie
too soon?
No.
Please conspiracy nutjobs, explain to me how this plane will resurface undetected and cross the Atlantic or Pacific undetected, enter US airspace undetected, and attack us. They'll scramble jets when that thing is hundreds of miles from US land and shoot it down without hesitation. Period.
the same way it vanished.
Which was nowhere near the US...
I'll preface this by saying I don't actually believe the aircraft is part of a terrorist plot. Several government agencies cleared all passengers on board of suspicion.
With that said, there are definitely ways this could happen. If a terrorist organization was in control of the plane at this time, they'd obviously be removing any sort of tracking or communicative transponders from the aircraft. That would make using secondary radar useless as it relies on the aircraft providing a response signal. This is actually a big part of why we can't actually find the damn thing. Over the ocean past land masses, there's very little, if any, primary radar that can detect the aircraft.
As you can see from the map above, primary radar coverage only extends out so far. Possibly only 50-150 miles in some areas. These maps are readily available and if I can use them to see weakness in coverage, believe a terrorist could as well. It would be reasonable to expect that as an aircraft neared known radar coverage, they would increase speed to near maximum cruise in order to cover distance in the least amount of time possible. For a 777, that's an equivalent speed of 590mph (altitude dependent based on atmospheric pressure).
At those speeds it doesn't take long to travel a lot of distance. By the time a radar echo is received and recognition protocols are completed (likely with no response), you don't have a lot of time to scramble forces to take it down. If it reaches a populated area, shooting it down may alter it's intended path of destruction, but it won't stop it.
Now I'm not a military guy and I don't know what types of protocols there may be with that. Our airforce keeps patrols in the air and jets at the ready, so scrambling aircraft probably doesn't take much time. However as you can see, there's little if any room for error here. A terrorist pilot acting like a commercial airliner that's having problems, could possibly stall decisions for long enough for the aircraft to reach an intended target on the eastern or western coast.
I'll preface this by saying I don't actually believe the aircraft is part of a terrorist plot. Several government agencies cleared all passengers on board of suspicion.
With that said, there are definitely ways this could happen. If a terrorist organization was in control of the plane at this time, they'd obviously be removing any sort of tracking or communicative transponders from the aircraft. That would make using secondary radar useless as it relies on the aircraft providing a response signal. This is actually a big part of why we can't actually find the damn thing. Over the ocean past land masses, there's very little, if any, primary radar that can detect the aircraft.
As you can see from the map above, primary radar coverage only extends out so far. Possibly only 50-150 miles in some areas. These maps are readily available and if I can use them to see weakness in coverage, believe a terrorist could as well. It would be reasonable to expect that as an aircraft neared known radar coverage, they would increase speed to near maximum cruise in order to cover distance in the least amount of time possible. For a 777, that's an equivalent speed of 590mph (altitude dependent based on atmospheric pressure).
At those speeds it doesn't take long to travel a lot of distance. By the time a radar echo is received and recognition protocols are completed (likely with no response), you don't have a lot of time to scramble forces to take it down. If it reaches a populated area, shooting it down may alter it's intended path of destruction, but it won't stop it.
Now I'm not a military guy and I don't know what types of protocols there may be with that. Our airforce keeps patrols in the air and jets at the ready, so scrambling aircraft probably doesn't take much time. However as you can see, there's little if any room for error here. A terrorist pilot acting like a commercial airliner that's having problems, could possibly stall decisions for long enough for the aircraft to reach an intended target on the eastern or western coast.
Valid response and i tend to agree with you. BUT i'd like to think that post-9/11 our military has much more in place to detect and put down a plane in this scenario than we'll ever know. Like you said, that radar map is available to anyone. The question is: what detection/defense maps and devices are NOT known to us?
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